7 Tips to Help Nutrition Clients with Mindful Eating

If you're after expert tips for helping nutrition clients with mindful eating, you've come to the right place! In this article, you will learn how to promote a better lifestyle, by avoiding any stumbling blocks they may encounter. 

If you'd like to take this advice further, you can develop your knowledge through the completion of a Personal Training Diploma. Following graduation, you will be able to provide clients with bespoke workout programmes that work hand-in-hand with their mindful eating habits. 

You can also download our free course prospectus to find out more about this and all of our other courses. 

7 Tips to Help Nutrition Clients with Mindful Eating

We’ll now run through some of the best ways to help clients with intuitive eating and mindful nutrition so that you can help them achieve effective and positive eating patterns. 

#1 Tips to Help Nutrition Clients with Mindful Eating: Suggest Your Clients Keep a Food Diary

If you want to know how to help nutrition clients develop mindful eating habits one of the best ways is to keep a food diary.

This is where your clients will enter when they eat and what they eat but, unlike in other diets there will be a lack of judgement, paying attention to other, different factors.

They will pay attention to things like:

• Hunger and fullness cues
• Mood before and after eating and if there’s a craving feeling
• What they ate specifically, as detailed as possible to include sauces and preparation
• Details of how it tasted 
• Nourishment provided by the meal 
• Physical sensations following the meal

All of this helps clients not only focus on the nutritional benefits of the food they’re eating but also grounding them in their body and making them appreciate and pay attention to different things.

This isn’t just great for people with more psychological food issues but also will help with a whole host of other standard physical goals such as:

• Curbing cravings as being aware of hunger and fullness cues by writing them down will make people more sensitive to when they’re eating because of a craving rather than hunger
• Weight loss because being more attentive about what they eat will help curb impulse eating or overeating
• Energy levels. Paying more attention to what they eat and why will help to improve diet in general to choose foods based on what they can offer as nourishment

The benefit of a food diary is also that you can use what they write and identify to shape future tips to help nutrition clients with mindful eating. 

Whether you’re a nutrition coach or a nutritionist you’ll be able to review what clients have said in their diaries in check ins and help to adjust any programmes accordingly. 

Not only will this help you showcase your nutritionist skills by helping your clients with what to pay attention to, they will see better results by having a record of their progress!

Some of our other tips to help nutrition clients with their mindful eating habits will make up what your clients can journal about.

Let’s look at some more of them now!

#2 How to Help Nutrition Clients Develop Mindful Eating Habits by Listening to Hunger and Fullness Cues

One of the best tips to help nutrition clients with mindful eating is getting them to recentre themselves physically and pay attention to what’s going on with their bodies before, during, and after eating. 

This means not only being aware of when they’re full but also learning to eat when hunger begins rather than denying those feelings.

Often bingeing or unhealthy eating habits will stem from ignoring feelings of hunger or attempting to suppress them.

Not only does this potentially lead to eating quickly and ignoring feelings of fullness but also may result in unhealthier decisions in terms of what clients choose to eat. 

Learning to attend to hunger and fullness cues is especially important if you’re working with clients suffering from disordered eating because it’s an important process for breaking negative connections to hunger. 

It’s also super helpful for people attempting to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight because it will help to stop them from overeating but in a helpful way where they’re not necessarily denying themselves.

One of the ways you can do this is through any meditative practices you do with clients, which we’ll cover later in this article.

Focusing on the body in a controlled way will then develop habits and techniques that they can use outside of your sessions or any moments of meditation.

Tuning into these signals will heighten the experience of eating for clients as well as help them to see results.

This is why tips like this to help nutrition clients with mindful eating not only help your clients but your reputation and success rate too!

#3 Help Clients with Intuitive Eating and Mindful Nutrition by Encouraging Short Meditations

Mindfulness as a practice originally stems from Buddhist thinking and so goes hand in hand with meditation and other techniques that have filtered through from this tradition.

This is why one of the best tips to help nutrition clients with mindful eating is to use short meditation and breathing exercises before eating.

This will focus your clients on their bodies and draw attention to the things that will make the eating process itself more mindful, alongside the other tips to help nutrition clients with their mindful eating habits.

For example, if people are trying to lose weight and often mindlessly or distractedly graze on sugary snacks, this can be curbed with meditation techniques.

Stopping to recentre as often as possible before eating will provide an opportunity for clients to listen to their body and any cues that may help curb the craving or choose something more nutritional instead.

This is one of the things you can encourage clients to journal about after eating in order to see the difference that it makes emotionally, though it shouldn’t be the focus at the moment of eating.

If you want to know how to help nutrition clients develop mindful eating habits in this way it can be difficult to know where to start but there’s plenty of apps and software options to help!

Programmes such as Calm and Headspace have great, short meditations designed to help with a whole range of issues.

In fact, Headspace has a whole range of meditations and techniques dedicated solely to mindful eating:

This is a great tool to recommend to clients and something that you can do with them to help them see how they can contribute to mindful eating. 

Otherwise you can do a technique called box breathing, encouraging clients to count whilst they breathe, breathing in for six seconds, holding for four, and breathing out for six, holding and repeating.

They can do this a certain number of times, reducing the time accordingly as they get better and it works quicker to increase their focus. 

#4 How to Help Nutrition Clients Develop Mindful Eating Habits by Eating More Slowly

One of the easiest tips to help nutrition clients with mindful eating is just getting them to slow down when they eat.

This might mean chewing a certain number of times or making sure to sit down to eat as much as possible, avoiding eating whilst rushing or being on the move!

Eating slowly goes hand in hand with other techniques to help clients with intuitive eating and mindful nutrition because it helps clients to pay attention to things they may usually miss.

Slowing down means that clients can focus far better on:

• How they feel whilst eating
• The sensory experience, being grounded and noticing taste, smell, texture etc
• Where the food has come from, who has prepared it, and how it was prepared

All of these things are really important if you want to know how to help nutrition clients develop mindful eating habits because these are the elements that make up mindful eating and will deepen your clients’ connection to their food and their bodies. 

As this is one of the simplest techniques to implement, too, it can often be the one that sees results the quickest.

Meditating beforehand will help clients slow down their eating process and relax their bodies so they can focus on the experience.

This is another thing they can journal about too, pausing whilst eating the meal to reflect on any changes in feeling or the sensory experiences of the meal.

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#5 Tips to Help Nutrition Clients with Mindful Eating: Remove Distracting Stimuli

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to mindful eating techniques is the intrusion of external stimuli or being in an environment that makes it difficult to relax or meditate.

If you want to help clients with intuitive eating and mindful nutrition this is one of the easiest way to help them improve and see results by altering their environment. 

Removing distracting stimuli means getting rid of anything in the room whilst your clients are eating that might take their attention away from the experience of eating.

Firstly this will help with the initial meditation or breathing technique as these activities both need a quiet environment to help clients focus.

The more noise in the room the harder it will be to count breaths or do a mental body scan as there will be sounds distracting your clients. 

This will also make it far easier to focus on the aforementioned elements of the eating experience and help them to notice any effects afterwards too.

You can work with your clients to create a checklist before starting to eat or even preparing the food depending on the techniques you use with them.

For instance, you might encourage your clients to put the following distractions on a list:

• The television
• Mobile phone
• Radio
• Any clutter on the table or surface where they’ll be eating

This can act as a list they go through every time they sit down to prepare food or eat to ensure they are as focused as possible each time. 

#6 Be Wary of Strict Goal-Oriented Thinking if You Want to Tips to Help Nutrition Clients with Mindful Eating

Though this might seem counterproductive when dealing with nutrition clients who’ve come to you wanting to change their relationship to food, you should be wary of focusing too heavily on goals.

Mindful eating is all about learning to appreciate food’s sensory and nutritional qualities in the moment.

Though this can contribute massively to some goals, such as weight loss, recovery for those with disordered eating habits, and other physiological issues, these shouldn’t be the focal point of the habits themselves.

By focusing on the moment and the nutrition and benefits of the food being eaten, here and now, much like meditation practice, the goal is to get clients to break negative psychological connections to food and eating.

This is why if you want to know how to help nutrition clients develop mindful eating habits you shouldn’t go too heavy on the goals and any sort of future focus.

If clients are thinking about what they want out of their eating experience in the future then this is taking them out of the moment, eating as a means to an end, which is counterintuitive to the process.

This is why this is one of the especially helpful tips to help nutrition clients with mindful eating working with you for psychological reasons as well as physical ones.

By focusing on the here and now there’s an opportunity for clients to focus on the food without any guilt, shame, anxiety, or overthinking.

Focusing on the sensory experience means food stops being thought of as either a reward or a punishment, leading to a greater appreciation of the food and healthier habits too!

So, if you want to know how to help nutrition clients develop mindful eating habits, establish any goals in an initial consultation or early on and encourage clients to put them aside until any check ins.

#7 Help Clients with Intuitive Eating and Mindful Nutrition by Focusing on Preparation 

As we mentioned earlier, one of the best tips to help nutrition clients with mindful eating is focusing on not just the sensory experience but also appreciating the process of the food.

Clients will connect to what they’re eating in a much more meaningful way if they pay attention to how the food has been prepared or who has prepared it.

This is why it’s also a great adaptable tip whether you’ve become a nutrition coach or a nutritionist because you can either include in sessions with a client or the packages you design.

Focusing on preparation will not only help your clients with the mindful eating process but also help you to offer tangible, actionable steps they can take to see results and improve their habits.

For example, if they’re eating in a restaurant they can focus on who has prepared the food and think about appreciating that process and showing gratitude.

However, you can also encourage them to cook wherever possible, giving them quick and easy recipes for mindful preparation as well as eating. 

This will add an extra layer to the focus on sensory details such as texture and shape because this will be tied to the way in which your clients have prepared the food.

For example, paying attention to texture and connecting that to how something has been cut and prepared in a particular way.

Much like the meditation exercises or breathing techniques, this will expand the mindfulness experience and enhance the benefits as a result!

Before You Go!

That concludes our list of tips to help nutrition clients with mindful eating! Now that you have a better understanding of these techniques, you can implement them into your own business. 

Remember, if you're looking to offer workout programmes that work alongside this advice then you will need to complete a Personal Training Diploma. 

For information on this course. you can download our free course prospectus to find out more!