Mindful Eating

Being mindful about why you are eating is the biggest challenge most of us face in the maintenance of a healthy lifestyle. It is just not enough to think of food as a vehicle for nutrients, or a way to stay fat or thin. Food is a natural source of pleasure for us, which is a wonderful part of our human experience, but the pleasure factor is also what makes it very easy to use food to soothe (or numb) uncomfortable feelings. 

Mindful eating starts with some practical things, like making the time to eat your meals, which means that you are more likely to plan for them properly and approach food with more reverence and intention. Being calm and unhurried around meals also helps you to chew properly, to check in your feelings and eat in response to your cues of hunger and satiety. 

A healthy relationship with food means learning to eat for the right reasons. The only way to begin this process is to check in with yourself when you do eat and try to describe your feelings completely. 

• If those feelings are 100% positive and happy, go for it. If you are eating purely for fuel to get through the day, that is also fine. If not, ask yourself what is going on. Is there some guilt? Is there some disconnection? Try to see all your feelings as signposts. Rather than trying to avoid them if they are unpleasant, respect them and listen to what they are trying to show you. 
• It is important to remember that a healthy food relationship allows for fun, pleasure and comfort. Ideally we should enjoy healthy food enough to get pleasure and comfort from good foods, but there will always be other foods that are not “perfect” that present themselves and it is useful to know how to handle them. If you are mindful enough to know why you are eating, then aim to eat what your body really needs 80% of the time. The 20% of the time when you eat for fun or comfort is less likely to have a bad impact. If you are trying to change something about your body, that might have to be 90%/10% for a while. 
• The seven emotions that are most often associated with disordered (emotional or compulsive) eating are: Guilt, shame, helplessness, anxiety, disappointment, confusion and loneliness. These feelings can drive undesirable food behaviours on a spectrum from relatively small food choices, like eating a bit more than you really need at some meals, to binge-eating enormous amounts of food. The seriousness of the fallout is what determines the need for professional help. If you believe you can tease out the feelings and make gentle progress in managing these and becoming more mindful without help, that’s great. However, if you struggle frequently and seriously with eating that feels out of control, please reach out to a health professional that you trust to help you.

Here is a mindfulness method to help with describing feelings:

Start by imagining a simple scale in your mind that illustrates the intensity of feeling. 

A 10 rating of positive intensity would be the happiest, most wonderful feeling – the day you won the lottery, got the job you really wanted, or went on a date with the person of your dreams. For negative feelings, the 10 rating of negative intensity might be extreme fear, pain or embarrassment. 

On the less intense side of the spectrum, a 1 positive rating might be relaxing on the couch, watching a favourite movie. Not extreme, but definitely positive, safe, comfortable. A 1 negative rating might be something like finding out that you can’t have rye bread with your breakfast, so you have to pick brown or white instead – a mild disappointment that you can get over in a moment. 

Do the following at least once a day, and particularly when you are in a mode of feeling out of control with food, but it also offers emotional insight even when there is no food involved.

Step 1: Decide simply if the way you feel right now is positive or negative. 

Step 2: Rate the intensity of that feeling on a scale of 1-10. 

Step 3: Gently observe the feeling. Try to describe it in any way that you can. If a clear word doesn’t come to mind, consider if you could describe it in other ways. What colour is it? What texture is it? Where does it sit in your body?

Step 4: Once you have defined it a bit, see if you are willing to stay with the feeling a bit. Breathe with it, really feel it, talk to it if you like (in your head, unless you are alone!) Be gentle and explore. This is not supposed to be a terrifying exercise, although it is a reflection and it can be a big release. If it feels like too much, back off a bit, and perhaps make a note of how it felt, then speak to a counselor instead of trying to figure it out all on your own.