- What's up? It's your girl, FrumpyFit.
If you don't know who I am,
I'm an online weight loss coach
who's dedicated to calling out all the BS in the fitness industry
and providing you with accurate fitness, nutrition, and weight loss information.
Today we are going over mindful eating
which I've mentioned in so many other videos before this
and you guys have been begging for an actual dedicated video,
so that's what we're doing.
I'm gonna go over the three steps to get to mindful eating for weight loss.
But first, this video is sponsored by Magic Spoon.
My literal favorite cereal of all time.
Yes, compared to your regular grocery store bought cereal.
Cereal is one of those foods
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It's one of my favorite breakfast things
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Let me just give you the stats, actually.
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And it's so good!
This flavor, frosted, is my all time favorite.
When we get variety packs, we love getting frosted,
fruity, chocolate, and peanut butter.
Like, there are so many good flavors to choose from.
So if you wanna try out Magic Spoon,
you can use this discount code
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and make sure you use the link in the description
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Thanks, Magic Spoon, for sponsoring this video.
Okay, first order of business.
What is mindful eating and what is mindful eating for weight loss?
I'm starting to hear people talk about mindful eating more
and unlike intuitive eating, which has a book,
I think mindful eating is more of just like a concept,
and people are putting different spins on it.
So this is my spin.
Mindful eating is just eating with mindfulness and intention,
and you can do this for any goal that you have.
So for weight loss, you're eating with mindfulness
with the ultimate goal of weight loss.
And how we do this is by creating a calorie deficit.
And we can do this with mindful eating
which I'll go over in this video.
If you need more information about calories
or what even a calorie deficit is,
because a calorie deficit is required for weight loss,
you can watch this video and also this playlist
which that video is in.
In order to accomplish mindful eating for weight loss,
you are gonna need to rely on some feedback from your body.
I always get questions like, "Well, how do I know
if I'm in a calorie deficit if I'm not tracking my calories?"
"How do I know if I'm actually losing weight?"
"How do I know if it's working?"
Essentially, you're not in a calorie deficit
if you're not losing weight.
So you gotta use that feedback from your body
to see if you're making progress or not,
but gettin' a little ahead of myself.
We'll talk about this when I go over the three steps.
Mostly step three.
And again, these are my own definitions
of what mindful eating is.
It's what I teach my students in my course,
Tried and True Weight Loss For You,
if you're interested in learning about it,
you can use the link in the description
and pinned in the comments.
I would absolutely love to have you.
But with my course students, they have two options for weight loss.
I've already talked a lot about calories on my channel
and I've made a couple of videos about calorie tracking.
"How to Calculate Your Calories"
and "Why You Shouldn't Count Your Calories,"
but mindful eating is the other option.
If you go with calorie tracking,
the ultimate goal is mindful eating.
You're not just gonna track your calories forever.
Or you can just skip the calorie tracking all together
if it doesn't work for you and just do mindful eating.
Please remember that there is no one way to lose weight.
It's about finding the right way for you,
so feel free to just use what I talk about in this video
as inspiration, you can accept, reject, or tweak
literally anything that I'm going over today
to make it fit you a little bit better.
Step one is what I call observational mindfulness.
So I recommend food journaling for this.
And the mindfulness that we're talking about
in this step comes after rather than during or before.
So all you're doing is observing yourself
for, I recommend like one to two weeks.
So you're not changing anything about your current diet,
you're just keeping some sort of track of it and observing.
During this phase, you're observing your decisions,
your habits, how you feel around food,
like emotionally and physically.
You're observing your hunger.
And there's absolutely no judgement involved.
Notice nothing of what I mentioned
has to do with calories or portions or anything like that.
If you feel like that will be valuable for you,
go ahead and add it in, but not required.
Step number two is what I call active mindfulness.
Now we're moving on from just observing
to applying that to our diet so that we can get results.
So you're gonna look over your food journal
and just ask yourself, "What can I gather from this information?"
And these are some common realizations
that I've seen with my students and even with myself
because I absolutely love this mindful eating strategy.
So you might realize, "I eat when I'm bored."
"I eat past the point of fullness."
"I feel x, certain way after I eat x, certain meal or food."
"I eat when I feel blank emotion."
"After eating blank food or meal, I don't feel satisfied
and tend to eat pretty quickly again after."
"After eating blank food, I don't feel good physically.
I'm slugglish, I'm bloated," whatever it is.
So you might have some of those realizations,
you might have none of 'em and yours are gonna be totally different.
So now for being active with our mindfulness,
when we are actively being mindful,
we are seeking to improve the things that we've identified
that are not serving us, or maybe don't fall
into the category of eating with intention.
Now, the intention can totally be
eating for enjoyment or taste.
So I'm not saying that from now on,
any time you decide to eat your food,
it needs to have some serious reason why you're eating
or has to serve your goals 100% of the time,
or has to be perfect 100% of the time.
The point is to just have intention behind that decision
rather than it happening and us thinking back of like,
"Oh, I kinda wish that I hadn't done that."
I firmly believe that taste and enjoyment
are a part of a diet that is successful
and that if you ignore that part of it,
you will not be successful.
So again, that intention is totally fine.
So at this point, identifying those habits
and decisions and behaviors that may not be serving you
and aiming to improve them
may get you some weight loss on its own.
If that's the case, just keep doing what you're doing.
Keep practicing that mindfulness
and eventually the goal is to get to a point
where this mindfulness is more of second nature
rather than a whole thought process
that you have to go through when you're eating.
Step three is reflection, and this comes into play
specifically with weight loss.
If you're not seeing results, you have to reflect
and figure out what next steps to take.
If this happens, if you're not getting the results
that you're looking for, do no panic.
Do not change everything up, okay?
The point is to make small changes
to what we're already doing instead of changing everything.
I actually talked about this in a recent video
and I just made my most popular free masterclass,
"The One Thing You Need To Achieve Sustainable Weight Loss,"
which, hint, it's minimum effective dose
meaning doing as little as possible.
I just published that masterclass
as an on demand training rather than you
needing to show up live for it.
So that link is in the description under freebies
if you're interested in watching that master class.
But anyway, no need to panic
and try keto for the third time, okay?
We're gonna tap into the knowledge
that we have about a calorie deficit and weight loss,
and again, if you need more information about that,
check out the calorie deficit video that I made.
And we're gonna figure out how to apply
that information that we know to mindfulness
in order to start losing weight.
We're gonna figure out how we can create a calorie deficit
using mindfulness and intention.
This is going to look different for everybody.
For me, personally, I will let you know
the ones that I kind of turn to
if I am practicing mindful eating and wanting to lose weight.
I can't remember if I mentioned them
in this video about gaining weight and how I plan to lose it,
but these are prompts, mindfulness prompts,
that work for me when I'm losing weight.
I aim to eat the same foods but just smaller portions.
So the example I usually use is cream cheese.
One of my favorite breakfasts, and I just love
cream cheese in general, sometimes I'll do a piece of bread
with jalapeno cream cheese and scrambled eggs on top.
Amazing.
I also love to do a little breakfast burrito.
Don't judge me if you think this is weird,
but I've had friends try this that were skeptical
who said it tasted incredible.
Tortilla, flour or corn, whatever's your preference,
a little bit of regular cream cheese,
egg, onion, salsa, and olive if you're feeling into that.
I personally love it.
So I can look at those two breakfast options
and say, "How can I increase the likelihood
that this meal is gonna get me to my goal?"
I tend to go a little too ham on the cream cheese,
so all I'm gonna do is just slightly decrease
the amount of cream cheese that I'm putting on
whatever it is that I'm eating
and so I still get to have the cream cheese,
I still get to have the exact meal that I'm looking for,
but instead of packing on the cream cheese,
I'm just gonna ask myself, "How much do I need to include
in this recipe for me to still really enjoy it,
but keep me on track with my goals?"
And if you do that little by little throughout the day
with everything you're eating,
that can make a really big difference,
especially over time if you're consistent with it.
Another example is like, I love ice cream.
I'll usually have a couple of cookies or ice cream at night,
and so that can look like still having that ice cream
but having just slightly less.
Especially because we tend to just finish
whatever we put in our bowl,
if you just put less in the bowl initially
and go about your business, you may not even notice.
Imagine if someone else served your ice cream
and just put a little bit less than you normally would,
you probably wouldn't notice that much.
But it would save you some calories
and help increase the likelihood
that you're in a calorie deficit.
Another thing that I'll do occasionally
is when we're grocery shopping,
I'll just start reading food labels and checking to see
if we're getting calorie-friendly options
that we're still gonna enjoy.
This is not about just decreasing your calories
and switching to foods that you don't like.
Food swaps only work if you're still gonna like it.
So for me, this looks like maybe salad dressings,
sauces, like pasta sauce, but also barbecue sauce.
My favorite barbecue sauce is, I think it's G Hughes,
and it is sugar free so it has less calories in it.
Still amazing, don't even, when I was prepping
for my body building competition,
I used Walden Farms barbecue sauce.
No. No. G Hughes.
You can also kind of do this with recipes,
figure out how to swap or improve the calorie content
of recipes that you're having,
like my husband and I just started trying out making stir frys,
and we've just been buying the store bought sauce
without really looking at food labels
because we just wanna dip our toes in
and see if we like it before we really refine it,
and so our next step might be to refine the recipe a little bit
to be more calorie friendly, potentially in the sauce department.
Again, make sure any of these swaps
that you're making are still gonna be enjoyable to you
'cause that's very important.
And lastly, one of the biggest ones for me,
is improving mindfulness with snacking.
Okay, I, a self-proclaimed snack queen,
you can watch this YouTube video
all about snacking for weight loss.
But I love snacks. I just love snacks.
And it's so easy to go overboard,
like accidently eating too many chips or whatever it is,
so if you are in that department, check out this
snacking tips for weight loss video
'cause I actually go over some of my mindful eating practices
when it comes to snacks, but also what I do,
aside from the tips in that video,
is before I go grab a snack, I ask myself
why I want that snack.
Why do I want a snack in the first place.
If it's 'cause I'm bored, maybe say no to the snack.
If it's 'cause I'm really actually hungry
and I wanna eat something, then I'm like,
"Okay, what snack could I have
that is going to keep me on track
maybe with my goals, make me feel satisfied afterward
for sure, because just eating a pile of chips
is not gonna do that for you,"
that's kinda what I go for in that snacking video.
Okay, so I wanna challenge you
if you get to this point in your mindful eating journey,
to get creative and just trust that if you continue
these kinds of behaviors, there's a very good chance
that you're gonna still be able to reach your goals.
The key here though is that you have to be patient.
If you're the type of person who gets really frustrated
or frazzled at not getting results quickly,
or if you're in a rush to lose weight,
this strategy is gonna be challenging for you
and so you also need to kind of address that at the same time.
Or even before you try this out
because in my course, mindful eating as your starting strategy
is a part of a long term strategy.
Basically in the course you choose whether short term weight loss,
meaning you lose weight more quickly,
or you lose weight more slowly,
you decide which one is right for you,
then we kind of build your strategy also based on that.
It's hard to explain unless you're in the course.
There's a whole order to things, it all makes sense
with the homework assignments and you know, all of that.
But mindful eating is a part of the longer term strategy.
So going into it, you have to know
that this may decrease how quickly
you're able to reach your goal.
But, if it's the right strategy for you,
you're gonna need to accept
that that's likely how things are gonna go.
And, that that's what's best for you.
It may not be what you want,
but it might be what's best for you.
All right, that's all I have for you about mindful eating.
I hope it's helpful.
Let me know if you have any questions
about mindful eating in the comments,
or if you have any follow up videos you want me to make
related to anything that I talked about,
and as usual, thank you so much for watching.
Thank you so much for your support,
it means the aboslute world to me.
Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe here.
You can also follow me on TikTok
and on Instagram, and I will see you guys in the next video.
Bye!