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LEVEL 1 EMOTIONAL HEALTH: FOCUSED EATING IN A WORLD FULL OF DISTRACTIONS
LESSON 1

Bringing Awareness to Meals

Prefer to listen? Check out the audio recording of this lesson.

¿Prefieres español? Escucha esta lección en español aquí.

Food is delicious, comforting, distracting—the perfect companion. So it’s no surprise that we are all prone to the mindless eating that can happen behind the wheel of the car, in front of the television, or bathed in the cool blue light of our smartphones. But by eating without paying attention, not only are we missing out on the true pleasure of food, but we’re also losing touch with our hunger and fullness signals. 

That’s where food journaling comes in. Studies consistently show that recording your meals and eating patterns leads to both weight loss and better health. This is in part because taking a moment to pause and notice your behaviors helps you practice mindfulness, which is loosely defined as focusing your awareness on the present moment.

Simply taking a photo of what you eat can make you more conscious of things like idle snacking and trips to the pantry. It can also help you pay attention to your hunger cues and how your body feels, as well as remind you to slow down your pace and give your brain the 20 minutes it typically needs to register fullness. 

And since we eat with our eyes first, taking photos of your food can also help make you a more adventurous eater as you seek out more interesting and colorful things to add to your plate. (That boring bowl of oatmeal looks much prettier with some strawberries on it.) Creating a visual catalog can also help you more efficiently create a realistic shopping list once you actually see just how many apples you’re eating in a week, making grocery store trips faster and helping you achieve that elusive fridge equilibrium where it’s stocked with just enough food and nothing goes to waste.

For these reasons, we’re going to use this class to practice a very basic form of food journaling that we’ll describe in the goal section. As you do this, consider yourself a curious scientist, collecting data and observing patterns. You won’t have to keep this practice up throughout the program (though you can certainly dip back into the practice when you want a tune-up), so take the opportunity now to really dig in and see what you can learn.

Ready to get started? Let’s do this!

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. So instead of writing down everything you eat, your goal for this class is to use your smartphone to take a picture of everything you eat for two weeks (this is the Instagram era, after all!).  

Don’t worry, we won’t make you review the photos if you don’t want to, and you can delete them all at the end of the class. The point of this exercise isn’t about shame, but about slowing down and taking stock of your emotions before you start to eat. Searching for your phone, opening up the camera app, and snapping a quick picture rarely takes more than 10 seconds, but it’s enough time to give you a few beats to notice how you’re feeling and the circumstances around the meal or snack. 

At the end of the day, on a sheet of paper or in the in the Notes app on your phone, take a minute to reflect. There are a few ways you can do this. If you want to keep things simple, focus on one question: what decision within the Food Pillar was I most proud of today? If you want to get a little deeper, you can jot down some themes or observations (how your body felt at the start and end of every meal, how rushed you were, etc). And if you want to go all in and you feel comfortable reviewing your photos, you can pull them up and look for patterns and wins. (Which meal had the most green foods? Which made your body feel the best?)

That might feel tedious—don’t worry! This is just a two-week exercise to help you better understand your habits, not something you have to do forever.