One of the tools you can use when you are starting to work on mindful eating and healing your relationship with food is to track how much you eat and what you eat. This is not meant to control what you eat, but instead to be used in conjunction with your mindful eating journey.
To Track How Mindful Eating is Helping With Your Food Issues
An excellent reason to start tracking what you are eating while mindful eating is because you can actually see at what point mindful eating begins helping you. For example, if you have been writing in your journal every day during your mindful meals about the experience, you might notice that you aren’t focusing so much on the quality of your food, but on little details you noticed.
Or maybe you added some journal entries where you caught yourself being more mindful even with distractions, or how much easier it was getting to focus on your eating, instead of other things.
To Make You Aware of Your Eating Habits
You might have some bad eating habits without realizing it, but they become more apparent with mindful eating. Maybe when writing down why you chose a specific food or what your intention for that meal was, you discovered a lot of them are from being bored and not actually hungry, or that you tend to have certain types of foods when you are sad or under a lot of stress.
Everything about your eating habits is important to record, including what you eat when you eat during the day, what inspires you to eat, how you feel when you are hungry or feel when you tend to overeat, and so many more details. They should all be written down.
To See Your Growth with Your Relationship with Food
Mindful eating is also amazing at helping you to work on your relationship with food, which tends to become toxic after a series of dieting or restricting your food or quantities. By tracking your food and mindful eating process, you will discover a lot about yourself, similar to your eating habits, but so much more.
You might even see when you begin transitioning to having a healthy relationship with food and much less anxiety or fears about certain types of foods. Don’t forget anything you feel or experience is wrong, but it is good to work on yourself, your motivations, and why you have this relationship with food that you have.