by Mila McManus, MD

Mindful Eating Hacks for 2025: Part II. Here are six more mindful eating hacks scientifically supported to improve health and nutritional lifestyles — **Part 2 of 2**

Welcome back to Part II: Mindful Eating Hacks for 2025. Last week, we introduced the idea that learning to be mindful about your eating habits can be transforming. We provided the first six of twelve mindful eating hacks for better health in 2025. You can follow this link to read them. This week, we present the other six mindful eating hacks that are scientifically supported to improve health and nutritional lifestyles. Most of the habit hacks are easy to implement and don’t cost anything. Implement them individually or together for greater impact. You may want to try incorporating one each month during 2025.

SEVEN: Clean out your freezer, fridge, and pantry. Mindfulness is much easier when every available choice in the house is a good one. The whole family can benefit by hacking this habit so that items such as candy bars, potato chips, soda pop, and ice cream won’t be kept in the house as a routine choice. Ultra-processed foods and the commercials about them on television are BOTH designed to trick your neurochemistry into craving them. Don’t fall prey to the advertising. Put clean, healthy choices in the house, and keep the bad choices off the grocery list.

EIGHT: In response to hunger, hydrate first. Hack the hangry habit. When you think you are hungry, pause and think about drinking a glass of water. This mindful eating habit can help curb your appetite. One side note: avoid drinking too much liquid with your meal. Liquids dilute your stomach acids and enzymes, and reduce the quality of your digestive process. During meals, minimize your liquid intake to 4 ounces or less. (Also, it takes 10-20 minutes for water to pass through your stomach, so after that, you’re good to go with respect to eating.)

NINE: Change the order in which you eat your meal. Eat some protein, healthy fats, and raw vegetable fiber first. Eat starches and sugar at the end of the meal. Protein, healthy fats, and fiber are slower to digest, resulting in satiation, which is why this is a good mindful eating habit. Sugars and starches digest very rapidly, spike blood sugar, and create hunger cravings again. Placing the slower-moving, longer-digesting foods first slows the starches and sugars afterward. For example, if you plan to have grilled chicken, rice, salad, and fruit, eat the chicken and salad first, followed by the rice and fruit. Eating a salad first is another good strategy for filling up with fiber in raw vegetables, then eating protein, followed by potato, rice, fruit, or sweets.

TEN: Stop eating at least three hours before bedtime. Quality sleep is a challenge for many people. One reason can be that the digestive process is preventing sleep from occurring. When food has had a chance to digest, this mindful eating hack allows the body to focus on the relaxation, repair, and cleansing that should happen during sleep. If your stomach is full and digesting, your body is distracted from other duties.

ELEVEN: Fast at least 12 hours per 24 hours. Food scarcity triggers the body to clean the house, eliminating waste, debris, and damaged cells. The process is called autophagy and occurs when food is avoided for 12-15 hours. The good news is that you are already more than halfway there if you try to sleep at least 7-8 hours every night. All you need to do is mindfully incorporate #10 above and do the same the next morning by delaying breakfast for 2-3 hours. Drinking water, black coffee, or tea will not break the fast. But you have broken the fast if you add anything with calories, such as creamer, sugar, or food. Mindfully fasting for 12 hours reduces snacking and energy consumption to fewer daily hours, often resulting in less overall energy consumption.

TWELVE: If it has a drive-thru, don’t eat there. When it comes to healthy food, convenience is not your friend. If you want to take control of your health, you must face the truth about convenience foods. Don’t be fast, cheap, and easy regarding your diet. If you are, you can expect disease and ill health. This mindful eating hack will transform your health. Slow down, invest in your nutritional health, and allow a little more time in your schedule to eat healthfully. This may be the last mindfulness habit hack, but it will have long-lasting beneficial outcomes for the entire family.

Here’s to mindfully eating your way to new habits and better health in 2025!

Reference

https://drhyman.com/pages/eating-guide-101

Mindful Eating Hacks for 2025

by Mila McManus, MD

Over the next two weeks, we will introduce you to twelve science-backed hacks to help you be more mindful and create new eating habits. — **Part 1 of 2**

Learning to be mindful about your eating habits can be transforming. Over the next two weeks, we will introduce you to twelve science-backed hacks to help you be more mindful and create new eating habits. Because we eat a few, to several, times daily, our eating habits are deeply entrenched, and we often don’t think much about them. Most of the following hacks are easy to implement AND don’t cost anything, AND they will help you change how you think about your eating patterns. Implement them one by one or put them together for greater impact on your health!

ONE: Eat until you are 80% full. This concept originates from Okinawa and is called “Hara Hachi Bu” in Japanese. It matters because there is a delay between your stomach being full and the leptin hormone communicating that to your brain. Be mindful that ultra-processed foods often contain ingredients designed to trick your brain so that it does not hear the fullness message from leptin, contributing to overeating, craving more, and metabolic dysfunction, including weight gain, diabetes, and/or dementia. One aspect of mindfulness is learning to listen to your body and stop eating when you can still comfortably do some yoga or go for a stroll.

TWO: Sit down to eat and eat slowly. Digestion is accomplished through the parasympathetic nervous system, along with healing, recovery, and rest. If you are stressed while eating, you do so in your “fight or flight” state through the sympathetic nervous system. Science demonstrates that our gut permeability is increased during this stressed state, and our production and release of digestive enzymes are decreased, making for poor digestion. Thoughtlessly eating on the go can increase the likelihood of leaky gut and digestive discomfort. Mindful eating is eating more slowly and chewing your food longer. It helps decrease overeating as you are more likely to “hear” or experience the fullness message given by your leptin hormone.

THREE: Plan meals and snacks to avoid reaching the point of “hangry”. Failure to plan is a plan to fail. Once you hit the hangry (hungry and angry) place, odds are that your choices will also suffer. Maintaining steady blood sugar levels and avoiding severe spikes and drops is a fundamental habit hack to avoid most diseases. Being mindful of the need to plan, organize, and shop for your week will help you succeed. Carry a cooler if necessary and plan balanced snacks such as mixed nuts, olives, apples, or celery with nut butter, fresh veggies, hummus or guacamole, grass-fed beef sticks, and/or a balanced, clean ingredient food bar such as the Aloha brand.

FOUR: Make sleep a priority. Poor sleep is directly correlated to poor eating habits. Skimping on sleep alters and disrupts your appetite hormones. It stimulates ghrelin to communicate hunger messages and reduces leptin messages of fullness. And, of course, when you are tired, you have less emotional bandwidth to make better food choices in the first place. Sleep is also when your body detoxifies, resets hormones, and recovers from stress. Focusing your mind and thinking on prioritizing sleep is one of the most important habit hacks you can do for yourself.

FIVE: After eating, get moving. Muscles love glucose (i.e. sugar). This habit hack is one of the best ways to maintain stable blood sugar: get moving within 30 minutes of eating. Mindfully plan to walk, do some gardening, wash the car, or go for a family bike ride after meals. Enjoyable activity after eating reduces stress, promotes the body’s utilization of the food eaten, improves relationships, and helps with digestion and quality sleep.

SIX: Track your eating frequency. For a week or two, keep a journal of each snack and meal, including the time of day and how you felt emotionally or what you were doing before you went to get a snack. Being mindful in this way helps you to identify emotional and distracted eating, and/or eating out of boredom. Scrolling the phone or watching TV while eating is not mindful and can lead to far more calorie consumption than your body can utilize. You may want to move all eating to the kitchen table rather than the couch, desk, or bed. This goes hand in hand with eating slowly until 80% full and will prevent you from mindlessly finishing off a bag of crackers or chips. It will help you see what emotions or events make you go to food to soothe you. Then, you can find healthier ways to relax and soothe your emotions or relieve your boredom rather than doing so with food. Here’s a link to a simple practice to reduce anxiety without using food.

Stay tuned next week for the other six mindful eating hacks for 2025. In the meantime, start hacking and be well.

Reference

https://drhyman.com/pages/eating-guide-101

Mindful Eating Hacks for 2025: Part II

by Mila McManus, MD

Mindful Eating Hacks for 2025

by Mila McManus, MD