Once you begin to become more mindful of how you feel physically, you will naturally become aware of how you feel emotionally. Learning to deal with emotions such as anger, stress and frustration positively, without turning to food, all starts with emotional awareness.
Often times, when we spend a lot of time in our heads to avoid experiencing feelings, our "monkey mind" or "noisy roomate" , as it's sometimes called can lead us to mindlessly overeat or make food choices that don't honor our bodies and health. And yet the noisy roomate is not our friend. It tells stories that we believe to be true when so often, these imaginings are nonsense. Moving forward, I want you to start checking in with yourself regularly, throughout the day, by being aware of and identifying specific thoughts you may be having. Ask yourself "how are these thoughts are making me feel?" This practice, when performed every 30 minutes, will help you catch yourself, and identify your underlying need before you reach for the bag of potaoe chips. You may need a powernap, a ten minute break and a cup of hot tea or a walk in the fresh air. You may just need a hug, a neck rub or a big glass of water. Maybe you just need to phone a friend and vent a little to let off steam. Whatever it is, there is usually a healthier way of dealing with unpleasant feelings, rather than eating food you don't need and its a way healthier for you. As you get emotionally healthier, you will become acutely aware of how certain people and situations make you feel. If, everytime you speak to your sister, you end up trying to please her, while she belittles you in front of others and then pretends it was a joke, you may need to choose not to care a lot about her words. Oftentimes, when people are mean towards us, it has more to do with them and their troubles than it has to do with us. Now, we can choose to be hurt by such comments, or, alternatively, we can recognize the motive and simply walk away, hang up or choose not to care a lot about the relationship. You see, when you choose how you want to feel emotionally, which, I presume, is fabulous, then there is no point tolerating someone bringing you down. Especially when this type of emotional abuse can lead you to eat as a way of coping. With awareness and mindfulness, practiced in the moment, you are better able to identify these trigger situations and either limit them, or simply brace yourself for them mentally, so that being around certain people doesn't always result in you wanting to eat. Try this next time you walk into a potentially triggering situation. With awareness you'll be amazed at how you can set an intention of the perfect unfolding (ie. you don't feel the need to reach for food to calm anxiety). Practice this and you will see how it puts you back in charge of situations that were previously detrimental to your morale. As you get emotionally more aware and healthier, you will naturally feel the need to numb youyrself with food diminish as well, which is wonderful progress!
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One of the biggest obstacles I hear people face when maintaing a healthy lifetsyle is when we eat out at restaurants.
Yes, eating out can potentially trip us up and throw us off, however, with mindfulness, eating out doesn't have to be a saboteur. Firstly, it's important to arrive at the venue with an appetite, not necessarily ravenous, but with a good desire to eat. This is because, if overly hungry, we may be tempted to devour the entire bread basket and butter stick, before the waiter has even taken our order. This is No Bueno! Often, In fact, I will often have a cup of tea or soup and perhaps a protein snack such as cheese if I need to before going out to eat, especially when I know the service may be slow and by the time we actually get to eat, it will potentially be way later than what my internal body clock is used to. If need be, pack a handful of almonds in a zip lock bag, and put them in your purse, just in case your blood sugar gets really low and you becopme a "hangry" mess at the dinner table. You can always go to the bathroom and discreetly eat the almonds to help you survive a hypoglycemic attack. When we are training ourselves to become mindful eaters, the intial training period, when dining out at a restaurant, will require extra attention and awareness. Rest assured, eventually we can eat mindfully almost without effort and almost without thinking. Often times, when dining out with friends, a romantic date, family members or even work aquaintences, there may be some level of anxiety, social phobias or even excitement. This is a landmine opportunity to self sabotage if we have the tendancy to eat past comfort and finish off the last bits on our friends plates too. Again, awareness is key here. You and you only, are in cahrge of where your hand wanders. Keep in mind, when ordering food, the waiters job is to upsell and entice you to order more, including alcoholic and sugar laden drinks, appetizers, bread, desserts etc. However, you are the one in charge of your order, so don't feel pressurred to order more than you need. Also, don't be afraid to share plates, drinks and desserts either. Often times, when I dine out, I will share wine, fries and dessert with my husband. Often, enough is as good as a feast. After the first few sips and bites, the pleasure factor starts to decline, so next time, pay attention to how the pleasure factor diminishes. The flavour and pleasure really pops at the beginning, so consider stopping after three mouthfuls of dessert, knowing that you can always order another serving tomorrow or the next day. I tend not to order sugar laden drinks with my meal, because I would rather chew my sugar, as in, eat dessert instead. This is a personal choice. You need to weigh up what's important to you. However, keep in mind that drinking too much with your meal can stretch out your stomach, potentially making you feel bloated and drinking to much fluid with yoyur meal can also interfere with digestion. Having said that, if I'm in a warm climate and I'm thirsty, I will sip a large drink, such as an ice-tea, or ice-coffee, however I always dilute it with water and lots of ice, especially if its overy sugary. Better still, if they offer a stevia sweetened beverage, this is a good option. ersonally I avoid aspartame laden drinks, since this type of sweetener is a known carcinogen. As a side note, I would also make a conscious effort to avoid clothes with elasticized wastes when eating out, as its far too easy to shoot past comfortable satisfaction when you don't physically feel your pants getting tighter as you eat. A zipper and button serves as a gentle reminder that you have had enough to eat. As a side note, bear in mind that our stomachs, at rest, are about the size of our clenched fist. Therefore, more than a fistful or so of food (imagine, though that non starchy vegetables, such as lettuce, is condensed down) will stretch out youyr stomach. The stomach will keep stretching if we continue to overfeed it. This is why stomach banding is so effective, because we literally are forced to stop eating, due to the reduced size of our stomach pouch. Eating out is a wonderful opportunity to socialize with friends and colleagues. If you are trying to reach a healthy weight, there is np need to avoid these situations. With increased mindfulness and attention to your body cues, there is no reason why yoyu cant walk out of the restaurant feeling pleasantly content, without having felt the pressure to overeat past satisfaction. Remember, no one can force food on you, and if they do try, then you may need to questions whther these people really have your best interests at heart. Finally, be sure to order what is is you really fancy, rather than ordering around what you really want and then going home and eating more to make up for that feeling of deprivation. In my experience, its far wiser to not eat around a craving, just go straight for it, enjoy it with maximum pleasure, and go home feeling content, minus the guilt. Whether its shopping for a new outfit, driving your kids to soccer, cooking the family dinner or folding laundry, how we do anything, is how we do everything, include how we choose to eat.
Even if you've developed some bad habits over the years relating to food, rest assured, these habits can be changed. Its important not to label yourself an "impulsive stress eater", even if at times you do numb yourself with food and drink, because the labels we attach to ourselves can de detrimental to our personal progress and positive change. Remember, you get to choose whether you eat with mindfulness, intention, attention and pleasure. No one can do it for you, just like no one can rob you of your ability to eat this way. When you put your powerful hat on (as opposed to your victim hat) , you realize that you can choose to eat, from this day forward, in a way that honors and respects your body. You can choose to remain in the comfort zone and not overdo things. Have you ever secretly observed your naturally thin friend eating? I can almost guarantee that they take their time with food, they are selective (aka fussy) with their food choices, not afraid to leave food on their plate, especially if they've had enough already and, whether they realise it or not, naturally thin eaters stay connected to their hunger and fullness cues as they eat. It may be unconscious for them, because, for whatever reason, they never lost touch with their inherent connection to their body cues. Ironically, when we aim for more pleasure with food, we naturally eat less of it. We become satisfied sooner and quite discerning and we start noticing the quality of our food choices. When we are acutely aware of quality, its way easier to say no in the face of a mediocre piece of cake. I mean, if we're going to indulge ourselves in cake, it had better be the best possible cake we can find, right? after all, we need to make sure its really worth it, because we are pleasure seekers when it comes to food. This is where the French ladie helped me a lot! But let"say we order/buy/make some food and it just doesn't quite live up to our expectations? Do we eat it anyway? Hell no! There is no point. If you can't get maximum pleasure out of every bite, you are best to put the fork down. Yes, it may be dissapointing. You might have put effort into buyin or making the food. Alas, if it"s any consolation, you were better off without it, especially if it didn't absolutely rock your socks! As a side note, leaving food that you have paid good money for requires an abundant mindset, as opposed to a scarcity mindset. We will work on how to adopt an abundant attitude around food a bit later, but for now, just be mindful of what's going through your head when this situation arises. In summary, if you are a patient, deliberate, pleasure seeker who aims to treat her body like its the holy grail that it is, then how you eat will reflect this. So the next time you sit down to a meal, take a moment to pause and reflect of how you want to approach eating, and life, because how we choose to eat and behave around food really does flow over into every aspect of our lives. One of the biggest challenges we experience when faced with the urge to eat, even though we know we are not physically hungry, is how to stop our urges. Because, after all, sometimes they feel stronger than our ability to manage them.
There are lots of tactics out there, including ways to distract yourself as soon as you feel the urge to eat coming on, such as have a cup of tea, go for a walk, soak in a bubble bath, listen to music or read a book. Sometimes activities like this do the trick, other times they don't. So what if these delay tactics don't work? What can we do? Approaching eating from a place of mindfulness, again, in my experience, is the answer. The technique I recommend is called "urge surfing". Once you get the hang of it, you'll probably never be at the mercy of a tub of ice-cream again. there's one caveat though, it takes a lot of practice. It wont happen overnight, but it will happen. Its a skill worth mastering. Surfing the urge is a mindfulness technique, based on the premise that urges come in waves, and they are transient in nature. This means we can learn to "ride out" the urge to eat in the moments when we: a) aren't physically hungry b) feel powerless over the addictive qualities of the desired food Instead of trying to fight the urge and give in to it, we instead learn to accept and watch it rise and dissipate, simply by practising awareness around it. It's important to remind yourself that urges never last forever, and usually there is an underlying emotional trigger, such as feeling overwhelmed, anxious, stressed or frustrated about something. Stay tuned in to these thoughts, reflect on what events led to them, because these are possibly your personal triggers and when you experience these emotional states, they are your warning sign that some damage is about to be done. Just be ready to accept these feelings. You can even talk to yourself in order to clearly identify and then articulate what they are. It might be something like, "Gee, my boss was super moody today, he snapped at me for no apparent reason and it made me feel angry that he uses me as his verbal punching bag" Then you can say to yourself, "I guess he has some pressurres on him at the moment and I am not going to let his words drive me to eat junk food my body doesnt need". Take a seat and focus on your breath, and without judging yourself, notice that you simply have a desire to comfort yourself with food. Don't judge yourself, simply observe. By recognising head hunger, you can then choose to either eat a little something if you really want to or choose to meet your underlying need to "let of steam" in a way that doesn't involve food. Whatever you do, just know that you have choices in that moment. If you have a fight with a donut, you can win. You are powerful, not powerless. And if you don't eat, nothing bad will happen. In fact, not eating in that moment will prove to yourself just how free you really are. By becoming more mindful around these situations, you are practising a new skill. Everytime you surf the urge, you strengthen your ability to use this technique. Eventually, simply observing the urge without acting on it becomes second nature. It is possible to just let the urge just be. And once you master the art of urge surfing, you will feel a sense of relief and renewed self confidence, and you are on your way to being in charge of your eating. If you've ever read a page of a book and quickly realized you didn't comprehend one sentence of the page you just finished reading, you'll know how easy it is for our minds to wander and for distraction and mindlessness to rob us of the joy of a book.
When it comes to eating, it is so easy to become distracted and unaware as we eat that we end up missing all the pleasure of each mouthful. When we eat mindlessly like this, we end up physically full, however strangely unsatisfied and often wanting more food. Often, what was missing, was simple awareness as we eat. After all, our taste-buds are in our mouth, not our stomach. If we wolf down our food, without chewing, really tasting and thoroughly enjoying every mouthful, then overeating is almost inevitable. Mindful eating allows us to fully appreciate the sensory delight of eating and to be more conscious of the amount and nature of all that we eat and drink. When we practice greater awareness around eating and drinking, it breaks the emotional attachment link to food. What I love about mindful eating is that it replaces self-criticism with self-nurturing. It replaces shame with respect for your own inner wisdom. The truth is, we are all born with the innate wisdom of knowing how to eat. Just like animals and kids, the intuitive sense we are born with is a natural gift that somehow gets lost along the way. We are all born with an intuitive sense of what our bodies want and need. Sadly, due to outside influences such as family, friends, media and the diet industry, we learn to distrust this natural instinct. Greater awareness of self is the way we can reclaim it. Bringing our minds back to our bodies, consciously, as we take each bite, is the first step. Having a healthy relationship with food means you are not morally superior or inferior based on your eating choices. Food is just food. It is the meaning we give it that can possibly cause people a lot of heartache. It is good to be flexible with your food choices. In fact we never get it wrong. We only think we do based on conditioned beliefs we have around food and eating. I often get asked how to practice mindful eating. The simplest place to start is awareness. Every time you eat, be sure to pause first, consciously bring your mind back to your body and notice the food in front of you. Take your time to really notice it. The texture, the color, the ripeness, the taste. Swirl it around in your mouth, really taste it. Every. Single. Bite. It feels good doesn't it? Remember this. You don't need a reason to eat the foods you like and want. Mindful eating is a way to become reacquainted with the guidance of our internal cues of hunger and fullness. Start listening intently to your body and youll be amazed to find that "enough" is as good as a feast. |
AuthorG'day. Welcome to my blog, where I write about mindful eating. My name is Sally Asher and I'm a wellness author of three books. I hold a Health Science degree and have a passion for behavioral change. I live between South Florida and Melbourne with my husband and two teenagers. My husband and I run a real estate investment company. I love to help people eat mindfully and reconnect with the innate, intuitive sense of eating that we are all born with. ArchivesCategories |