Tips on How to Identify and Eat What Your Body Needs and Not What Your Mind Wants

What you eat determines who you are, how you feel, and of course, how you look. Here’s how to avoid eating out of habit, emotional distress or plain boredom and ensure that food satiates you on all levels.

Eat when hungry, not because you should be hungry:
Your diet chart doesn’t have to resemble a military time table, where you must at all costs have lunch at noon and a tea/coffee break plus snack later in the afternoon. Sometimes, you may just not feel like it. Listen to your body, not your mind.

Keep the emotions out:
You don’t want your meals to be influenced by your mood swings. Food is not the solution to boredom, tiredness, irritation, depression or anger. Calm down before you attack that meal, else you’ll stuff your face with unnecessary calories and won’t even feel better post the binge.

Don’t eat with hogs:
You’re influenced, subconsciously or otherwise, by the people you eat with. Families and couples often end up with similar eating patterns. For instance, If one person habitually eats dessert post every meal, the others will automatically follow suit. It isn’t a sin to indulge from time to time, but it isn’t the best idea to be so easily swayed.

Trick your sweet tooth:
There are other ways to indulge your sweet apart from sugary, buttery, gooey and sinfully sticky store-bought deserts. The first golden rule: make your own desserts. That way, you’ll physically see the amount of sugar/fat that goes in, and decide accordingly if you want to replace some ingredients with healthier ones or skip dessert altogether and enjoy the natural sweetness of fruit/dried fruit instead.
Change your cutlery:
The bigger your plates, bowls, mugs and spoons, the bigger your servings will be. However, this doesn’t call for a dramatic switch to hobbit cutlery. Keep the change reasonable, and you’ll find yourself feeling full way before you did with those larger-than-life plates. We’re more visual that we think we are.

Up the aesthetic value:
Talking about the visual element, there’s no denying the importance of the aesthetic factor. Food well-presented — with a balance of colours, textures and flavour — is the stuff gastronomic orgasms are made of. Are you going to treat yourself to one today?

Turn off the TV:
Please, please tell me you aren’t a couch potato. Eating with the idiot box on can either lead to mindless eating or conversely, loss of appetite. In both cases, you don’t pay attention to what’s on your plate. It’s obvious that you aren’t going to feel satiated at the end of the meal.

No shopping on an empty stomach:
Eating the wrong things has its roots in buying the wrong things. We know that food laden with preservatives, fats, salt and sugar aren’t good for us but we’re more likely to pick them up when we head to the supermarket on empty stomach. Shop after you’ve eaten instead

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