Conscious eating is easy📌

All you have to do is be attentive to your food and how you feel, be able to separate physical and emotional hunger, and give up the phone at lunchtime.

Sounds like a mockery, doesn’t it?

✅ Those who have tried conscious eating know how difficult it is. Everything seems to be clear in theory, but in practice nothing comes out.

In this article we talk about one person’s personal experience, but someone else’s experience does not guarantee that this will help everyone and work at all.

Evidence-based medicine is built around studies involving thousands of people of different ages, ethnicities, health conditions, and lifestyles. So far, we can’t tell you about large-scale studies of conscious eating — science knows very little about it.

For 85% of people who lost weight with restriction, it came back within a few years — largely due to emotional overeating and stress. And mindful eating can help change eating behavior, but more research is needed on this topic.

In a nutshell, conscious eating is being mindful of how you eat and how you feel.

Conscious eating helps establish eating behavior: people stop dividing food into bad and good, give up the diet-disruption-diet cycle, eat when they are hungry and stop eating when they are full.

✔️ To switch to conscious eating is to break the dietary mindset that society considers the norm. So in many ways, conscious eating is not a set of tricks, but an honest conversation with yourself.

If you ate a slice of pizza at lunch, that’s it, you can skip going to the gym in the evening and eat cake — your day is already ruined anyway. That’s part of the dietary mindset. It’s also part of dividing foods into bad and good: avocados are good, a burger is bad.

When someone with this experience thinks about eating consciously, they see everything as a new diet. First, he mentally figures out whether it will help him lose weight⬇️

Second, if something goes wrong, he goes on a binge and then starts again on Monday. If you treat conscious eating this way, you’re more likely to fall off, because any diet or eating system for the sake of losing weight sooner or later you fall off and gain the weight back.

Conscious eating is not about controlling your food, but about trusting yourself

Our bodies work great as long as people don’t get in and break them down on their own. The body knows how much food it needs, what kind of food it is, what temperature and texture, but because we read that bananas have too much sugar, we don’t let the body eat what it asks for. And we end up ruining our relationship with it, and then we go on diets and ruin it even more.

✍🏻 Diet myths:

- The body doesn’t need a break from eating and detoxes

- You can eat as many times a day as you feel comfortable. Eating once is good, eating five times is also good.

- You do not need to watch your food the way you usually do — count calories, weigh food, remember everything you’ve eaten all day long

- There are no good and bad foods. You can buy bread at home, and you don’t have to bypass the candy department in the supermarket

- The numbers on the scale don’t define personality and shouldn’t affect your mood.

🔥 When people follow restrictive diets, they know exactly what they can and cannot eat. And if they don’t know, a trainer at the gym or a nutritionist on Instagram will write out a proper diet of avocados, chia seeds and chicken breast for 500 rubles.

This won’t work on a conscious diet — you’ll have to think for yourself every time you feel like eating.

In the next article on our blog, we will touch in detail on the practical aspect of this topic.