Mindfulness Reduces Reactivity to Food Cues: Underlying Mechanisms and Applications in Daily Life

Mindfulness-based interventions are becoming increasingly popular as a means to facilitate healthy eating. We suggest that the decentering component of mindfulness, which is the metacognitive insight that all experiences are impermanent, plays an especially important role in such interventions. To facilitate the application of decentering, we address its psychological mechanism to reduce reactivity to food cues, proposing that it makes thoughts and simulations in response to food cues less compelling. We discuss supporting evidence, applications, and challenges for future research.

Experimental and correlational studies consistently find that the adoption of a decentering perspective reduces subjective cravings, physiological reactivity such as salivation, and unhealthy eating.

We suggest that the decentering perspective can be adopted in any situation to reduce reactivity to food cues. Considering people's high exposure to food temptations in daily life, this makes it a powerful tool to empower people to eat healthily.