Peaceful Eating, Peaceful Life
Eating. We all do it.
And Food — possibly one of our most turbulent, long-lasting partners in relationship, ever.
We can love food, hate it, abuse it, control it, be ashamed of it, restrict it, enemize it, rejoice it, celebrate (with) it, indulge in it, waste it, cultivate it, and as we cycle through, we often end up at the beginning and start all over again.
But food is always there, and we will always need it.
However we think of food, however and whatever we eat, we need it to survive and we need to eat to thrive. Since we are locked in this partnership, why not begin practicing one that is healthy, sustainable, satisfying, and enjoyable?
Whether you are suffering from irregular eating behaviors, an eating disorder, or want to bring more intention into your food choices, there are tools you can employ, mindsets you can re-frame, and approaches you can apply in order to address patterns of disordered eating and sustainably heal.
Increasingly, practices like a Non-Dieting approach, Mindful Eating, and Intuitive Eating are being proven to provide successful behavioral and emotional tools to help heal your relationship with food.
Let’s take an explorative dive into these 3 practices:
Non-Dieting Approach
Flexible . No Rules . Abundant . Food as Friend
First it was Weight Watchers. Then South Beach, Atkins, then the Zone diet followed by efforts to follow a Ketogenic, a Vegan, and a Raw foods diet. In between there were juice cleanses and liver detoxes, sugar, gluten, and dairy fasts. And now you’re exhausted. And you weigh no less.
Yo-yo dieting and restricting and controlling food is nothing new in our culture; with these practices being so pervasive you’d think they actually work!
The Non-Dieting approach recognizes the fallacy of successful, sustained weight loss through dieting as much as it recognizes the negative impact on mood and the massive amount of daily energy expended on trying to restrict eating. Weight loss may accompany a particular diet, but with methods that restrict foods in an unsustainable way, you end up more often than not, regaining the weight plus some.
Dieting has been shown to increase binge-eating episodes in both females and males, and in turn lead to weight gain over time. It also promotes irregular eating behaviors like skipping breakfast, and studies indicate that dieting is detrimental to psychological well-being and quality of life.
Adopting a non-dieting approach, however, has been shown to significantly reduce preoccupation with body shape and size, as well as improve eating attitudes and alleviate weight concern and stress.
Think about it — when we have too many rigid rules, we exhaust ourselves trying to control our eating through pure willpower. Eventually, we have a bad day or we find ourselves, unprepared, in a situation without the ‘right’ foods available and our willpower is rendered vulnerable. So, we cave and break the rules to attend to our emotional needs — but what are the psychological consequences of that ‘failing’? What is the energetic and emotional cost of constantly restricting?
Proponent of and an informed, embodied example of the successes of non-dieting, neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt gives an engaging and personal talk on why diets do not work and how they do not serve us. Below are some highlights from her talk, but listening to the full delivery is worth it.
- Our brain regulates body weight like a thermostat: responding to signals from the body by adjusting hunger, activity and metabolism to keep our weight stable as conditions change.
- Diets don’t have very much reliability. 5 years after a diet, most people have regained the weight and 40% have gained even more.
- Several long term studies have shown that girls who diet in their early teenage years are three times more likely to become overweight five years later.
- Weight (normal to obese) makes very little difference in risk of death if the individual eats fruits and vegetables, exercises 3xweek, doesn’t smoke, and drinks alcohol in moderation.
- You can take control of your health by taking control of your lifestyle, even if you can’t lose weight and keep it off.
- The typical outcome of dieting is that you are more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it.
- “Let’s face it. If diets worked, we’d all be thin already.”
And as remedy to this dieting culture, Aamodt calls upon the two practices, Mindful and Intuitive Eating.
Mindful Eating
Awareness . Listening . Attention . Observation . No Judgment . Forgiving
Mindful eating is a non-dieting approach based on the buddhist concept of mindfulness. It means practicing full awareness of what is going on within you and around you in that moment. Mindful eating is mindful in that it means to listen to the body’s signals so that you eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. It’s not mindful in the restrictive sense, like, ‘watch what you eat!’. Mindful eating is more concerned with, how.
There are no limits on quantity or type of food; no food is sinful, no one food is sacred. Imagine this freedom!
Your eating guidelines do not come from an external rule book but rather from the messages sent by your own body telling you what you need and what you don’t. Mindful eating means that you trust your body’s intelligence, that it knows its own needs. The practice is therefore to really listen in, to be aware, and to give your eating experience full attention to perceive those messages and eat without judgement.
You can start to practice Mindful Eating by:
- Breathing
- Slowing down
- Chewing each bite
- Eating away from distractions and screens
- Letting your food be a sensory bath — notice the variety of colors, aromas, textures and flavors
- Plating your food in an appetizing way
- Appreciating and enjoying your food
- Preparing your food
- Observing signals of physical hunger vs stress hunger
- Noticing the messages of satiety — fullness, flavor reduction
- Learning your triggers to eating mindlessly
- Brief mindful meditation before meals: Deep breaths and sense into physical hunger cues; Take the time to observe the sensory stimulations of your meal; Journal about your food and behavior observations
So, what are the benefits to eating mindfully?
Mindful Eating promotes healthy digestion.
Mindful Eating promotes the parasympathetic state of our nervous systems (known as rest and digest), meaning a calm and restful inner environment and mood that allows for healthy digestion of food. When we are stressed, or in the sympathetic state known as fight or flight, our blood is in our limbs — not in our bellies — and we are therefore not prepared to digest well. Eating mindfully reduces stress and focuses the body’s attentions on digestion. This, in turn, can reduce bloating, indigestion, as well as constipation.
Mindful Eating improves mood and psychological well-being around food.
Studies have shown that learning mindfulness-based eating practices can significantly reduce binge-eating episodes and improve overall mood.
Mindful Eating can help heal conditions like eating disorders, depression, anxiety, and other food-related behaviors.
The stress-reducing effects of mind-body practices that bring awareness, reduce negative affect, and improve vitality have been shown to help people cope with their clinical and nonclinical disorders and eating behaviors.
Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good. Sit down to regular meals without distractions. Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop, and let your hunger decide when you should be done.
- Sandra Aamodt, on Mindful Eating in, Why Dieting Doesn’t Usually Work
Intuitive Eating
Internal wisdom . Mindful . Non-judgment . Attunement . Consciousness
“Babies push away food when they are full, toddlers know when they do not like something. Intuitive eating is about tapping back into that wisdom.”
- Elyse Resch, MS, RD, FADA, Author of Intuitive Eating and bi-creator of the term, intuitive eating
As you might expect, Intuitive Eating is complementary to Mindful Eating. It observes many of the same practices but with less of a focus on meditation and a deeper focus on moving people away from emotionally charged relationships to food.
Three overarching principles guide this Intuitive Eating:
Unconditional permission to eat
Eating for primarily physical rather than emotional reasons
Relying on internal hunger, fullness and satiety cues
Like Mindful Eating, Intuitive Eating also encourages the practitioner to trust that their body knows what it needs; it asks them to ‘feel deeper within’, to trust that there is an intuition communicating their food needs. It rejects the dieting mentality and helps to normalize food relationships in the moment of eating. There is a spiritual element to intuitive eating, a mysterious, intimate trust that we can tune into.
Intuitive Eating is practiced in ways that can sound like this:
I eat whenever and whatever I desire when I’m hungry
I do not judge my eating or my food choices as good or bad
I do not follow eating rules or diet plans
I am the expert of my own body
I take a moment to recognize my emotional state before and during eating
I acknowledge and understand why I am eating, even if it is emotional
I am not preoccupied with food as a psychological need
By following these principles, intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight and spend less time thinking about food.
Intuitive Eating is associated with lower body weight, sense of well-being, and body acceptance.
A study conducted in 2006 found that individuals following intuitive eating principles had lower body weights, a healthy sense of well-being, and low concern for an ideal body type.
Intuitive eating practices allow for sustained, long-term changes in health and weight.
Similarly, a study published in 2005 proved that improvements in anthropometric measurements (weight, BMI), metabolic fitness (blood pressure, blood lipids), energy expenditure, eating behavior, as well as psychology (self-esteem, body image, depression) in obese, female chronic dieters were not only significant but sustained and long-term with intuitive eating practices versus dieting protocols.
Intuitive Eating principles are strongly associated with treating and healing eating disorders.
A 2008 study of individuals diagnosed with binge eating disorder found that after 8, 90min weekly sessions teaching intuitive eating principles, 80.6% of participants no longer met the criteria for a diagnosis of binge eating disorder.
Check out this intuitive eating questionnaire for a helpful guide to gain awareness around reasons for eating and to learn how to eat more intuitively.
“The Japanese have the wisdom to keep 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, 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.”
- Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works, Author of Intuitive Eating and bi-creator of the term, intuitive eating
So, we’re all in a relationship with food…and it’s complicated. But the beauty of Non-Dieting, and Mindful and Intuitive eating is that everyone is capable of integrating them into habit — you just have to start.
And when you do, remember that these are practices. They will take time to integrate.
Practice adopting them into your life so that their application becomes easier and more smooth, like second nature. During the learning curve, be prepared that there will be a natural ebb and flow between frustration, resistance, failure, success, and acceptance. Along this rollercoaster ride, self-compassion is key to sustain these practices and reap their benefits; let the fuel and motivation for these practices be love, self-care, and the desire to be more kind to yourself. Try and notice when the negative, punishing, ‘dieting’ emotions arise and choose not to spiral down into that black hole of negative self-talk.
Peaceful eating = Peaceful life
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