How Mindful Eating Helps You BREAK A CRAVING

Mindful eating is a gently powerful technique that might help you turn away from comfort eating. Mindful eating is the practice of mindfulness around food, and may lead to a greater appreciation of life!

“An average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking.”  - Leonardo daVinci

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi, this is Shelley Treacher from the Binge and Overeating Recovery Podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about awakened or mindful eating. But first, I have a question. In asking me to talk about how to change your relationship with food, this person asks, is moderation possible? Can eating food still be enjoyed? Or is neutrality the best approach? I love these questions because they're so specific that I can only give you specific answers. I love that, thank you. And they're really great questions for today's subject. Everything I explore today will be relevant to these questions, but here's my immediate, kind of off-the-cuff response. Yes, you can change your relationship with food. I definitely see that happen every day. But it doesn't happen overnight. Sometimes it does for people. Sometimes people have a quick light bulb moment and then everything changes, but still it takes some work to keep that going. But mostly it requires many shifts in your psyche to make this complete change because it's not just your food and your eating that you're changing, it's your whole belief system and the way that you think and the way that you believe and the way that you feel. So it doesn't happen overnight, but it can happen. You can change your relationship with food. I do think food can be enjoyed still as well. In fact, I think that's partly the key to giving up binge eating, because more often than not, we eat too fast to really savour any food at all. Moderation is definitely possible. I'll be explaining two of the ways this can be achieved today with mindful or awakened eating. But as for achieving neutrality, it depends on what that means really. I probably need to ask a more specific question of you. I think it is possible to reach a place of feeling less charged about food, but I don't think progress can be made easily through dissociating. Because that's what the food does in the first place. It helps you to switch off. My thought is that engagement rather than neutrality is much more helpful. So let's start talking about mindful eating. You know that I'm going to be giving up eating sugar. I've decided to do that next week, so I will be making an announcement on Facebook this week, just as a pre-warning about that. But so from next Monday, I'm gonna stop eating sugar. And the reason I'm laughing is because I know it's not gonna be easy. It might be easier for me than some people because I have so many techniques at my disposal, but it's still not easy for me. So I hope that you'll follow my progress. But mindful eating and actually doing this podcast has been really helpful for me. This will be one of the techniques that really helps me to stay on course. It's also something my clients have a lot of success with and tell me about. So let's get started. Mindful eating is the practice of mindfulness around food. The first thing to notice here is how distracted and busy you are in life. In fact, this may be one of the main reasons for overeating. Our brains can only focus on one thing at a time, despite how much we're told that women can multitask, it's really only that we can think about things in quick succession, but we can still only think about one thing at a time. So in our lives, our brains just can't cope with so much input. Because we're trying to focus on too much at once. It's also our default to be mindlessly ruminating all the time. Harvard research says that we spend 50% time lost in thought. It went on to assert that the more time we spend in our heads, the more anxious and unhappy we become. The idea behind mindful eating is that we have inner wisdom that we've learned to ignore. So we're trying to uncover that again. If you think about your life now, how busy are you? Do you ever stop and just do something enjoyable just for the sake of doing it? Yesterday I found myself with an extra hour, so I extended my usual park walk to include the city farm. It was a gorgeous hot day, and it was so lovely being there in the sun, with small children and families, which I wasn't even expecting that, but it was so nice to be around people like that again. And being able to stroke the goats was amazing. This is a deliberate attempt to enjoy moments of frivolity more in my life. Normally I might think I have to get home to do some work, but I really enjoyed those stolen moments. I think that's what life's made of, those moments where you just enjoy what's going on right now. And it's the same with food. We have so many automatic habits and assumptions around food. Next time I'm going to be talking about how you can break habits, but the things like we have finishing our food because we were told to as we were growing up, or eating at certain times because we'll be busy when we actually are really hungry. The idea with mindful eating is to learn your body cues for food, when you are actually hungry or full, so that you can build your response to those cues. And you're not expected to be amazing at this straight away, in fact you're probably not going to be. The basic idea of mindful eating is to breathe and to check for hunger and satiety, to slow down, to taste the food, to breathe between bites, to maybe put your fork and spoon down, especially if you're talking, and to be present with what you're saying, and to chew thoroughly. It's suggested that dieting is unhelpful to mindful eating because it denies your internal guidance. You can't really follow your own sense of what you need if you're restricting and you're on a certain schedule. It's also sensible to stop weighing when you try this for the same reason. With mindful eating, you are learning to rely on your internal sense of what's right for you, rather than anything external, anyone else's opinion, culture, society, anything else that's going on around you. This seems like a good time to ask you to close your eyes right now and ask you, how would you like to be with food? Let yourself pause the podcast here just to envisage what you would like to be like with eating and with food. How do you see yourself? What's your ideal? The practice of mindful eating is to only eat when you need to eat to take time and attention with eating. How often are we doing something else when we eat? I know I often eat when I'm on my laptop or when I'm unloading the dishwasher or when I have a million other chores that I need to do. So as much as you can be starting to practice eating mindfully, you can also watch when you eat mindlessly. The focus is to eat in response to physical versus emotional cues. To rely on hunger and satiety cues to evaluate what, when, and how much to eat. To learn to be present with food, with curiosity. Doing this, you'll notice flavours more, and the stuff you usually eat starts to taste too strong or artificial. I'm really looking forward to releasing sugar from my diet actually because I remember this part. I remember from previous times when I've done this, that when I stop eating sugar, my sense of smell and my sense of taste starts to come back, and things get stronger that aren't particularly good for me, and I can taste that. So I'm looking forward to telling you about that part, and I'm also looking forward to uh experiencing fruit and juicy flavours and more subtle flavours. With mindful eating, you learn to not eat what you don't like. But if you do eat something, you learn to savour it. When you're mindless, you miss out on juicy, fresh, various flavor, and you might also put things in your body that it would normally reject. And you overeat. When you eat without tasting, you enjoy the food less. You eat more, and you eat stuff that you just don't even like. Mindful eating allows you to monitor exactly what your body wants. With mindful eating, you're encouraged to grant yourself unconditional permission to eat whatever your body wants to. So long as you're paying attention to it, that's the thing. Leonardo da Vinci has been often quoted saying, An average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking. And this is long before the age of the internet. John Cabotsin, who is kind of known as the mindfulness master, he's been quoted as saying mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally. In mindfulness, the body is key, being aware of the body and what it needs. You're encouraged to have a curious acceptance of your thoughts, your feelings, your body sensations, and your circumstances. In mindful eating, your job is to keep bringing your intention back to what you're feeling, thinking, smelling, or touching right now. Becoming aware of your body sensations. When your mind wanders, especially to junk food, you bring it back without any judgment. Every millisecond of a moment that you come back counts. People often think that mindfulness is only achieved if you can meditate and clear your mind for hours. But really every second counts. We're only human after all. I've been practicing mindfulness for a while now, and I can really only still do a few minutes. But they help. They change everything. And the more you repeat this, the more you'll build up your capacity for it. It's like exercise. It allows awareness of when you're hungry and what drives you to eat with impartial acceptance, curiosity, and kindness. It encourages you to relate to your body more healthily, to what you eat or to yourself at any time. Lynn Rossi says, mindfulness teaches us to befriend the moment and ourselves exactly as we are. You're building up trust that you have the answers. We often feel resistance to the present. Your job is to move from that to being interested in it. With gentle kindness, just watching it. Especially any judgment. For example, if you feel you're greedy and want more, you can just watch that experience non-judgmentally. Even if you do still eat, it's likely that you'll enjoy the food more. If you're paying attention to the mechanics of your thinking and your feeling around it. Author Cherry Huber writes, We don't lack self-discipline, we lack presence. This is not quick fix satisfaction. Here it's time to ask whether it's what you want or whether you're responding to habit, emotion, or just because it's there. And then the deeper question about your hunger. With mindful attention you can start asking, what are you really hungry for? Your intention and your why is also important here. Often people want to be more mindful for self-regulation, and then it becomes motivated by self-exploration. People get interested in themselves. For me, I'm asking, why do I really want to give up sugar? And it's because I want to feel good. I also want to feel non-dependent. I relish the idea of tasting and smelling things differently, having more energy naturally, and proving that it's possible. I'm also asking myself, my life is good, so why do I need sugar? That way I can use this as a self-exploration so I can change my life if I need to. Next time you start to prepare food or you start thinking about food or you're sitting down to eat, take a pause and notice what the colours are on your plate and what the textures are, what kind of thoughts you're having, what's the smell like? Where is this food from? And assess from one to ten how hungry are you? And maybe also from one to ten, how strong is your craving? And notice where that is in you physically, all of that, the smell, the taste, the sight, the experience. How do you feel about all of that? And is that food really what you want? You can also tune in to the smells and the tastes and the look of the food to assess whether it's healthy for you. Without judgment, just observing. This is really all information. You're just getting to know yourself and your responses. All of this will lead you to choose differently, to choose better food that your body responds well to. Mindfulness is a tool to be used in the process of awakening. It is a practice to modify your eating process by including a quality of present attention, curiosity, and exploration. Mindfulness also improves your physical functioning and health. We are wired to repeat patterns in life, and with food, these patterns go unnoticed. With mindfulness, we can recognize these patterns and make changes to break the pattern. If you slow down and observe yourself with interest and investigation, you might eventually find that you're not as interested or as hungry as you think. I know you might find that hard to believe right now, but I've seen it to be true so many times. With the attention to yourself and your eating, you start to become more in connection with what it is you really want. It becomes hard to ignore with this practice. As you slow down, you may also notice how fast other people are eating. People attack their food. Having said this, I want to normalise that this is a huge challenge. It's not easy for any of us, because we will have to face discomfort. I'll end on an amazing story where mindful eating actually led to survival. So Leno Stanchek tells us of his father in prison camps in World War II. His father, being on a starvation diet, decided to keep food in his mouth for as long as possible, and to chew it as many times as he could. According to Stanchek, he felt more energy when he chewed a hundred and fifty times. My jaw just aches thinking about that. Thankfully I know that he worked up to that. It's like exercise again, right? So I think he started with fifty and worked up to a hundred and fifty. I'm not suggesting that you need to do that, but listen to what happened. The more he chewed, the more energy he had. By the end of his time in the prison camp, Stanchek's father was one of only three people who survived. All of them, the other two, were also people who had joined him in chewing thoroughly. If that's not a good advert for being prison, I don't know what is. Next week I'm going to be talking about habits and how to break habits. If you have anything you want to contribute, I'm so happy to hear about it. If you've got a question for me, let me know. Or if you've got any ways that you've broken habits, any strange little tricks that you've tried, I'd love to include them in the podcast. I'd also love to welcome you into my support group. It is now open for you. So if you can't stop eating and you don't really know why, if you're sick of beating yourself up about it, come and talk to people who understand.