10 Mindful Eating Strategies for the Holiday Season

The word “mindful” is often thrown around as a buzzword in the wellness industry, but cultivating mindfulness truly has many benefits for both mental and physical health. 

However, even the most mindful people can start to lose their way during the holiday season, which is rife with stress, elevated emotions, and many more opportunities to eat.

If you eat mindlessly more often than you’d like, try incorporating these ten mindfulness techniques today to make your holiday season happier, healthier, and calmer. 

How to Practice Mindful Eating

Mindfulness is a “nonjudgmental state of awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, or experiences in the here and now,” and mindful eating applies to developing awareness and intention when eating food.¹

Some people use the “3 R’s” to describe mindful eating, which is comprised of:

• Reflect: Before you begin eating, reflect on your hunger levels. For example, are you physically hungry or eating out of boredom? 
• Respond: Based on your reflection, mindfully choose the foods that you think will nourish you in this moment. 
• Relax: Create a calming and relaxing environment to eat in, with no distractions. Take deep breaths and release any guilt around eating. 

Essentially, mindful eating is conscious eating—being conscious of how you feel, paying attention to what you’re eating, and staying in the present moment.

Some potential health benefits of mindful eating include gaining a healthier relationship with food, better digestion, weight management (although the goal of eating mindfully should not be weight loss), reduced stress, reductions in disordered eating patterns (including binge eating), and improved well-being and mental health.² 

1. Express Gratitude

Gratitude is a key component of mindfulness, food-related or otherwise. Before eating, take a moment of gratitude for the meal in front of you, appreciating the people who took the effort of growing the food, preparing it, or cooking it. 

Being grateful for a meal can help foster a sense of appreciation for food and bring awareness back to the moment—a critical component of mindful eating practices. 

Some people do a small mindfulness meditation before eating, which also incorporates gratitude. 

2. Eliminate Distractions

We’re all guilty of watching TV during dinner or scrolling through Instagram on lunch breaks—but that is the definition of mindless eating. 

Mindful eating entails 100% of your focus going to your food—not mindlessly flipping through your For You Page.

Although it may seem uncomfortable if you’re used to eating with distractions, try to eliminate them all by putting your phone away, keeping the TV off, and eating at an actual table and chair.

During a holiday meal, it can be difficult to eliminate other distractions, like political ramblings from your uncle across the table or tons of little ones running about. But, if you practice mindful eating without distractions in the lead-up to these big holiday gatherings, you’ll be a mindfulness pro by the time the holiday dinner rolls around, able to focus on your meal and engage in mindful conversation while tuning the rest out! 

3. Eat Slowly

Many people have experienced a meal where they scarfed it down and barely even noticed what they ate. 

An important practice to eat more mindfully is slowing down and savoring each bite.

Some tips for slowing down your meal include pausing after each bite, chewing each bite thoroughly, and taking sips of water between each bite. These mindful eating practices can naturally slow you down and make each part of your meal more memorable. 

If you want to take it to the next level, try eating your meal with the utensil in your non-dominant hand to eat more slowly. 

4. Engage All Five Senses

Of course, eating and drinking will use your sense of taste, but mindful eating should ideally use your other senses, too.

Some ways to engage all five senses when eating include:

• Smell: Most people can notice the aroma of a meal when it’s cooking but take less time to smell it once it’s on their plate. Before taking your first bite, bring the food close to your nose and smell it, noticing the specific herbs, spices, or other ingredients you can recognize. 
• Sight: Take a close look at your meal. If someone else prepared it for you, notice how they arranged the food or garnished it. Look at the different colors, textures, and details on the plate. Perhaps take a picture of your meal, as this can surprisingly elevate your awareness—and it has other benefits, too!
• Touch: This one may be prohibited depending on where you are eating (we don’t recommend grabbing your steak with your hands in a Michelin-starred restaurant). If appropriate, given the dish and the setting, feel the texture of the food on your plate before eating. Otherwise, feel the different textures in your mouth while chewing it. Is it smooth, creamy, crunchy, light, airy, dense, or chewy? 
• Sound: Notice any noises that occur when you slice, cut, or bite into a food—does it snap when you bite it, does it sizzle on your plate, or does your knife make a noise while cutting through it? You can also notice sounds around you, like ambient music or people chatting next to you.
• Taste: This one seems obvious, but many people can overlook how to truly taste their food. To elevate your sense of taste, chew slowly, allowing each bite to spend time on your tongue. Notice all the flavors of the meal—are they sweet, salty, bitter, sour, or umami? You can also try to identify specific foods or ingredients in a meal, especially if you did not cook it yourself.

By fully engaging with your food in this way, you will likely enjoy it more, feel more grateful, notice your hunger and fullness levels better, and, ultimately, cultivate a healthier relationship with food.

5. Recognize Hunger and Fullness Cues

Recognizing your hunger and fullness levels is an essential component of mindful eating habits. Many people simply eat all of the food on their plate, regardless of whether or not they are still hungry. 

Taking note of physical hunger versus emotional hunger is also important. Are you truly hungry, or do you want to eat from boredom, stress, sadness, or loneliness?

Try to eat until you are satisfied but still comfortable—not hungry, but not overly full. In the Blue Zone community of Okinawa, Japan, this tenet of mindful eating is known as Hara hachi bu, or “eat until you are 80% full.”³ This principle may be one reason why Okinawans are some of the longest-lived and healthiest people in the world, as they stop eating before they are full.⁴  

The best way to recognize your body’s signals for hunger and fullness is by slowing down your meal. Use all of the tips in the previous section for eating slower, which allows your brain to catch up to your stomach and realize that it’s no longer hungry. It can take 20 to 30 minutes for your brain to recognize you’re full, which is much longer than most people take to eat a meal.⁵ 

Conversely, notice how hungry you are when showing up to a meal. If you feel ravenous, lightheaded, shaky, or nauseous, you may note that you went too long without eating, as these are extreme signs of physical hunger. 

6. Don’t Deprive Yourself or Restrict

On holidays characterized by large meals, many people skip breakfast or lunch in an attempt to “save up” calories for later. However, this often leads to feeling ravenous when the next meal or appetizers roll around, causing overeating, feeling sick, or filling up on foods you don’t care that much about.

When we undereat (acutely or chronically), the body cannot distinguish between this self-imposed restriction and a real, immediate food shortage. This causes the body to act like it’s in a “starvation mode,” increasing hunger and appetite and slowing down metabolic rate to conserve energy.¹ 

Instead, eat a nourishing and balanced breakfast and lunch before your holiday meal to avoid overeating and help you make the food choices you intended to.

7. Manage Stress

Stress is often involved with mindless eating, leading to overeating or binge eating episodes. Stress management is crucial for mindful eating, as you cannot eat mindfully if your mind and body are reeling with stress. 

​​Recognize and acknowledge your feelings of stress (or another emotion) and try to manage them with stress-relieving activities, such as deep breathing exercises, going for a walk, exercising, journaling, talking with a loved one, or going to a therapy appointment. 

Managing stress is easier said than done, and the holidays can add an extra layer of stress, so the first step is acknowledging if you are eating out of stress or another form of emotional eating. If this is an ongoing issue, look for therapists, Registered Dietitians, or other practitioners who specialize in emotional eating or eating disorders. One study found that dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)—a cognitive behavior therapy for emotional eaters with a focus on mindfulness and emotional regulation—was effective at reducing emotional eating.¹

8. Eat Without Judgment

Try not to label any foods you eat as “good” or “bad” (including calling food “junk food”), but rather, maintain neutrality around your food choices. This is especially important if you have a history of disordered eating patterns.

Take note of how certain foods make you feel—both for physical and mental health—rather than how you think they will make you look. 

If you notice that a meal filled with refined carbohydrates, sugar, or ultra-processed foods makes you feel sluggish, sick, bloated, or tired afterward, that’s more important than thinking about how it will affect your weight.

Similarly, instead of avoiding or eliminating certain foods entirely (like saying you won’t have any desserts this holiday season), set intentions to enjoy them in moderation, which reduces feelings of deprivation, restriction, or guilt if you don’t stick to your plan. 

Although some foods are not always nutritionally healthy for our bodies, they can sometimes be nourishing to our souls, and there is certainly a time and place for comfort foods. Overall, a non-judgmental attitude is essential for maintaining a compassionate relationship both with food and your body.

9. Stay Hydrated

Many people mistake hunger for thirst, and a lot of us are chronically dehydrated. Drinking plenty of water throughout the day and having a glass before meals can help manage hunger and overeating.

During the meal, taking sips of water between bites can also facilitate mindful eating, as you can think about your body’s hunger or fullness levels while sipping. 

10. Create a Plan

When going into the holiday season (or any food-centered event), it can be helpful to create a plan in your mind about how you want the meal to go. If Thanksgiving is around the corner and you typically overeat and feel sick afterward, create a plan for which favorite foods you want to focus on eating and which you could do without.

For example, you may decide that filling up on bread rolls and being too stuffed for the rest of the meal is not worth it to you, but the pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes are. This can help you to prepare for what is to come, and you can spend less mental energy during the meal deciding what you are or are not going to eat. 

Last but not least, know that one meal (or even one week) will not make or break your health. If you overate or consumed foods you didn’t plan to, move past it and do not deprive yourself or feel guilt or shame.

Mindful Eating FAQs