Mindfulness is taking advantage of the fact that humans are conscious of their consciousness, and using that to overcome our instincts. For example, the human b

Mindfulness is taking advantage of the fact that humans are conscious of their consciousness, and using that to overcome our instincts. For example, the human brain, if left alone will tend to go towards negative situations. I think (keyword: think) that's because we want to avoid bad feelings, so we replay those events in our mind to figure out what happened and how we can avoid those bad feelings in the future. Feelings, after all, are a response to a situation, so if we have a bad feeling, it means we did something wrong. However, studies have shown that such behavior has negative impacts on you (bad feelings reduce your immune system, etc), so mindfulness is avoiding that trap. As for your original question, you can't figure out when to stop eating because humans largely disregard instinct. Obesity has many causes.