Healthy Eating Monday Challenge
The Get Healthy Team wants to help you maintain a healthy lifestyle especially during this time of uncertainty. We have created a week-long physical activity and a week-long healthy eating challenge to help motivate, inspire, and engage you and your family while keeping you safe by following social distancing guidelines. This week we will focus on healthy eating. Check out our Facebook page and this blog to find out the daily challenges for this week.
The coronavirus has changed our daily routines dramatically and has contributed to more stress. It’s likely we find ourselves mindlessly eating more foods or eating foods that are less healthful. Complete our Healthy Eating Monday Challenge to be more mindful while eating.
Healthy Eating Monday Challenge: Incorporate mindful eating in order to help us re-establish healthy eating patterns and practices in our lives.
Some suggestions to meet this challenge include:
- Schedule meals at set times and have them away from your workspace
- Turn the television off and put your smartphone away for meals
- Remove snacks from your workspace
- Reorganize your kitchen to make treats less accessible
Mindful eating is the practice of bringing attention to all of our senses (taste, smell, sound, touch, sight) while being aware of the emotional and physical responses that take place within us before, during and after eating. Mindful eating uses the act of mindfulness, or being present, to help overcome eating problems in our lives. With the dramatic change in daily routines and environments due to the coronavirus, it’s likely that we’ve lost some of our natural eating rhythms and healthy eating patterns that we had established in our lives before the crisis.
For those now working from home, you may have greater access to food and snacks, and find yourselves mindlessly eating more food or eating foods that are less healthful for us. For some, increased stress makes it difficult to eat and we may skip meals or forget to eat throughout the day.
To overcome these challenges and eat more mindfully during this challenging time, schedule meals at set times and have your meals away from your workspace. If needed, create reminders in your work calendar to signal when it’s time to step away from your workspace for a meal or snack. Try to remove distractions such as television and smartphones while eating, and if you can, avoid engaging with the news during mealtimes. Being deliberate in your meal and snack consumption allows you to really savor your meals, leading to a more fulfilling eating experience overall. Keep all food in the kitchen and away from your workspace.
Take some time to consider the food environment in your home and home workspace and reorganize it to help you practice mindful eating. The first rule is that all food belongs in the kitchen and pantry areas. The simple act of removing tempting foods from your workspace can be a powerful tool in preventing mindless eating. Put treats and foods that are to be eaten rarely on a higher shelf or less accessible place in your pantry. Portion out snacks for the day in individual containers. Write out an inventory of the food that you have in the house, along with some ideas for healthy meals that you can make from that food. That way, when you’re hungry, you’ll have a plan of what’s available to eat.
For more on mindful eating, visit healthy eating habits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
These simple changes can help you recover your mindfulness around eating during this stressful time. Visit our Facebook page and tell us how you’re eating mindfully today!
