Sensual Eating – Outside the Mouth, Inside the Mouth

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Sensual Eating Transcript

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.

Emotional Eating: Devastating, Even Deadly!

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Emotional Eating: Devastating, Even Deadly! – Transcript

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

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.