Emotional Eating 3

 

Mindfulness

Welcome to Emotional Eating Session III. First let me go over the premise of mindfulness again. Like affirmation the more we hear it, the more it becomes a part of us. Mindfulness is a return to paying attention to life. And, when we pay attention to our food, and I mean really pay attention, we begin to notice all sorts of wonderful aspects of the food, and more importantly, we become aware of how much food we’re putting into our bodies.

Mindfulness is the moment by moment awareness of life without getting caught up in our own thoughts and self-talk that distracts this awareness.

Unfortunately we carry this over to our eating. We have meal after meal, snack after snack, barely aware of what we’re eating and how much we’re consuming.

I cannot stress enough the power of journaling! If you don’t have time to write down the thing you are eating, is it really ok to be eating it? The major reason to be journaling is awareness. It shows us in a concrete form exactly what we have put in our bodies each and every minute of the day and it keeps us accountable to the most important person – ourselves!

Mindfulness is awareness without judgment or criticism. It is very important to realize that we are not comparing ourselves to anyone else. We are not judging ourselves or others. We are simply witnessing the many sensations and thoughts that come up as we eat. The recipe for mindful eating calls for the warming effect of kindness and the spice of curiosity.

We stressed how mindful eating involves paying full attention to the experience of eating and drinking, both inside and outside the body. We must also pay attention to the mind. While avoiding judgment or criticism, we watch when the mind gets distracted, pulling away from full attention to what we are eating or drinking. We watch the impulses that arise after we’ve taken a few sips or bites: to grab a book, to turn on the TV, to call someone on our cell phone, or to do web search on some interesting subject. We notice the impulse and return to just eating.

We notice how eating affects our mood and how our emotions like anxiety influence our eating. Gradually we regain the sense of ease and freedom with eating that we had in childhood. It is our natural birthright.

The old habits of eating and not paying attention are not easy to change. Don’t try to make drastic changes. Lasting change takes time, and is built on many small changes. We start simply.

Mindful eating has the powerful potential to transform people’s relationship to food and eating, to improve overall health, body image, relationships and self-esteem. Mindful eating involves many components such as:

• learning to make choices in beginning or ending a meal based on awareness of hunger and satiety cues;
• learning to identify personal triggers for mindless eating, such as emotions, social pressures, or certain foods;
• valuing quality over quantity of what you’re eating;
• appreciating the sensual, as well as the nourishing, capacity of food;
• feeling deep gratitude that may come from appreciating and experiencing food

Mindful eating draws substantially on the use of mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness helps focus our attention and awareness on the present moment, which in turn, helps us disengage from habitual, unsatisfying and unskillful habits and behaviors. Engaging in mindful eating meditation practices on a regular basis can help us discover a far more satisfying relationship to food and eating than we ever imagined or experienced before.

A different kind of nourishment often emerges, the kind that offers satisfaction on a very deep emotional level. Over the past 25 years, mindfulness practices, in general, have been shown to have a positive impact on many areas of psychological and physical health, including stress, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and heart disease. More recently, evidence is building that validates the benefits of mindful eating for treatment of obesity as well as binge eating disorders. The benefits of mindful eating are not restricted to physical and emotional health improvements; they can also impact one’s entire life, through a better sense of balance and well-being.

The Center for Mindful Eating, of which I am a member, is committed to dialogue, support, sharing ideas, clinical experience and research. As such I’d like to include an easy guide, for educational purposes only, to the principles of mindful eating.

http://www.tcme.org/principles.htm

THE PRINCIPLES OF MINDFULNESS

Mindfulness is deliberately paying attention, non-judgmentally.

Mindfulness encompasses both internal processes and external environments.

Mindfulness is being aware of what is present for you mentally, emotionally and physically in each moment.

With practice, mindfulness cultivates the possibility of freeing yourself of reactive, habitual patterns of thinking, feeling and acting.

Mindfulness promotes balance, choice, wisdom and acceptance of what is.

MINDFUL EATING IS:

Allowing yourself to become aware of the positive and nurturing opportunities that are available through food preparation and consumption by respecting your own inner wisdom.

Choosing to eat food that is both pleasing to you and nourishing to your body by using all your senses to explore, savor and taste.

Acknowledging responses to food (likes, neutral or dislikes) without judgment. Learning to be aware of physical hunger and satiety cues to guide your decision to begin eating and to stop eating.

SOMEONE WHO EATS MINDFULLY:

Acknowledges that there is no right or wrong way to eat but varying degrees of awareness surrounding the experience of food.

Accepts that his/her eating experiences are unique.

Is an individual who by choice, directs his/her awareness to all aspects of food and eating on a moment-by-moment basis.

Is an individual who looks at the immediate choices and direct experiences associated with food and eating: not to the distant health outcome of that choice.

Is aware of and reflects on the effects caused by unmindful eating.

Experiences insight about how he/she can act to achieve specific health goals as he/she becomes more attuned to the direct experience of eating and feelings of health.

Becomes aware of the interconnection of earth, living beings, and cultural practices and the impact of his/her food choices has on those systems.

©The Center for Mindful Eating Free to reproduce and distribution for educational purposes only

Carlotta Robbins is a psychologist and hypnotherapist. She works primarily with weight problems and more importantly those emotions and thoughts that lead to weight gain. If you have any questions, she will be glad to answer them carlottann@rejuvenation21now.com or visit her contact us page at www.rejuvenation21now.com/contact.

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Emotional Eating 2

SENSUAL EATING, OUTSIDE THE MOUTH,
INSIDE THE MOUTH

Welcome to Emotional Eating Session II dealing with sensual eating, or eating outside the mouth and inside the mouth.

Let’s just go over the premise of mindfulness. Mindfulness is a return to paying attention to life. And, when we pay attention to our food, and I mean really pay attention, we begin to notice all sorts of wonderful aspects of the food, and more importantly, we become aware of how much food we’re putting into our bodies.

Sensual eating, outside the mouth has to do with touch which is present in eating in many, many ways. The sense of touch informs us from the moment we reach for a fork, spoon, knife, or in the case of finger food, the moment we reach for the food itself. And the experience can be bad as well as good. In the case of a dull knife when you try and cut into a thick piece of meat, guess what? Your eating enjoyment will be less.

Even before taking your first bite, you’re aware of other touch-based information. You will feel a food’s weight, for example a bite of chocolate is heavier than a kernel of popcorn. A spoonful of peanut butter weighs more than a spoonful of rice.

As our sensual eating moves inside the mouth we’re about the texture of food. Here are some possibilities and examples:

• Smooth (yogurt)
• Bumpy (cracker)
• Chewy (dried fruit)
• Crunchy (pita chips)
• Grainy (hummus)
• Creamy (pudding)
• Crumbly (certain cheeses)

Interestingly enough, touch helps us to push food to the various parts of our mouths for chewing and to orient it so that we can swallow. Without our mindfulness we take all this for granted as we’ve done for so many meals and snacks. Come back to all these sensations and maybe in the beginning, take note of what we are feeling inside and outside our mouths.

Temperature is an important piece of information to the brain. Foods taste different depending on their temperature, and their textures change as well: think of a cold chunk of cheese versus the same cheese heated and melted. Make sure your food is at the right temperature to allow you to enjoy it – no half-heated food!!

As one might expect Flavor is perhaps the most powerfully sensual information we get from eating. The variations are endless and alluring. Our taste buds actually work with our sense of smell and can bring us great pleasure as well as great disgust. Usually only a small part of our consciousness is aware of the flavor of food we eat. It’s just enough to keep us eating. Just imagine if we really paid attention to all the data that taste can bring?

Try this little exercise the next time you’re eating. When you’ve taken a bite of food, check in to see what flavors are there – both bold and subtle:

• Salty
• Sweet
• Bitter
• Acidic
• Earthy
• Bland
• Spicy
• Sour
• Toasted/Roasted
• Minty
• Woody
• Floral
• Smoky

If you find this exercise difficult to focus on flavor, closing your eyes can make things easier.

We have so much going on in the senses registered through the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth that it can seem almost futile to include the stomach as well. But real satisfaction would be impossible without input from the stomach, which tells us when we have completely fulfilled the need to eat.

One recognizes a delay between the time we are full and the moment we know we are full. To reduce the effect of this phenomenon, check in with your stomach every three or four bites. Don’t start checking in halfway through the meal; you are more likely to forget to check at all. Starting early in the meal allows us to compare later feelings of moderate fullness to feelings of having a relatively empty stomach.

Clear your head and help yourself tune in by taking a deep breath. Compare your feeling of fullness with the level of satisfaction in eating your last bite. In general, pleasure associated with eating a bite of food lessens as the stomach becomes fuller.

Here is a key point for all of us and for all our clients. If we continue to eat with high awareness, our chances of overeating are much less than they are otherwise.

At the point where your meal or snack is done and you stop eating, ask yourself how you feel about you. What is your self-opinion? If you are like most, being aware of the body’s amazing ability to respond to food sensually is very satisfying. And knowing that you have treated your body well – honored your body – throughout the meal or snack helps in developing a culture of self-care that can extend to other areas of our life (like exercising in a healthy way, for example).

A good number of us have a strange psychological reaction to treating ourselves well: “I don’t deserve this. I’m uncomfortable doing this because it feels good, and I’m not supposed to feel good.” And there is a real challenge. It takes a lot of courage to exist outside our comfort zone, whether the ‘extreme’ place is much better than our normal way of being or much worse. Living in a new and better place, and staying there, can be a big adventure.

Working through this exercise in mindful eating can be difficult, but don’t worry. It will take some practice to eat with real awareness, particularly in a culture that works so hard to take our attention away from what we are eating, how much we are eating, and how satisfying it is (or isn’t). Continuing to eat mindfully will make all those distractions very, very boring!

So, let’s take a deep breath every time we sit down to a snack or a meal and remember eat mindfully by enjoying every aspect of our surroundings, sensations and the food. WE DESERVE IT.

Carlotta Robbins is a psychologist and hypnotherapist. She works primarily with weight problems and more importantly those emotions and thoughts that lead to weight gain. If you have any questions, she will be glad to answer them carlottann@rejuvenation21now.com or visit her contact us page at www.rejuvenation21now.com/contact.

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Emotional Eating 1

Hi, my name is Carlotta Robbins. I am a psychologist and hypnotherapist dealing primarily with weight problems and more importantly those emotions and thoughts that lead to weight gain.

Tonight I want to invite you to a conversation about emotional eating and how we use the technique of mindful eating to deal with those emotions.

Emotional eating is when we use food to deal with feelings instead of using food to satisfy hunger. We’ve all been there, finishing a whole bag of potato chips out of boredom or downing cookie after cookie while watching our favorite television shows. But when done a lot — especially without realizing it — emotional eating can affect weight, health, and overall well-being.

Not many of us make the connection between eating and our feelings. But understanding what drives emotional eating can help people take steps to change it.

One of the biggest myths about emotional eating is that it’s prompted by negative feelings. Yes, people often turn to food when they’re stressed out, lonely, sad, anxious, or bored. But emotional eating can be linked to positive feelings too, like the celebration of a holiday feast or the romance of sharing dessert on Valentine’s Day.

Sometimes emotional eating is tied to major life events, like a death or a divorce. More often, though, it’s the countless little daily stresses that cause someone to seek comfort or distraction in food.

Emotional eating patterns can be learned: like a child given a cookie or candy for a job well done or to comfort a bruise or hurt.

It’s not easy to “unlearn” patterns of emotional eating but it is possible. And it all starts with the awareness.

How many of us can accurately describe with any accuracy what we have eaten within the last 24 hours? Often we’re on autopilot because we have done it enough that we don’t have to pay much attention to get the food into our bodies.

This is one reason it’s very important to keep our daily logs with us and accurately write down everything we put into our bodies.

So, with all this in mind we can take steps to practice Mindful Eating. Mindful Eating is a practice that has existed for centuries, but few practice it in our culture. How often have we seen someone walk into the kitchen, fill a plate with a few things, or grab a bag of snacks and begin eating before even sitting down at the table? It happens all too often. Being mindful when eating first means being aware that we are about to eat… being aware that food is before us and that we will soon be eating it.

In fact, we are rarely mindful at all when we eat. And that first step is to BECOME AWARE OF FOOD.

Be conscious as you go to the kitchen or sit at the table that you are preparing to eat. Be mindful of what has been prepared. Recognize how much is available of each food and aware of how large your plate is.

It is always useful to enjoy our plates and silverware. Take the time to use decorative plates and cups, use attractive bowls. Put away the plastic ware!! Make your eating an event… the event of satisfying your hunger.

The benefit of doing this gives you a better idea of what you want from the food available after taking a full inventory of all that is around you. Identify your food (if you are alone, identify everything verbally, making the process more concrete). These simple steps can help to reduce anxiety around food.

Use your eyes: How do we eat with our eyes?

Take in the food’s shape. Is it flat, like a cracker? Roundish and bumpy like cauliflower? Or is it smooth, shiny, or dull?

Examine color. Notice variations in color on the skin of a piece of fruit, or the grill marks on steak or chicken. Do you find it appealing? Bright? Deep?

Notice spices on your food. Can you identify the pepper? Salt?

Great chefs go to great lengths to prepare food attractively because they know it can add excitement and satisfaction to the whole experience of dining. We eat in order to become satisfied and often to pursue pleasure. The more we pay attention to what our eyes tell us, the more satisfaction and pleasure are available.

As an exercise take the time to lean over your dish and take in the smells of the food intentionally. When is the last time you did this? Notice that children will instinctively do this. Sometimes when we are the food preparer we get ‘numb’ to the good smells and tend to ignore how pleasurable this sense of smell truly is…we miss out on the excitement. Breathe in slowly taking in all the scents of the food.

Our benefit in doing this is that our sense of smell is tied to our sense of taste. We get to begin our enjoyment of the food’s flavor without eating it. Being intentional here will give us a greater willingness to be intentional or mindful in later steps.

Most of us would say that the sense of hearing has nothing to do with eating. But the sounds of food and eating have a lot to tell us.

There is no mistaking the sound of a piece of silverware making contact with a plate, or a beverage being poured over ice. Biting into a crisp apple makes a different sound than biting into any other food.

Pay close attention to sounds prior to eating. And remember, when you begin to eat the sounds continue. Tune into food sounds… like the crunch of celery. Recognize the sounds of your food being moistened in your mouth and hear yourself swallow.

Benefit: Eating, in its own way can please us through our sense of hearing, just as music can. As we hear what we are eating, we become more aware of our participation, which helps us to know how much we’ve eaten.

All these helpful guides put our eating experience into perspective; making us mindful and aware of what we are doing with food and how we are using food to satisfy our hunger.

Next time we will continue this discussion by progressing to sensual eating, outside the mouth, and inside the mouth. Sounds strange and interesting all at the same time.

If you have any questions I will be glad to either answer them now or you can email me at Carlottann@rejuvenation21now.com

Thank you so much for your time and interest in this very powerful subject.

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America’s Disease Culprit: What can you do to avoid…

Nothing ruins a good meal like uncomfortable indigestion, but before you go popping your next antacid, please let us explain the dire nature of this situation. Digestion is among the most important bodily functions. It is the way your body turns the food you eat into fuel and nutrition.

Indigestion is the first sign of poor digestive health. Experts agree that poor digestive health can lead to any number of health issues ranging from light fatigue and indigestion to a wide range of devastating diseases.

It isn’t simply what we eat that affects our health, but also how we eat. More often than not, poor digestion can be avoided by understanding how your stomach works and eating within your digestive system’s “rules.” The process of digestion is much more complex than simply chewing food and swallowing it. Minerals, probiotics and enzymes all work together to prepare the food and your body for digestion and absorption.

Digestion begins with your first bite: as you chew, the enzymes in your saliva begin to break each morsel down so that your stomach can properly digest them. For example, the enzyme alpha amylase is responsible for reducing starches into smaller, more manageable molecules, and lingual lipase, which is secreted by glands underneath your tongue, digests fats. These are important steps, which occur while food is still in your mouth. Swallowing your food without chewing thoroughly will hinder these enzymes and as a result, place a greater strain on your stomach, resulting in poor digestion.

Chewing your food well is only one of the many actions you can take to prevent poor digestion and protect your health. Check out the list below for more…

• Avoid Antacids. These over the counter tablets absorb and neutralize natural acids that your body produces to aid in the digestion process. They are vital to healthy digestion and as many would argue, a healthy life. There are many alternatives to taking antacids as well as their prescription counterparts.
• Get Enzymes. Enzymes play a key role in the digestion process. The problem is that many processed foods lack the enzymes necessary to keep this process functioning optimally. It is absolutely vital that you are getting enough enzymes either from your food or through supplementation. Many also use various enzyme formulas such as our Formula #12. (for more info, contact us.)
• Balance Your Bowel Flora. Research suggests that bowel flora is responsible for a host of functions including fermenting unused nutrients, building the immune system, preventing growth of harmful bacteria, regulating the gut and producing vitamins. Eating additive free yogurt and taking acidophilus supplements are two great ways to balance your bowel flora.
• Drink fluids between meals, and don’t have more than 4 oz. of fluids with a meal. That said, thirst can be perceived as hunger so drinking ample amounts of water between meals is always a good practice.
• Avoid coffee at meals. Instead, drink it an hour before you eat or an hour and a half to two hours after you eat.
• Consume fruits by themselves, not with other foods. As with coffee, eat fruit an hour before your meal or an hour and a half to two hours after a meal. This is especially important with melons.
• Pay attention to your body more. Some people’s body’s will respond better to frequent small meals while others will feel much better only eating 3 main meals per day. No matter what your body’s preference is, overeating is always ill-advised.
• Take your time. Savor the food, enjoy your meal, and make sure that you chew thoroughly before swallowing.
• Rest after eating, allow your body 30 to 45 minutes for digestion and wait a little longer before engaging in strenuous physical activity.
• Practice moderation with foods that are known triggers for indigestion, particularly carbonated beverages, alcohol, coffee, acidic foods, spicy foods, fried foods and greasy foods.
• Try not to microwave your food, as doing so destroys natural enzymes, making it more difficult for you to digest. Instead, re-heat food in the oven or on your stovetop.
• Eat when you’re hungry. This seems like common sense, but it is easy to misinterpret boredom for actual hunger.
• Wait to sleep until three hours after eating. The body doesn’t require as much energy to sleep, and calories from a bedtime snack will be stored as fat. Sleeping with your head elevated on a pillow will also prevent indigestion while you sleep, since acids from the stomach will be less likely to move upwards into the esophagus.
• Avoid enzyme-less foods, many foods meant to last for long periods of time do so because of a lack or enzymes. Make sure the majority of your diet consists of fresh foods.
• A healthy lifestyle can also benefit digestion. Frequent exercise, not smoking and avoiding processed foods are habits that your entire body will thank you for.

Sources:

E-book –Journey To A New You

http://www.uihealthcare.com/topics/medicaldepartments/surgery/gerd/index.html

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/indigestion/DS01141/DSECTION=causes

http://www.bodyofbalance.com/Documents/StomachRules.pdf

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Digestion

America’s Disease Culprit: What can you do to avoid poor digestion?

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Artificial Sweeteners

Excitotoxins: Chemicals that Destroy Your Health…article

Did You Know Aspartame Kills?…PDF

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Endocrine Disruptors

What Are Endocrine Disruptors?…article

Obesogens…blog

Kidnapping Our Children’s Health: Endocrine Disruptors…blog

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