Week 1 Concept: Mindful Eating
Week 1 Challenge: Eat at least one meal per day sitting down
at a table – with no music, TV, or computer.
Company and conversation, however, is encouraged. Listen to your body in terms of hunger,
thirst, and fullness.
Mindful Eating – Rebecca Bass-Ching
We live in a multi-tasking culture. In fact, we take
pride on how much we can accomplish in a little time. And this is often out of necessity as many juggle work, school, parenthood, life.
Yet, multi-tasking = not paying attention. When we are not paying attention, it is impossible to care for ourselves by listening to our bodies.
When you are overextended and overwhelmed:
- You lose touch with when you are hungry for food or full
from food.
- You get confused about the difference between true hunger
and emotional hunger.
- You feel guilty, anxious, flooded, depressed, numb when we
slow down. So you keep going fast or you freeze and feel paralyzed.
No bueno! And SO not good for our mind, body and soul.
One of the most meaningful philosophical changes I made in
my life was adopting the Intuitive
Eating approach to how I care for and nourish my body. I believe
in this approach so much it has become a cornerstone of the food philosophy at Potentia.
The following are the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating
developed by Evelyn
Tribole & Elyse Resch. As you read them, take note of your
reactions to this list.
- Reject the Diet Mentality: Throw out the diet
books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly,
easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if
you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all
of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better
diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to
rediscover Intuitive Eating.
- Honor Your Hunger: Keep your body biologically
fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal
drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions
of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor
this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself
and food.
- Make Peace with Food: Call a truce, stop the
food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself
that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to intense
feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often,
bingeing When you finally “give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be
experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating,
and overwhelming guilt.
- Challenge the Food Police: Scream a loud
"NO" to thoughts in your head that declare you're "good"
for eating under 1000 calories or "bad" because you ate a piece of
chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has
created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker
shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments.
Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive
Eating.
- Respect Your Fullness: Listen for the body signals
that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that
you're comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself
how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?
- Discover the Satisfaction Factor: The Japanese
have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living. In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often
overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence – the pleasure and
satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you
really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you
derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By
providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less
food to decide you've had "enough".
- Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food: Find
ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using
food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom,
anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its
own appeasement; food won't fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the
short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But
food won't solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will
only make you feel worse in the long run. You'll ultimately have to deal with
the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.
- Respect Your Body: Accept your genetic
blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to
realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and
uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect
your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It's hard to reject the
diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body
shape.
- Exercise – Feel the Difference: Forget militant
exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it
feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If
you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the
difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the
snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it's
usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.
- Honor Your Health – Gentle Nutrition: Make
food choices that honor your health and tastebuds while making you feel well.
Remember that you don't have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not
suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or
one day of eating. It's what you eat consistently over time that matters;
progress not perfection is what counts.
Many people I meet personally and professionally do not
trust food and do not trust their bodies. When there is no trust in a
relationship, the relationship is pretty bleak. Healing your relationship
with food and your body can take time depending on where you are at physically
and emotionally. And given our diet and weight obsessed culture, the
concepts of intuitive eating can seem scary and/or unrealistic. If that
is how you feel after reading the 10 principals of intuitive eating, you are
not alone.
That is why getting the support of a Registered Dietitian
and Therapist who specialize in treating food and body issues is an absolute
must. Not everyone is ready for this approach for a variety of reasons
and a specialized treatment team can be a necessary support in this
process. Plus, it can take a while to “detox” from the diet/body
hatred mentality. Beginning the journey to heal your relationship with
food and your body starts with looking at food not as "good",
"bad", "points", "calories", "carbs",
etc. but also doing some deep soul work and cultivating your identity not from
the number on the scale but on your true worth and value.
What do you think about the 10 principles of intuitive
eating? Which of the 10 principles were you most drawn to?
Rebecca Bass-Ching, LMFT MFC# 44584
Disordered Eating & Trauma Expert
iaedp-SD Immediate Past President
Adjunct Professor: Azusa
Pacific University
