Eating mindfully, choosing and savouring food away from the distractions of computers and televisions, can help people lose weight, a study has shown.

A programme in the US tells people they can eat what they want, including their favourite high-calorie, fattening foods. But they must eat it mindfully, thinking about nothing but the enjoyment of eating their food – although not necessarily eating all of it.

“We instruct people to eat the foods that they love, and not give them up, but to eat them in a mindful way,” said Dr Carolyn Dunn from North Carolina State University in the US, one of the authors of the study presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Porto, Portugal.

“For example, if one of us was going to eat a food that has very high calories, we would tell them to eat one or two bites, but to eat those one or two bites with awareness, so they are getting the most pleasure out of those one to two bites.

“Other research has shown that those first two bites are associated with the most enjoyment – eating more will certainly give you more calories but not more enjoyment.

“So a chocolate mousse, for example ... we would advise them to eat it with mindfulness and with purpose and to enjoy those first few bites.”

They don’t have to waste food. “We instruct them to share it or take it home for another day or buy it in smaller amounts,” she said.

The commercial programme, called Eat Smart, Move More, Weigh Less, lasts for 15 weeks. Dunn and colleagues trialled the results by enrolling 80 people, 42 of whom went immediately on to the programme. The remaining 38 became the control group while waiting to join.

Those on the mindfulness programme lost a mean of 1.9 kg over the 15 weeks. The others on the waiting list were keen to join and assumed to be trying other ways of losing weight; they too lost a small amount – 0.3kg.

“Mindfulness is paying attention to your surroundings, being in the present moment,” said Dunn. “Mindful eating is eating with purpose, eating on purpose, eating with awareness, eating without distraction, when eating only eating, not watching television or playing computer games or having any other distractions, not eating at our desks.

“We talk about these aspects to get people to move away from eating with distractions and towards eating with purpose and eating with more awareness.

“People did increase their mindfulness and they did absolutely decrease their weight.”

Mindfulness is also about the way people shop for food and the choices they make in restaurants, she said. “Are you letting your emotions drive your eating? Are you eating out of fear or depression? Are you letting external cues drive your eating because you are in line in the grocery store and that food is being heavily marketed to us?”

Participants in the study were not offered any type of diet sheet or even asked to count calories. Each week they had a talk on a different aspect of food and nutrition. They were encouraged to walk and increase their physical activity levels.

At the end of six months, around 75% of the participants had not regained the weight they had lost and some had lost more. The results were similar for the control group, once they had joined the programme themselves.

While mindfulness has become popular and is of great interest for health improvement generally, little research has been done on whether it could help in weight loss or prevention.



“Results suggest that there is a beneficial association between mindful eating and weight loss. The current study contributes to the mindfulness literature as there are very few studies that employed rigorous methodology to examine the effectiveness of an intervention on mindful eating,” say the authors.