Starting with mindful eating
Mindfulness is the latest craze. You will find it working it’s way into every field, and unfortunately it’s often associated with a cash grab by well meaning middle class folks who present mindfulness as a warm, fuzzy positive practice that centers everything around your outlook, and how if you are unhappy, it’s somehow your fault.
This however, is the opposite of mindfulness, but it is much easier to market.
Mindfulness at it’s root starts with one, all powerful question:
“What is happening now?’
From that question springs other, harder questions like “How do we know” and “How do we define ‘now’?’ and even the ever challenging “So what?”, but we can always come back to “What is happening now?”
At it’s heart, that means mindfulness is all emotions. It’s neither positive nor negative, BUT if you are starting mindfulness practice, chances are you are not in the best place and that means for many people it can be daunting because negative stuff will definitely come up.
Mindfulness can also be hard because it brings to our awareness things that we are ignoring, and ignoring them may be a survival habit. Mindfulness may make us more aware of systemic oppression, toxic relationships or even buried trauma. It may make us justifiably angry, or depressed, or anxious. Those may be valid responses to the world around us and mindfulness can bring our attention to them in a way that is acutely painful.
An important part that is nearly always missed in corporate mindfulness is that often we need to acknowledge those feelings, even if we can’t deal with them now, and it may be healthiest to just acknowledge them, and put a pin in them until you are ready and have the support to deal with them. Mindfulness is often the first step to seeking the help and community support you need to work through things. One of my original Buddhist teachers called it “Waving at the clouds”. If you see a cloud in the sky, you can‘t change it and pretending it’s not there won’t make a difference, so all you can do is greet it and in doing so acknowledge it.
So, how do we do mindful eating?
The first question is “What is happening now?”
I usually do this by asking my clients to start a journal they keep whenever they eat. Doesn’t need to be much, just a note of what was happening when they ate. Here’s the guidance I usually give them.
-Remain non-judgemental, you can note your feelings, but note them as feelings, not facts
-Don’t make conscious changes. You may need to resist that. Right now we are interested in what is happening, that takes time to establish. You may find things naturally change as you measure things, and that’s fine, but let it naturally happen and note it. One dietary trap we can fall into is constantly changing things, and never giving anything tome to take hold
-Note your feelings. Why are you eating? Hunger, boredom, stress, comfort? Again, there’s no judgement, just noting.
-Note the environment, where were you? Did you have the TV on? Did you eat over the sink? Who was with you?
-What did you eat? Why? Don’t worry about measurements! We’ll cover how the food felt next, and that’s a lot more important than the amount.
-How do you feel afterwards? Were you full? Still hungry? Stuffed? Satisfied?
This can feel like A LOT, and it is. Recording your food can be stressful. I generally recommend doing two 3 day blocks of journalling over two weeks, one thats all week days, and one that includes the weekend.
Now it’s confession time:
I rarely do a detailed dive into my clients food journals. I ask them to present their findings to me. I guarantee everyone who does this will find something that they could improve, and how to improve it. If I tell folks what is important, I am removing them from the process.
So, take a day or two break from your journals then read them all.
-What stands out to you?
-What did you expect? How did it show up?
-What didn’t you expect? How did it show up?
-What do you think should be the first thing you address, why?
The one prompt I will give you is to look for patterns, like:
When I feel X, I eat foods that don’t align with my needs
When I am with Y, I over eat and feel ill afterwards
On Mondays I often forget to eat
On Wednesdays I go for a wholesome lunch with my coworkers
Often our next steps will be to either DO MORE of a habit, i.e. build on a pattern or DO LESS of a habit, i.e. Break a pattern. For ones that start with “When I feel” followed by a negative emotion, that may mean addressing the feeling, if possible.
I generally recommend my clients pick a habit they thing is important from their journal, and I often get them to start with doing more of something. Pick something that you are 90% sure you will do, and when you read your journal for that habit, note what was around you when you did it.
Clients are then asked to stop journalling their food intake and just focus on recording that habit every day for 2 weeks. I ask them to make entries even when they feel they failed. The goal is to still consistently measure data, success and or failure aren’t really as important as continuing to be mindful.
There it is, the first couple of weeks I go through with most of my clients to start them on the process of mindfulness. Just remember, the key to mindful eating is to be kind to yourself, the strategies you used to get to this point clearly worked regardless of how un-mindful you may have been because you are still here. Mindfulness is about unpacking these habits without judgement, and packing away the ones you no longer need, and moving forward with all the good parts that are left.
