At first, your biggest challenge is that you may not know that you are eating "mindlessly". Often it is eating emotionally that causes this to happen. You eat without thinking for many reasons, and the neural associations to foods that trigger emotional eating can be formed at a very young age. Foods can get linked to home, friends, love, being pampered, family, and just about any person, place, or experience.
Habitual eating patterns such as these often run on "automatic pilot", unless you intentionally break them and replace them with new ones. But, before you can break them you have to acknowledge they exist. This is where awareness comes in. You have to pay attention. This is the polar opposite of mindless and emotional and impulse eating.
You have to eat exclusively which means that when you eat you do nothing but eat. Eating exclusively means that you will become aware of undesirable associations of emotions and food. Watching TV, being on the computer, or reading a newspaper can all become linked to eating mindlessly when they are paired together enough times. If one of these activities becomes linked to eating, just watching TV or going onto the computer may trigger emotional hunger and subsequent mindless eating.
The second part of mindful eating is to eat slowly. Eating too quickly will not allow the satiety mechanisms in your brain to register the caloric energy. By the time that you feel full, you may have already eaten too much.
Keeping a journal of what you eat is a great way to promote conscious awareness of what you eat.
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