Body and Mind: Mindfulness Helps Consumers to Compensate for Prior Food Intake by Enhancing the Responsiveness to Physiological Cues

Abstract

External cues regularly override physiological cues in food consumption resulting in mindless eating. In a series of experiments, this study shows that mindfulness, an enhanced attention state, improves consumers’ reliance on physiological cues across consumption episodes. Consumers who are chronically high in mindfulness (study 1) or who receive a short mindfulness training that focuses attention on the body (study 2) compensate more for previous food intake in their subsequent consumption. Moreover, after a mindful body meditation, consumers are more aware of physiological cues that develop after consumption (study 3), rather than of the amount they have previously eaten (study 4). Furthermore, we argue and show that the focus of mindfulness matters: mindfulness trainings that focus attention on the environment or on the body similarly elicit state mindfulness, but only mindful attention with a focus on the body stimulates compensation for previous consumption and awareness of satiety cues. Finally, practicing mindfulness and specifically paying mindful attention to body sensations is related to a more constant body weight in a sample of the general population (study 5).