How To Start Eating Somatically with the 3 T's

What drives your food decisions? Do you eat because you're hungry? Do you eat because it is time? Do you eat because you think you're supposed to? Do you eat because you're committed to a certain routine? Do you eat because you're bored, stressed, anxious, or worried?

There are many many reasons why we eat. We're not going to label any reason for eating "wrong" or "bad" here. Whatever reason you're deciding to eat has a purpose to it and is serving you in some way whether that is to fuel your body, have more energy, or just tom feel more emotionally grounded.

What happens when we eat, for any reason, in a disembodied way is that we can miss the eating experience entirely. If we miss the pleasure, satisfaction, and satiation from eating, we can be searching all day for the emotions and sensations we missed from the act of feeding our body.

So how do we start landing the eating experience in our body? I call it the 3 T's:

Taste

Temperature

Texture

The 3 T's are something you can attend to before and during your meal to notice how your body is processing, assimilating, and resonating with what you're eating. Guiding your attention to these 3 things can bring you into an embodied experience with your food to discover a way of eating that supports you in feeling how you want to feel in any moment.

Taste

Let's start with Taste. Before a meal, you can slow down and ask your body what kind of tastes would feel nourishing for that meal. You can ask your body if it wants something sweet or spicy, salty or bland, bitter or tangy. As you ask your body questions you can notice if it relaxes or contracts guiding you toward what your body might be needing for that eating experience.

Then, as you're eating a meal with those specific tastes, you can notice how your body responds. You can observe your bodily sensations to explore were the tastes you identified as needing coming from your headspace or a body space. You will know this by how your body responds to the food. If you notice your body feel calm, at ease, grounded, and energized those tastes were what your body was wanting. If you notice your body start to feel uncomfortable, digestively uneasy, and agitated those tastes might have been coming from a mental decision rather than bodily messages.

No judgment here! Again there is no right or wrong space to eat from. You just get to notice and observe how your body responds differently when you choose to eat a food from a mental decision and when you choose to eat a food from a connected body decision.

Temperature

Next is Temperature. Before you sit down to eat, you can ask your body what is the temperature of your food that would feel the most supportive. Does it want something hot or cold? Lukewarm? Room Temperature? Raw or Overly cooked? Then, while you're eating, you can notice if the temperature of your food is feeling soothing or energizing or something else. Your body will let you know that temperature of that food resonates with you by how you feel after the meal is over.

Texture

Last is Texture. Before you start to eat, explore the texture that would feel most satiating. This could be creamy, crunchy, mushy, smooth, soft, hard, liquidy, crispy, or crumbly. Enjoying the experience of what we're chewing is important to want to stay embodied during your eating experience. If you don't like the texture in your mouth, you may disembody just to get through the meal because the texture of your food is not resonating with your body. As you chew the specific textured food you decided to have, you can notice if this is inviting you deeper into your body to want to stay in the eating experience or if there is some part of you that wants to leave your body just to get through the meal.

These are three ways to start to eat somatically and feel connected to your body throughout your eating experience. All the information you collect will just be data points guiding you in future food decisions. So no matter what you observe and discover, you can thank your body for communicating with you to stay connected to body appreciation for all the ways it shows up for you and lets you know what works for it and what does not by the messages you receive through bodily sensations.

I want to make one note here.

If it has felt unsafe to be in your body, this practice may actually feel intense to experiment with. You may be at a place where you're still stepping into trust with your body and just need to eat anything and be alright with just eating food. Everyone's somatic eating journeys will be different depending upon where you're at on your healing path. Trust where you are and you can experiment with these tools whenever it feels safe to do so.