Weight loss injections are a relatively new tool to help with weight management, and they’re already gaining popularity very quickly. While they can help you lose weight by reducing your appetite and helping you eat less, you’ll still need to make some adjustments to your lifestyle to achieve your weight loss goals.

Mindful eating is about paying special attention to our food as we eat it, where it came from, how it was prepared, how it feels, and how it makes us feel – and adopting mindful eating practices can be a crucial skill to help achieve your weight loss goals.

  • Mindful eating is about paying deliberate, non-judgemental attention to the food we eat, considering its journey from where it came from to our plate, savouring how it tastes, and recognising how it can make us feel.
  • It can help you tell physical hunger cues and cravings caused by your emotions apart, so you don’t eat unhealthy food when you don’t need it.
  • Because weight loss injections reduce your appetite, it can be difficult to practise mindful eating while using them – speak to your dietitian for personalised advice.
  • But treatment can help you develop healthy eating habits and a better relationship with food – so you can sustain the weight you’ve lost on injections even after you stop treatment.

Understanding mindful eating

Mindfulness is a concept that’s becoming more widespread in day-to-day life. It’s about paying deliberate attention to the moment you’re in, without judgement, and appreciating it for what it is.1 Mindful eating applies these ideas to food, to help improve your awareness of what you eat and how it affects you. It’s typically not concerned with nutrition or weight loss directly, but simply encourages paying special attention to the food you eat and how it makes you feel.

But because mindful eating puts more focus on appreciating food, and considering how the food you eat impacts you – it can often help you lose weight.2 Some of the core principles of mindful eating that can help with weight loss are:

  • Savouring your food
    Eating more slowly, focusing on how food feels in your mouth and how the food makes you feel in response can result in you feeling more satisfied with your meal despite eating less. This is because it takes around 20 minutes for you to actually feel full after eating.3
  • Listening to internal hunger cues
    Research suggests that trying to eat mindfully even a little can help improve your ability to recognise ‘true’ hunger signals from emotional ones (caused by factors like boredom or stress).4 A study in which mindfulness practices were taught alongside information on emotional eating revealed that participants could better recognise triggers that made them want to eat despite not being hungry.5
  • Managing distractions while you eat
    Try to eat intentionally, and when you do, focus on eating. Pay attention to your food and not to other distractions. Think about where the food came from, the journey it took to reach you, how it was cooked – all of the things that came together for you to be able to enjoy it.

Eating mindfully in these ways can help to improve your relationship with your food – and can be really useful for managing your weight over the long term. It’s not a restrictive diet (which studies suggest can damage your relationship with food and lead to disordered eating),6 but just encourages greater awareness between you and what you eat. And evidence suggests that people who adopt mindfulness practices when eating tend to eat smaller portions of healthier foods.2

Mindful eating can be a really useful skill alongside weight loss injections. You’ll naturally develop better eating habits that can help you maintain weight loss – even after finishing your treatment. By improving your relationship with food while you’re using treatment, it’ll be easier to stick to your weight loss goals afterwards. But there are some caveats you should be aware of if you’re thinking of trying mindful eating on weight loss injections.

Can you eat intuitively on weight loss injections?

While weight loss injections and mindful (or intuitive) eating can be two really useful tools to help you meet your weight loss goals, it can be difficult to pair them together. Weight loss injections suppress your appetite, and for a small number of people who use them, they can over-regulate appetite. This can have a big impact on the enjoyment you get from eating, and make it more difficult to savour your food slowly.7 But the good news is most people won’t experience this extreme of appetite regulation.

If you’re using weight loss injections, speaking to a registered dietitian is really important – whether you’re practising mindful eating or not. They can help you come up with a personalised diet plan to make sure your body is getting all the nutrients it needs while you’re eating less because of your treatment. But if you’re interested in practising mindful eating, they’ll be able to help you incorporate intuitive eating principles into your weight management plan.

How to use portion control strategies

Weight loss injections reduce your appetite to help you eat less, but it’s still important to control how much you eat. If you continue to eat large portions of unhealthy foods while using weight loss injections, not only won’t they work – but you’ll likely experience unpleasant gastrointestinal side effects.

Some ways you can control your portion sizes to help with mindful eating while on weight loss injections are:

  • Choosing the right plate. It sounds really obvious, but a smaller plate fits less food on it, and can be a good physical limiter on the size of your meals.
  • Measuring your servings. Not only can measuring the amount of food you eat help limit the size of your portions, but it can also make it easier to track your nutrient intake. Making sure you get enough nutrients while on weight loss injections is really important, because you’ll typically be eating less due to a reduced appetite.
  • Focusing on nutrient-dense foods. Sugary drinks and unhealthy snacks often offer very little nutritional value (if any). As well as eating smaller portions, make sure your plate is made up of whole foods that are rich in carbohydrates (for fiber and energy), protein (for muscle repair and growth), and healthy fats (to help transport and store essential vitamins).

Managing cravings

Cravings are a normal part of the weight loss journey. First, it’s important to identify whether you’re experiencing cravings or hunger cues. Cravings are typically for a particular food (often sweet or fatty foods) and are linked with your emotions – whereas feeling hungry generally isn’t associated with a specific type of food or emotion, but a physical need. For example, you might crave unhealthy snacks if you’re feeling stressed, bored, or anxious. But if you’re hungry, you’ll notice physical signs – like a rumbling stomach, or feeling weak or unfocused (caused by low blood sugar).

Cravings can occur soon after you’ve eaten a meal, and typically come on suddenly and feel very urgent. Conversely, you’ll usually only experience hunger after you’ve not eaten for several hours, or if your last meal wasn’t satisfying enough. The good news is cravings tend to pass with time, whereas hunger won’t. So it can be a good idea to wait a little while if you find yourself craving specific foods, to see if you notice other hunger cues, or if the feeling passes.

While weight loss injections should help to curb your cravings by reducing your appetite – there are plenty of mindful practices you can try to help manage them, too.

  • Distract yourself, mindfully. Finding something to distract yourself from food while you’re craving it can be tough. But engaging with something that takes up your attention (like a puzzle), removing yourself from food by going for a walk, or even just some simple breathing exercises can help you resist giving in to temptation.
  • Identify emotional triggers. Knowing how your emotions (like stress, boredom, or anger) affect your cravings can give you the tools you need to avoid them. It can help you stay away from situations that trigger these emotions, and let you make an action plan to help deal with them if you can’t. Mindful eating can help you better recognise when you’re actually hungry, and when you automatically reach for food because of non-hunger cues.
  • Choose healthy alternatives. If you are craving something sweet, choose a healthier, whole-food option, like fruits or yoghurt. If you fancy something more savoury, try some dried veggies or popcorn instead of reaching for a bag of potato crisps.
  • Stay hydrated. You’re probably tired of being told to drink more water, but there’s evidence that doing so can help reduce hunger cravings. When your body is dehydrated, it can disrupt the signals to your brain. This can cause you to still feel hungry even after you’ve just eaten – so making sure you drink plenty of water can help stop you eating food you don’t really need.8

Making sustainable changes

Mindful eating practices can help you maintain the weight you’ve managed to lose from weight loss injections. There’s some evidence that suggests after coming off weight loss injections, some people can regain the weight they lost while using the treatment.9 By engaging with mindful eating while using weight loss injections, you can build sustainable habits around food that allow you to keep on top of your weight management after stopping your treatment.