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How to Practice Japanese Mindful Eating for More Joyful Meals
Overcoming the most confusing part of eating well
There are several standard principles to follow when managing weight and maintaining a healing and nourishing relationship with food, some principles which I have come to understand in Japanese ideas:
- Harahachi-bunme, or 8/10ths your stomach (moderation)
- Ichiju-sansai, or ‘one soup, three sides’ (variety)
- Plenty of vegetables and fruits
- and finally, mindful eating
Out of all these ideas, mindful eating is arguably the most important and also the most difficult — it’s definitely the one I struggled with the most.
Coming from a former background where food was a source of stress and also a source of temporary relief, I became to associate food with a sort of guilty curse. I felt bad so I would eat, and I would eat more because I felt worse for eating. In the most rational sense it was crazy because why couldn’t I just exercise self-control? But mindful eating is the most finicky thing in that it’s so intangible.
I could look at my plate and physically see whether it was a lot of food or not enough, as I could similarly count the number of vegetables on my plate and see the different colors and dishes that compromised my meal. I could see moderation, variety, and an assortment of vegetables, but I couldn’t see mindful eating. Like all psychological states we strive for — happiness, security, and confidence — being mindful only exists within my own experience.
So what does mindful eating even mean? How do you approach it? Is it actually important? Interestingly enough, mindful eating began to make more sense to me not when I studied the techniques for it, but when I happened upon a random statistic about the Japanese language.
Do you know how many words the Japanese have for food texture?
Japanese has 445 terms just to describe texture.
Do you know how many terms English has? A limited set of 77.
In Japanese, descriptor terms in Japanese are often onomatopoeic words, words that mimic the sound of…
