Make Conscious Eating a New Year's Resolution

It's a new year, and everything looks bright and shiny, including those New Years' resolutions you just made. Be on time for work, build a savings account... lose 10 pounds. Instead of making generalized weight-loss resolutions this year, consider changing your mentality toward food a bit and making conscious eating a New Year's resolution instead.

Why is Conscious Eating Important?
Our lives revolve around food. Eating is an activity we need to do in order to stay alive, and like all required, repetitive activities, after a while, it's easy to go on autopilot. Stomach growling? Grab a burger. Missed lunch? Pick up a bag of potato chips. Thanksgiving dinner? Stuff yourself silly. With the exception of dinner at a favorite restaurant for a special occasion, or getting an occasional delectable and rare sweet treat, eating food becomes less of an experience and more of a chore.

And when we're not paying attention to the foods we're eating, it gets easier and easier to go for the fast, the convenient, and the unhealthy, and often in bigger quantities than we need. That's one place the extra pounds come from, and ultimately, our New Year's resolutions to lose 10 or 20 or 50 of them.

What Exactly is Conscious Eating?
To understand conscious eating, you first have to know what it's not. Conscious eating is not a new diet fad, weight loss program, or quick way to get skinny. Instead, conscious eaters are people that make the decision to pay more attention to their food.

Rather than sit down for a hastily-cooked dinner or something grabbed on the fly, plowing through it while thinking about their to-do lists at work the next day or the parent-teacher conference a few hours before, conscious eaters eat deliberately. They choose the foods that they like and that are good for them, and they savor the whole food experience - enjoying every bite, and quitting before they get too full.

This quote by Luciano Pavarotti sums up a conscious eater's attitude well: "One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating."

How to be a Successful Conscious Eater
If you want to make conscious eating one of your New Year's resolutions, here's how to do it:

Slow down.
Multitasking is great, but you shouldn't eat while doing something else. For example, it doesn't take long for a tub of popcorn to mysteriously disappear while you're watching a movie. But while you're eating that popcorn, are you savoring the buttery crunch? Or are you watching the onscreen action and mindlessly moving your hand from bucket to mouth? Multitasking with food leads to loss of enjoyment and overeating.

Make food an experience again.
If you're used to sitting in front of the TV with a tray of dinner on your lap, it's time to shake things up. Schedule a time for dinner, just like you would for anything else. Clear the clutter off the kitchen table and eat there. Get out real plates and napkins, and maybe eat by candlelight. Eating is an event. Enjoy it.

Get out of your rut.
Are you bored with food and just haven't realized it yet? Say you love turkey sandwiches. You take one to work every day for lunch. After a while, no matter how much you love them, you're eating those turkey sandwiches out of habit - not because you like them. If you're bored with food, try new things or foods you haven't had in a while. Shake up your routine by trying something you've never eaten before or experimenting with a new recipe.

Pay attention to your body.
Overeating is a sneaky problem. It can be psychological (mom's voice reminding you of the starving children in third world countries?) or physical, like when we keep eating long after we've had enough, not even realizing we're full. Eating consciously lets us slow down, enjoy our food, and be more aware of the actual amount of food we eat. Starting out with smaller portions, and focusing on our enjoyment of them, helps us figure out just how much food it takes to get that edge of hunger off.

Conscious eating won't make you lose 10 pounds in 10 days, and it might not get you ready for bathing suit season in record time, but it will go a long way in correcting unhealthy attitudes toward food. When you slow down and eat consciously, you might find yourself eating less and enjoying more.