Following a thyroid diet plan! Mindful eating can be the way forward

The most common problem while suffering from thyroid issues is either feeling hungry all the time and losing weight or gaining weight without eating much. My experience says that if you are following a thyroid diet plan, you need to be mindful of what and how much are you eating. That is also known as intuitive eating. Thyroid if not taken care of well in time can spoil your relationship with food.

Mindful eating comes as a psychological therapy that helps people develop a healthy relationship with their weight, eating, and body. To make this happen it uses psychological ways to enable people to recognize signs of being hungry and full. If you learn to identify it, you learn when to start or stop eating. There are times when you are following a thyroid diet plan and fail to recognize triggers for over eating or comfort eating resulting in weight gain and deteriorated health. In such situations, mindful eating helps to develop ways to manage these triggers.

Mindful eating is not a diet, but it is a process to help restore a healthy relationship between food and your body. It is not any particular meal plan but it surely can be linked with any particular type of thyroid diet plan that you are following.

How to link mindful eating with a thyroid diet plan!

There are a few simple rules that need to be followed while undergoing treatment for the disturbed thyroid gland and those are very simple like …

1. Eating anti-inflammatory foods… (more about anti-inflammatory foods read here..)
2. Cutting out simple carbs and sugars… (more about it read here…)
3. Sticking to small portions and frequent meals… (more about it read here…)
4. Take adequate sleep to avoid stress because it leads to overeating as well as unhealthy food choices. (more about it read here…)
5. Drink lots of water and healthy liquids like buttermilk etc.

Now you know the rules and all you need to do is to implement them by being conscious about your food and daily routine. It surely will require a lot of practice but it is not impossible.

Mindful eating and thyroid diet combined for sustainable weight loss

Thyroid patients need a sustainable weight loss plan to be followed with a good healthy and nutritious thyroid diet plan. Calorie restriction in the diet doesn’t lead to sustainable weight loss. Research has explained that 95% of people who begin a diet or opt for restricted eating to lose weight fail to do so over the long term as a result end up regaining more weight than lost. These people end up blaming themselves for their failure and lack of willpower to succeed. They look for other restrictive diet plans and get stressed ending up in the cycle of stress eating and comfort eating. On the contrary, if they practice mindful eating, it would encourage them to focus on themselves, self-care for the body they have. Not only that but also to develop a healthy relationship with food and their body along with right kind of exercise movements that they would enjoy.

Answer these questions…

You need to understand yourself, your thoughts, feelings, and behavior patterns to change your random eating habits. Our emotions and mental state play an important role in determining why, when, and what we eat. That leads to a bounce-back when we think of, how much did we eat, and how we feel after eating that. All you need to do while you practice mindful eating is ask yourself two questions…

1. Does your eating come because of your thoughts about yourself? Your self beating or restrictive eating choices can be a major cause of your binge eating. So think about it. Do you eat because you are beating yourself up for not working out, being lazy, or lack of willpower? It has been observed that for most of the people on a thyroid diet plan thoughts and emotions about food and eating play a major role in messing up eating habits.
2. Have you made an effort to change your thoughts about feelings related to food? If you observe your emotions before having unplanned food you will find that most of the time it is either due to dehydration or boredom.

All you need to do is work towards understanding your body by giving yourself a chance to make peace with your body.

How to understand hunger when following a thyroid diet plan!

Mindful eating is the way to control overeating, binge eating, and comfort eating. Imagine you are having lunch and you are full but you see a few spoonful of leftover in the serving bowl. What do you do? You think of not wasting it but dumping all that in your tummy. Now that is the time when you need to be mindful of why should you eat when your stomach is full!

Most of the times we all struggle with overeating, comfort eating and even binge eating. We eat when we are not physically hungry. We eat when we are past being full. If you are also the one who eats without hunger, then you need to identify the trigger for that urge to eat something. Mindful eating can help you understand the difference between actual physical hunger from triggers like emotional distress, boredom, or even tiredness. People with thyroid are seen to develop many impulsive emotional triggers so mindful eating can actually make you cope with these.

If you too struggle with dieting, or restrictive eating, then mindful eating can help you learn to pay attention to the natural hunger cues of your body. All you need to do is listen to the cue, trust them and eat accordingly. You need to shift your focus from gaining or losing weight to your improving overall health and wellbeing.