The Mindfulness Diet

The Mindfulness Diet, developed, promoted and taught by Doug Hanvey, recommends that you rely on your "inner light" to eat a healthy, well-balanced diet. Similar to other diet programs that encourage you to rely on your intuition when losing weight, the Mindfulness Diet teaches you how to analyze your behaviors and rely on your inner cues to make the healthiest food choices.

Diet Philosophy

The diet recommends that you put aside calorie-counting mechanisms, diet journals, restrictions on foods or certain recipes. Instead, a mindfulness diet philosophy recommends that you eat when you need to, and eat the foods that your body needs. Hanvey indicates that the original Greek meaning of diet, "way of life" relates to his diet philosophy because eating mindfully can become a permanent way of life for you long after you reach your goal weight. The mindfulness diet also encourages regular exercise, because your body needs and wants to move.

Expert Insight

Mr. Hanvey offers many studies that support the use of intuitive, or mindful eating. One study, published in the August 2008 issue of "Clinical Case Studies" entitled "A Mindfulness-Based Health Wellness Program for Managing Morbid Obesity" found that following a weight-loss program focused on food awareness, regular exercise, visualization techniques and identifying hunger helped a morbidly obese individual lose 144 lb. and maintain the weight loss during the 12-month monitoring period. Other experts, such as registered dietitian Julie Hansen, indicate that continual dieting can "bury" the intuitive eater inside you, and learning to eat mindfully, or intuitively, can help you break the diet cycle.

Techniques

If you are a chronic dieter, employing the techniques in a mindfulness or intuitive-based diet may seem radical. Both Hansen and Hanvey recommend putting aside formal diets and instead learning to rely on your inner voices to make healthy food choices. Part of the process involves learning how to identify when your body is sending you true hunger signals, not putting food into good or bad categories and learning to recognize the signals your body sends you when you are satisfied and full. Practicing these techniques involves looking for hunger noises or feelings from your stomach, eating regularly and giving your body needed exercise.

Considerations

As with any diet, consult your doctor before beginning a diet program. If you have diabetes, high cholesterol or heart disease, following a weight-loss program designed for your condition may require closer monitoring than that given by the Mindfulness Diet. When following this diet, familiarize yourself with healthy foods from each food on ChooseMyPlate.gov in order to eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, dairy and meats.