Ten common questions about mindful eating
http://www.newharbinger.com/Blog/tabid/36/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/467/ten-common-questions-about-mindful-eating.aspx

Thursday, February 09, 2012
:: 0 Comments :: :: mindfulness, food, health, excerpt, eating disorders, eating

Readers have asked many wonderful questions during the past few years like, “I love ice cream. Can I still eat sweets mindfully?” and “What is the best way to start improving my eating habits?” Here are the ten most popular questions on the minds of readers, and their answers.
1. If I Start Eating Mindfully, What Will Happen To My Weight? Will I Lose Weight?”
For many people, the answer is “Yes, it’s likely that you may lose weight.” But, more often than not, I say, “It depends.” Let me explain in more detail. When you are engaged in mindless eating habits, you are not meeting your body’s needs in some way. It might mean that you are eating too large of portion sizes, which makes you gain weight. However, if you are dieting or restricting, you aren’t getting enough calories or nutrients. This might mean that your body is struggling to maintain a healthy minimum weight.
The bottom line is that this book focuses on improving your eating habits. When you do so, the weight will generally take care of itself. You will notice that this book doesn’t hammer in the message “you need to lose weight.” The emphasis is more about being healthy than being thin or losing weight. This might mean getting more nutrients or taking better care of yourself. But weight loss can definitely happen as a result of mindful eating. Eating just the right amount needed to make your body function, without giving it too much excess, will allow your body to settle at your natural weight. Ask yourself when was the last time your body seemed to be at a healthy place—in regard to your weight, health, and feeling good overall?
2. “Is ‘Eating Mindfully’ A Diet? What’s Wrong With Dieting?”
It’s likely that you’ve already read many diet books. Although this book is about helping you eat better and manage your weight, you may be relieved to find that it is not a new “fad diet.” Fad diets, like the cabbage soup diet, no-sugar diet, and low-fat diet, come and go in popularity. Mindful eating is radically different. It’s not about cutting out food groups or starving yourself. It is something you do for the long term rather than something you go “on” and “off.”
Diets contain rules created for you; they are external pieces of advice. Mindful eating is tuning inward to use your intuitive wisdom to find what works for you. A diet may dictate, for example, that you can’t eat sugar. But what happens when it is your birthday and your daughter makes you a birthday cake?
Having a meal plan created by a dietitian is different than a diet. A dietitian helps you develop a well-balanced menu. He or she tailors it to your body’s needs rather than you trying to fit into the regulations of a particular diet. Having a professional help you choose healthy foods is a great idea.
Thus, dieting can be incredibly detrimental to your emotional, mental, and physical well-being. Diets can inhibit your ability to accurately decode your body’s messages and feedback. The dieting lifestyle is akin to taking a knife and cutting the connection that is your body’s only line of communication with your head.
3. “How Will Awareness Help Me Eat Better?”
Much overeating happens automatically. It can become so routine that you may not even be aware of it. When you start to become more mindful, you begin to see mindless behavior that you hadn’t noticed before, like chewing on your fingernails. When someone—or even yourself, through mindful practice—draws your attention to your reflexive actions, you see it and then can start working on changing the behavior. Similarly, if you aren’t aware that you munch when you are nervous, you will stay stuck in this pattern. Awareness can help in the following ways:
Mindfulness teaches you to be less reactive to stress. In turn, this helps you to reduce emotional eating. Just eliminating emotional eating can impact your weight and health immensely.
When you are more in tune with your body, you stop eating when you are full and you eat more-realistic portion sizes.
When you are more aware, you stop automatic behaviors, like picking or grazing on food, that unconsciously lead you to gain weight.
You notice problematic thinking and feelings about food and how it impacts the way you eat (for example, dealing with guilt and cravings).
4. “How Does Mindfulness Help People With Different Kinds Of Eating Issues?”
Intuitively, it makes sense that mindful eating is helpful to overeaters. It slows you down, makes you more aware of portion sizes, and helps you get out of the negative, automatic cycle with food. So how does it also help people who are undereating, or who are chaotic or emotional eaters?
In actuality, mindful eating has been used to treat a wide range of eating issues, from the inability to lose or gain weight to everything in between. There are three main ways that mindful eating works to resolve food-related problems and restore health:
Mindful eating reconnects you with your body’s signals. Whether you are overeating or undereating, you have lost track of your hunger and fullness. Mindful eating plugs you back into your body’s cues so you know when to stop and start eating.
Being mindful brings about better management of your emotions. Sometimes people restrict or overeat as a way to cope with negative feelings. Eating and not eating can distract you from your worries. When you have healthier ways of coping, such as mindful breathing and letting go of anxiety, you no longer manage your emotions through your food choices. You can tolerate your emotions, as uncomfortable as they may be, without pushing them away or stuffing them down with food.
Mindfulness changes the way you think. Rather than reacting to food-related thoughts that urge you to overeat, undereat, emotionally eat, et cetera, you respond to them. You can hear these thoughts without obeying them.
These are helpful skills for changing all kinds of eating behavior.
5. “How Did You Learn About Mindfulness?”
My very first contact with the word “mindfulness” happened when I was an exchange student in Japan, as a young adult. I lived with a host family in a little town near Osaka. My host family taught me many things that were unique to me at the time, including the value of being still and being present. While I was in Japan, they took me to many historical sites, including a Zen garden in Kyoto. It was here where I was first introduced to the word “mindfulness.” As we sat in the garden, my friends defined the word for me—because one thing that the Zen garden is intended to do is cultivate a sense of mindfulness. Although they described mindfulness in words, I remember very distinctly experiencing it. I shifted from being distracted in my mind to being totally present, sensing the experience to the fullest. After this, we went to other cultural places that brought about the same reaction. We read about mindfulness and discussed it.
That experience changed the way I lived. I learned how to be really in the moment instead of jumping into the future or ruminating in the past. Being truly present translated into being a focused student and learning how to listen. This skill has been invaluable in my relationships with friends and clients.
Fast-forward twenty years. During graduate school, I learned a lot about eating problems when I worked at various colleges and for eating disorder programs. The word “mindfulness” had become an integral part of my vocabulary. I noticed that I repeatedly used the words “eat mindfully” with my clients. I began describing in detail what I meant by these words. Most people know that the word “mindful” means to be more aware—but this was a particular kind of awareness. I noticed that clients started to say things like, “I ate dessert mindfully the other day. …” It articulated the exact type of relationship many of them wanted to have with food. The objective wasn’t to correct overeating or eating too little. Instead, it was learning to eat with awareness—just the right amount.
6. “Is There Evidence That Mindful Eating Can Help Me?”
Yes! During the past twenty years, there have been many important clinical studies and advances. A good place to begin is by looking at the work of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn (2009). His work was pivotal in bringing the concept of mindfulness to medicine. He found a way to systematically research the effect of mindfulness through clinical research. Mindfulness was found to help people cope with a variety of medical problems such as chronic pain, cancer, psoriasis, et cetera (Baer 2003; Davidson et al. 2003). Given its success with medical issues, psychologists began to study its application to psychological issues such as anxiety and depression, particularly eating issues.
Recent studies have found the following results. Mindful eating can help you to:
Reduce overeating and binge eating (Kristeller and Wolever 2011; Baer et al. 2005; Smith et al. 2006).
Lose weight and reduce your body mass index (BMI) (Tapper et al. 2009; Framson et al. 2009; Dalen et al. 2010; Singh et al. 2008).
Cope with chronic eating problems such as anorexia and bulimia, and reduce anxious thoughts about food and your body (Proulx 2008; Rawal et al. 2009; Hepworth 2011; Lavender, Jardin, and Anderson 2009).
Improve the symptoms of type 2 diabetes (Rosenzweig 2007; van Son et al. 2011; Faude-Lang et al. 2010).
7. “What Is The Difference Between Mindfulness of the Mind and Mindfulness of Thoughts?”
The difference between these two notions can be confusing. Both concepts have to do with your brain. But they have different functions. Mindfulness of the mind has to do with your level of awareness. Are you zoned out or very aware of what is happening? Tasting every bite or eating in a robotic manner? Using all your senses to enjoy the experience? Mindfulness of your thoughts pertains to the content of what you are thinking—the stuff that is on your mind. When listening to someone lecture, are you processing what he or she is saying? Are you thinking about your long to-do list when eating? Is your inner food critic sending you lots of messages about what you should or shouldn’t eat?
8. “Does Mindful Eating Mean I Can Eat Anything?”
Yes! You can eat everything and anything. Nothing is off limits. Restriction causes cravings. Period. For instance, if you told yourself that you could never eat your favorite fruit again, you’d be amazed at how much more you’d want it.
One major caveat: although you can eat anything you want, with mindful eating it is likely that you will choose not to eat everything. The more you tune in to what and how you eat, the more particular you become about what you consume. A woman in one of my workshops told me a story about potato chips. She used to love them. Then one day she volunteered to make sack lunches for a school. For an hour, she put potato chips into bags. She recounted how greasy her hands felt at the end of her shift. Her skin was saturated with oil and she couldn’t seem to scrub it off. Prior to this, she had never tuned in to the sensation of touching the potato chips. After this, she looked at them in a brand-new way.
Mindful eaters often find fast food less appealing when they are totally tuned in. To their surprise, it begins to taste greasy, artificial, and overly processed. Sometimes mindful eaters’ taste buds become more sensitive. They notice when tea is overly sweetened or when cereal is loaded with sugar. They say things like, “Oh, that dessert is too sweet.” Also, mindful eaters start to review the ingredients in foods to avoid those that are toxic or unhealthy. They realize that their body doesn’t feel up to par after eating something full of preservatives or other additives. Whole grains and fruits begin to fill them up and make them feel healthier. Mindful eaters still eat treats and junk food, but in much smaller portions, since even small amounts of sweets and fried foods start to seem like a lot. Thus, your food tastes will likely alter a bit as you become a more conscious eater.
9. “What is the Difference Between Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness?”
There are many similarities to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness. Both can help you improve your eating habits. For many years, CBT (interventions that target distorted behavior and thought patterns) has been one of the most successful forms of therapy for treating certain eating problems (Zindel et al. 2001). There is a slight difference in how CBT and mindfulness tackle things. Let’s say you have a negative thought about food. You say to yourself, “One cookie will make me fat.” This is an irrational thought. With CBT you’d recognize this as a negative thought and replace it with a positive, more rational thought like, “One cookie won’t make me fat.” With mindfulness, you don’t replace the thought or try to get rid of it. Instead, you become aware of this thought and accept the thought as it is. When you stop struggling with your thoughts, you can let them go without responding to it with action.
10. “Do I Have To Have A Spiritual Practice or Be Buddhist to Use a Mindful Eating Approach?”
Mindful eating is much like yoga. Yoga has roots in Buddhism and Eastern meditation. However, it is not necessarily a spiritual practice. Mindful eating and yoga utilize breathing exercises to calm and soothe the body. This is a technique. To eat mindfully, you can adhere to any kind of spiritual background or religion—or none at all. You may notice, however, that you become more relaxed and in tune with yourself through mindfulness. This, in turn, can enhance your spirituality in general, whatever that may be.
excerpt from Eating Mindfully, 2nd ed.: How to End Mindless Eating and Enjoy a Balanced Relationship with Food by Susan Albers, PsyD
Posted By nhpblog / 11:15 AM / Thursday, February 09, 2012