How often do you find yourself eating while watching Netflix or studying? When was the last time you actually concentrated on what you were eating?

With the constant pressure of everyday life, we find ourselves ever so often multi-tasking and simply using food to keep going. This has many unhealthy effects such as over-eating, which can lead to stomach problems and lack of satisfaction. The proposed solution to this problem: mindful eating. There are many definitions and interpretations of what constitutes mindful eating. We also see this plurality in our own understanding of the concept: even in our group of four, we were able to observe many differences in the group members’ interpretations.  To give you an idea of what we are talking about when we refer to “mindful eating”, we came up with the mind map below: 

During the course of our self-experiment, we noticed no improvements. Although we really tried, we failed. Uni, social life, sports, Netflix seemed more important. Especially, when we had multiple deadlines at once we found ourselves eating and studying at the same time. Or even skipping meals, eating enormous amounts of chocolate and junk food in general. Overall, though we were more mindful of our eating patterns, it was hard to actually hard to follow the principles of mindful eating. We rather focused on our mental health instead of our actual hunger. There was no time to actually cook or sit down to have a proper meal. Further, it was hard to embrace the five senses, eat slower and for overall health as meals had to be consumed quickly. Moreover, it is nearly impossible to erase distractions in day to day student life. However, we noticed, as soon as the stress faded, we ate more mindfully. We also noticed that it was very beneficial for our health and mindset. Eating with company, meaning eating with family, peers, friends was a much nicer experience hat eating by ourselves in the library.  Conclusively, one could say that environmental factors are the most important influence on mindful eating. Through the stress, eating mindfully became less of a priority.