Achieve Mealtime Success with One Intention

How many expectations do you put on your meal?

Do you expect your meal to make you happy, nourished, energetic, satiated, calm, and at ease? Do you expect your food to help you lose weight, gain muscle, and support your body in thriving?

That is A LOT of expectations for one meal.

Creating expectations can set us up to feel like a failure. If we expect our meal to do all of these things and then it doesn't, we might feel frustrated, sad, and disappointed, where you might find yourself continuing to eat to try to gain the experience you're looking to have with your food.

Take a moment right now and think of all the expectations you have in your relationship with food. Write all of these expectations down so you can see how much extra pressure is being put on your body every time you eat by what you're thinking and expecting your food to do for you.

It is important at the end of a meal that we feel that it was a successful satiating and nourishing experience. The more moments we give ourselves to feel like we're winning at life, the more relaxed we will feel and the easier it will become to continue taking care of yourself. It creates this ripple effect of feel successful, you continue to choose things that support you in feeling good about you, you feel good about you so you want to continue to take care of yourself, where you choose foods, physical movements, thoughts, and environments that feel most supportive to your body.

To achieve this mealtime success we need to simplify our eating experiences. Begin to practice choosing just ONE intention you have for your meal. This can begin by slowing down and connecting with your body before your meal. Ask your body how it is feeling. If it is simply feeling hungry, your ONE intention can just be to satiate your physical hunger and that can be done with any food. After your meal is over, check in with your body again and notice how you no longer feel the same intense physical hunger you did at the beginning of your meal. Congratulate yourself for achieving your mealtime intention. This is an important part so that you can feel on an embodied level that you set a goal and you achieved it and allow yourself to feel how good it feels to accomplish something. This can support in raising your sense of self esteem as you keep setting these mealtime intentions and achieving them over and over again.

Another scenario can be…

you slow down and notice that along with feeling hungry, your body also feels irritated and you would really like to feel grounded. Now you may start to get a little bit more discerning around what you choose to eat. You can explore what foods support you in feeling grounded in the moment and long term as well. I know for myself I will choose something with quality protein and fat as that often supports me in feeling grounded throughout my day. Whatever you choose, again pause at the end of the meal and notice how you feel. Congratulate yourself for striving to create the experience your body needed.

Let's say you create your intention, you choose the food you believe will give you the experience you're looking to have and it doesn't do it. How do we still feel like that was a successful experience? Here you would focus on the intention you created. Those intentions are often ones to support us in feeling more connected to ourselves. Focus on that you created this beautiful intention for yourself and you get to continue to focus on that one intention.

If your meal didn't give you the experience you desired, you can move on to exploring what could satiate your intention by exploring an emotional satiating act. Sometimes no matter our best intentions it is just not food that is going to get us there. So if you had an intention of your food supporting you in feeling energetic and you felt even more tired after you ate that was not an unsuccessful experience. If anything, it was a very successful experience letting you check off one thing on your list as you experiment and explore what is going to support you in feeling energetic in your day. This might then be exploring different acts like physically moving your body, taking a nap, and getting curious what the lack of energy might be here to teach you.

Do you see how just focusing on your one intention for your meal can actually guide your efforts for your whole day?

How we approach our meals can be how we approach everything else in our life. This practice of creating one intention at your meals is also a practice in simplifying what you're attending to throughout your day. To be able to eat somatically we have to set you up for success by decreasing mealtime expectations and creating food intentions that support you in feeling good about you.

Experiment with your ONE food intention each day this next week and email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime with what you discover!