Health
Habits
Food
Weight 
Better Than Butternut: Roasted Delicata Squash Recipe
10 Simple Ways To Eat Less Without Noticing
Juicing: Stupid and Pretentious or Nourishing and Enlightening?
10 Tasty Carbs That Won’t Make You Fat
How To Start Working Out When You Don’t Like To Exercise
Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet if You’re Serious About Losing Weight
Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control
10 Reasons You Aren’t Losing Weight When You Think You’re Doing Everything Right
How To Burn More Calories Without Breaking A Sweat
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Foodists
How Jason Lost 4 lbs in One Week Through Mindful Eating
Jason is an old friend of my husband’s who also happens to be the editor of this podcast. Since he’s started listening to the show he’s become more and more health conscious, and when I launched the Mindful Meal Challenge he decided to give mindful eating a try.
Jason is a perfect test subject for mindful eating, because as he was already trying to get his healthstyle in a better place he already has a set menu for breakfast and lunch. This means that what he was eating didn’t change, so any change in his eating habits can be directly attributed to mindfulness.
He found that his morning three egg omelet was in fact larger than he needed to be satisfied, so he has now cut back to two. He also found that even though he found himself consuming less for breakfast, he wasn’t as hungry when lunch and dinner came around.
Simply by eating one Mindful Meal per day in the morning, Jason lost 4 lbs in the first week of the challenge.
Although he is still trying to figure out the best healthstyle for himself moving forward (which I help him troubleshoot in this episode as well), mindful eating is now a major part of his weight control strategy.
Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.
Relate links:
Simple Gourmet: Roasted Beets With Fresh Mint and Chèvre
“The reason you’re suffering is you’re focused on yourself.” -Tony Robbins from Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss
Listen:
If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.
Hi Darya!
I wanted to say I love that you made a dedicated website for your Mindful Meal Challenge! When you first rolled your challenge out, I was extremely busy at the time and was just trying to wrangle some peaceful moments out of my days. Now, I feel I have more of a handle over my routine, so I decided to try the challenge and what do you know, you made an entire site! Thank you so much and I will definitely be sharing with my friends and family.
Warmly,
Melanie
Hi Darya
I have been enjoying your podcast for past four months. I also follow the mindful eating habits and thanks to you for reinforcing the habits that I grew up with and had totally forgotten.
I had a few thoughts about the things I heard in the episode with Jason and his craving for junk food in the evening after a whole day of mindful eating.
Is this the best place to key them in or an email is better as it may get a little long 🙂
and again I love love love Summer Tomato 🙂
Mindful regards,
Meena
Thanks Meena. Comments are always better than email 🙂
Hi Darya
Thank you for your prompt reply and sorry for this tardy response. I heard the episode of Jason and his mindful loss of 4lbs. At the end of the episode his concern was that he doesn’t feel hungry up to lunch after he has had a mindful breakfast; and then until dinner, when he has had the mindful lunch, but there is this craving for fries and the like at around 6 pm. Hope I comprehended that right. Here’s what I have to say on this.
I stumbled upon an Indian sports nutritionist almost the same time that I discovered Summer Tomato. Both of you promote the same, how to lose weight without dieting with almost similar core habits. Mindful and slow eating, eating on time, cooking your own meal, eating seasonal produce, local is better than distant organic and so on. On Jason’s concern, there is one habit that she puts across that has really helped me from these cravings. And that is feeding my tummy every 2-3 hours. It doesn’t HAVE to be a full meal in itself, but it could be healthy snacks like homemade yoghurt or a small bowl of peanuts or cheese or fruit. This helps in Diet-induced Thermogenesis that actually helps in burning calories. When I eat every 2-3 hours, my body knows it will get food after that time span and stays satiated and automatically the meal size reduces, regulates the supply of sugar to the brain, no cravings for sweet and fried junk. Also, when the body gets fewer calories at a time, they seem to be utilised much better and not get stored as fat. Prolonged gaps between meals send starvation like signals to the brain and the body starts craving for fat for storage in a time of such need.
One more aspect that has helped me with diligent practice, is that I never wake up to Caffeine now. The first meal that always enters my fasted body is a glass of warm water and a fruit in the first 10 mins of my wake up time. When I do that I am satiated with just half a cup of my morning tea, which I’ve been having since as long as I can remember.
That was a long comment and I hope it makes sense. It has helped me a lot and I think it is worth a try.
warm regards,
Meena
I’ve found just one meal a day to be sufficient on most days, with a morning pint of ICE cold water. Then I tend to drink 4 cups of pretty strong coffee in the morning, the afternoon I revert to decaf.
Food has become an enjoyment now rather than just a refueling exercise.
It’s kept my metabolism up and I’m not feeling hungry anymore! Lost 2 stone in about 3 months so I’m pretty happy and I have loads of energy. I’m really loving your podcasts! Keep up the good work, you’re slowly changing the world to a new way of thinking!
I’m Iranian-American and loved hearing that Jason has gotten into Persian food! It really is healthy and delicious — maybe modulo the tah-dig (the crispy rice at the bottom of the pot), which is perhaps more delicious than healthy. There’s a great Persian cooking blog called Turmeric and Saffron that I often rely on for recipes and ideas (https://turmericsaffron.blogspot.com/). And both Food and Wine magazine and the New York Times recently did recipe roundups for Persian New Year — you can easily find them by Googling. Since there isn’t much of an Iranian community in Chicago, I wonder whether Jason could find some of the key ingredients online? Amazon sells some Sadaf brand stuff (that’s the most popular brand of Persian products here in the US), so he could probably get things like rosewater, Persian saffron, and pomegranate molasses that way. Anyway, great episode, and best of luck to Jason!