4 Tips to a Mindful Passover

I don’t know about you, but when it comes to Passover, my days, if not weeks, leading up to it are so busy I barely have a second to breathe. There are multiple trips to the grocery store followed by nights in the kitchen preparing for the holiday.

I know I’m not alone.

My clients share the following challenges:

• Mindless Eating: During the busy days leading up to Passover, it’s not uncommon to grab and go! You may feel that sitting down to a meal is a waste of valuable time, so you eat what you can when you can. This leads to mindless eating, grabbing whatever food is close at hand.

• Food Restriction Leading to Overeating: The holiday meal is robust with delicious food. In an effort to “save calories” for the meal, they fall back into the habit of restricting during the day. Then when dinner comes, they are ravenous and find that they eat past comfortable fullness.

It’s not uncommon during the holiday to feel like you have taken a step off the Intuitive Eating Journey. This can be due to the stress the holiday brings on or from restricting yourself during the day. However, what is comforting about Intuitive Eating is that you can never fail. If you feel you’ve overdone it at one meal, you reflect, get curious, learn from the experience and move on.

4 Tips to a Mindful Passover: 

1. Banish the rules

Try to get out of the dieting mindset that you have held onto. Don’t think of food as good and bad, instead, think of food as nourishment. Be rid of the “I won’t eat anything I’m not supposed to mentality”. That is a dieter thought and will keep you struggling. Enjoy the foods that you like to eat. You may have waited all year for certain traditional dishes, so give yourself permission to enjoy them.

2. Eat consistently

Make it a point to stop and eat consistently as you are preparing for the holiday. This may mean you need to set a notification on your phone as a reminder to stop, tune in, and make time to eat.

3. Take it slow

When you finally sit down to the holiday meal, take your time and savor each bite of food, really exploring the taste and texture so you can have great pleasure in your meals. Put your fork down between bites of food to savor all the flavors in your mouth.

4. Forget about deprivation

If you have a favorite Passover food, enjoy it. Deprivation leads to overeating, keep that in mind. If you are interested in exploring traditional Passover foods with a healthy twist, check out my cookbook Passover the Healthy Way!

Wishing you a wonderful and delicious Passover holiday.

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