Want to master mindful eating for a fraction of the cost of a live program? Download the Mindfulness Diet, a comprehensive mindful eating program with more than 20 guided audio exercises and a 90-page workbook.
Are you a mindful eater right now? Take the following assessment to find out. While mindful eating can’t be measured with complete objectivity, this brief questionnaire will deepen your understanding of yourself, and of how mindful eating can begin to liberate your relationship to eating and food.
INSTRUCTIONS: Answer each question with the number that best matches your experience. Answer as you think you are, not how you think you should be. Treat each question as a separate question. If you don’t know how to answer a question, leave it blank.
1 = Almost always
2 = Frequently
3 = Infrequently
4 = Almost never
- I’m unaware that I’m hungry, or full, until sometime after the fact.
- I am stressed out.
- I don’t really taste or appreciate my food.
- I force or control what or how much I eat.
- I eat when I’m not hungry.
- I avoid eating even though I am hungry.
- I rush when I eat.
- I eat without being aware that I’m eating.
- I eat when I’m stressed out.
- I believe that I can only succeed by controlling or being rigid about my diet.
- I am unaware of thoughts that precede my eating behaviors.
- I find it difficult to remain focused in the here and now.
- I don’t love and accept myself and my body as it is.
- I don’t regularly feel a desire to exercise.
- My body image is negatively impacted by media exposure to the “thin ideal.”
- My exposure to media stresses me out or lowers my moods.
- I am living or eating “on automatic.”
- I am stuck in mental and/or behavioral patterns that I would like to change.
- Emotions “take me over” and I am not aware of what has happened until later.
- I eat to manage strong or uncomfortable emotions.
SCORE YOURSELF: Add up your answers and divide the total by 20 (or if you didn’t answer all the questions, by the number you answered). Your score will be a number between 1 and 4.
ANALYZE YOUR SCORE: A higher number (closer to 4) reflects more mindfulness (and freedom) in your eating behaviors. A higher number also reflects a more mindful and freer relationship to the many forces, particularly bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts, that (usually unconsciously) precede and influence eating behaviors.
How did you do? Don’t worry if you didn’t get a perfect 4.0. Nobody is perfectly mindful all the time! Yet the more mindful you are, the freer you will be. This mindfulness questionnaire has given you a taste of how mindfulness can transform and liberate your relationship to eating, exercise, your body, your mind, your emotions, and your very self. Mindfulness is the foundation for positive change and transformation in any area of life – but particularly in your relationship to food.