How Mindful Eating Can Transform Your Relationship with Food
In my work with clients, I’ve seen how mindful eating can profoundly benefit their relationship with food and lead to lasting improvements in eating behaviours. When you eat while working, scrolling your phone, or watching TV, it’s harder for your body to digest food efficiently or tune in to your appetite cues.
Eating while distracted or stressed can significantly increase the risk of overeating, bingeing, and making impulsive food choices. This pattern is especially common when working from home, where the boundaries between meals, work, and rest often become blurred. Without a purposeful pause for eating, meals become rushed or mindless. And even in traditional office settings, many people now eat lunch at their desks or skip breaks altogether. Sound familiar?
Why Distraction Impacts Your Body
Consuming food while multitasking disrupts digestion, makes us less aware of when we're full, and increases the chance of eating beyond our needs. In fact the brain takes approximately 20 minutes to register that you are full, so fast mindless eating, can mean you can easily miss when you feel satisfied.
Research also shows that mindless eating can raise total calorie intake by up to 25%, particularly when we don’t register our meals due to distractions.
Other studies have identified that being able to recall what you ate helps the brain register satiety and reduce subsequent eating.
Recent Studies Continue to Show Why How You Eat Matters:
🎵 Participants in a 2025 study who chewed in rhythm with a slow metronome chewed more, ate more slowly, and consumed fewer calories, helping to reduce overeating by syncing the body with a calming pace.
🧠 2024-2025 Trials illustrated how mindful eating has been linked to improvements in diet quality, emotional eating, digestion, and overall satisfaction, especially among busy adults and those with a history of disordered eating.
A 2024 review of 14 randomised trials confirmed that mindful eating significantly improves BMI, blood sugar, and triglyceride levels, often outperforming standard interventions for weight and metabolic health
How Mindful Eating Can Help You
Better digestion - Eating slowly and chewing thoroughly can reduce bloating, gas, and indigestion.
Increased satisfaction - Tuning in allows your body to experience pleasure from food, helping prevent cravings and binges.
Appetite regulation - You become more in tune with your fullness cues and less likely to overeat or emotionally eat.
Reduced stress - Taking time to eat, gives your nervous system a break, moving you from ‘fight or flight’ to ‘rest and digest.’
Balanced energy and mood -Clients often find they feel less sluggish and more focused after meals eaten mindfully.
More nourishing and satisfying food choices - rather than reacting to stress, habit, or impulse.
Where to Start…
begin with one mindful meal at a time
Choose a meal where you can sit down, without screens or work.
Notice: the taste, texture, aroma, and temperature of your food.
Chew slowly - You could even try syncing your eating to slow calming music
Pause midway: ask yourself how full or satisfied you feel.
Reflect after the meal: Did you eat just enough? Were you still hungry? Did it feel different?
Need help with this?
Although it sounds simple, mindful eating is rare in today’s fast-paced world, where grabbing food on the go has become normal. But it’s often one of the most powerful first steps in healing your relationship with food.
I explore this further(and much more) in my best-selling book The Binge Freedom Method: Your Four Pillar Plan to Beat Emotional Eating for Good
You can also download my free Breaking the Cycle Starter Kit which will teach you how to begin reconnecting with your hunger and fullness cues and more.