360 Degrees of Mindful Eating: 10 Skill-Sets to Overcome Overeating
Eating changes both body and mind, the total of who we are. What we eat and how much we eat changes who we are physiologically. Why we eat and how we eat changes who we are psychologically. Mindless eating changes us for the worse (body expands, mind shrinks). Mindful eating changes us for the better (body shrinks, mind expands). But there is more to mindful eating than just paying attention to the flavor of what you are eating and chewing ten times. The following is a brief 360⁰ overview of mindful eating “know-how.” Mindful/conscious eating consists of the following 10 skill-sets:
- Craving Control skills,
- Trigger Control skills,
- Hunger Recognition skills,
- Fullness Recognition skills,
- Process Focus skills,
- Satiety/Fullness Extension skills,
- Mindful Social Eating skills,
- Appetite Control Skills,
- Mindful Emotional Eating skills,
- Motivational Maintenance skills.
Trigger Control & Craving Control Skills
There are two broad approaches for dealing with environmentally-triggered eating: trigger control and craving control. Trigger control helps you avoid triggers that provoke your cravings as well as to reduce their trigger power through a process of desensitization. Craving control helps you manage the cravings once they arise. These two approaches are complimentary: to get across the temptation land-mines without blowing up (your waist-line), you must learn to avoid the avoidable triggers and to control the inevitable cravings.
Craving Control Training - Take the Guesswork out of Craving Control:
Not all craving control strategies are created equal! One of the most common and most intuitive craving control strategies is distraction. The strategy of trying to not think about eating often backfires since not thinking about something usually means thinking about it even more. Self-talk, another traditional craving control strategy, involves the use of self-motivational statements that reiterate the benefits of sticking to a plan and remind the person of his or her health goals. Self-talk, in its reliance on logic and reason, is of limited utility: craving is an emotional state that takes the otherwise rational brain and reduces it to irrational simplicity. Rational self-talk is hard to pull off when your mind's wisdom has been reduced to a nutritional tantrum of "I want!" Breath-based relaxation for craving control is an improvement on either distraction or self-talk as it allows the craving-aroused mind to return to its rational baseline. Mindfulness, as a craving control technique, involves "just witnessing" or "just noticing" craving thoughts as they pass. Mindfulness has received much clinical attention, particularly in the area of substance use treatment where the goals of relapse prevention closely parallel the challenges faced by chronic overeaters (Marlatt, 2002). In my opinion, mindfulness and relaxation are the first echelon of craving control, followed by self-talk and distraction strategies. It is important to experiment with all four of these craving control techniques to make an informed choice and to take the guesswork out of craving control when you need it.
Trigger Control Training - There is more to Trigger Control than “People, Places and Things”:
Trigger avoidance is simply staying away from the infamous addiction trigger trio of “people, places, and things.” This approach can be restated as “out of sight, out of mind, out of mouth” or, if you are an olfactory craver, “out of nose, out of mind, out of mouth.” As difficult as it is to create a “drug-free” environment, a “food-free” environment simply don’t exist. Let’s face it: food is the legalized drug, and, as such, it is omnipresent. Despite its limited utility, trigger avoidance is not without some value, and the exercises below will allow you to tap this strategy for maximum value. Trigger desensitization is a process of getting so used to a given trigger that it no longer has the power to trigger a craving. Repeated exposure to a particular trigger eventually voids it of its stimulus value. Eventually we stop noticing and reacting to the trigger. That’s how we learn to tune out the midnight train whistles if we live next to a railroad track. An example of trigger desensitization would be to carry a bar of chocolate on you at all times. With this constant access to the object of your desire, you eventually learn to eat chocolate on your timing, when you choose to, rather than at random, when you encounter it in the environment.
Hunger Recognition Skills: Learn to Differentiate Between Hunger and Cravings
Craving is a pseudo-hunger signal that mimics hunger. Cravings prompt us to eat as if we were hungry, when we actually aren't. Hunger is a physiological need with a physiological signature, a state of body. Craving is a want, a psychological state, essentially a thought of desire, a motion of the mind. Hunger is generic - you need food, any food that'll make hunger go away. Cravings are specific - you want a particular food. Hunger depends on your physiology. Cravings depend on the situational context. For example, if you weren't hungry, but, after passing a fast-food place, you suddenly developed a desire to eat, the chances are that this is a craving, and not a state of hunger. Your body probably didn't change in the time that it took for you to drive past a fast-food billboard, but your mind easily could have. Successful mindful eating involves a clear understanding of this difference.
Fullness-Recognition Skills: Learn about the Continuum of Fullness
Assuming you were hungry in the first place, the following three sensations happen after you begin eating. First, the sensation of hunger goes away. This is a moment of hunger relief. This happens almost too fast for us to have time to enjoy a meal. If you stop eating at this point, then you no longer feel the painful emptiness of hunger, but you also do not yet feel full. If you keep on eating, you will next experience a moment of pleasant fullness as the food distends the lining of your stomach, but not so much as to cause pain. If you keep on eating, you will eventually experience a moment of unpleasant fullness as the stomach distends to a painful degree. Skillful mindful eating involves knowing when to stop eating and involves practice in recognizing the difference between hunger relief, onset of pleasant fullness and onset of unpleasant fullness.
Process-Focus Skills – the Cornerstone of Mindful Eating
Process-focus is the cornerstone of mindful eating know-how. When we eat mindlessly, the body expands (to the extent to which mindless eating leads to overeating) and the mind shrinks (to the extent to which mindless eating denies us the experience of eating). After all being mindless means just that: being of less mind. Mindlessness hides the reality and robs us of the experience. I am sure you are familiar with this experience of having no experience: you get into the car, you start driving, half an hour later you are at your destination, but as you look back you don't remember the actual experience of driving. We've learned not to be puzzled by that. "Highway hypnosis," we think and move on. It's the same with eating, a kitchen-table hypnosis of sorts. You shop, you cook, you set up the meal, you turn the TV on and several mindless minutes later, you are done: your stomach is full but your mind is empty, and you are craving seconds just to have the very experience of eating you missed in the first place. When we eat mindfully, the body shrinks (to the extent to which mindful eating reduces mindless overeating), and the mind expands. After all being mindful means just that: having a full mind. Mindfulness is vision. Mindfulness reveals the reality of what is, in all its nuanced, complex and unique such-ness. Process awareness involves mastery of various pattern-disrupting, awareness-building and habit-modifying techniques to leverage mindfulness of the four aspects of the process of eating (flavor, eating movements, meal setting, and meal script).
Mindful Social Eating Skills: learn how to shift from Social Binge-Eating to Social Savoring and Taste Sampling
Family dinners, eating out with friends, business lunches, diplomatic receptions, neighborhood barbecues, and romantic picnics are some of the classic forms of “social eating.” Sure, eating is a good way to bond – after all, hunger is a common denominator. But for some families, couples and groups of friends, eating has become a relational crutch and the appetite the only feeling to share. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mean to suggest that you become a hermit and never share a meal with anyone. Just beware of the danger of the collective appetite. Social eating is often mindless eating since the discussion over the table usually has nothing to do with the food on the table. Consider shifting the paradigm from social eating to social savoring and cultivate taste sampling skills.
Mindful Emotional Eating Skills – a Harm Reduction Approach
Mindful emotional eating skills, in my opinion, are essential to a healthy relationship with food. You have two options in regard to emotional eating: you can try to eliminate it altogether or you can try to make better use of it by making emotional eating more conscious. The latter would be consistent with the goals of harm reduction, a humanistic form of psychotherapy that offers a pragmatic risk-reduction approach to managing problematic behaviors. Having mindful emotional eating skills can help you leverage more coping per calorie and avoid emotional overeating.
Appetite Control/Pre-loading Skills: learn about Pre-Loading on Smells
Pre-loading skills can help prevent overeating by manipulating fullness. For example, active, conscious smelling of food facilitates a faster onset of fullness (Hirsch, 1998). Try a “noseful-not-mouthful” approach to pre-load on the smell before loading up on the food, using smell as a kind of appetizer. Similarly, explore and experiment with pre-loading on liquids.
Satiety Extension Skills: learn How to Prolong Satiety & Maintain Fullness
When you eat and fill up, you begin to feel fuller, less hungry, satiated. This active, in-the-moment fullness can be recognized through the pleasant or not-so-pleasant distention of your stomach. You are not just not-hungry, you are full. Okay, say it’s now been a couple of hours since you ate. Your stomach is no longer distended and you no longer feel actively full, but you are also not necessarily hungry. You are content, neither hungry nor full. This state can be thought of as fullness, satiety, or, less scientifically, staying power. Different foods have different fullness/satiety values. Some foods tide us over for longer periods of time than others. Holt has introduced the so-called Satiety Index which is a rank-ordering of foodstuffs by their ability to keep us from feeling hungry. Familiarizing yourself with satiety literature can help you develop satiety extension skills that you can use to prevent overeating by maintaining fullness with the help of foods with staying power.
Motivational Maintenance Skills: Anchor your Eating in Your Values and Use Eating as a Platform for Meditation
Long-term wellness changes depend on motivation-maintenance skills. Successful shift to mindful, healthy, conscious eating lifestyle, in my opinion, depends on a development of a Personalized Philosophy of Eating. Having a personal philosophy of eating will help you leverage long-term motivation for change by anchoring eating in your existential and life values. An excellent way to maintain your motivation about mindful eating is to recognize that eating is a meditational opportunity. You see, while eating is physiologically inevitable, mindfulness isn't. Associating eating with mindfulness, one meal at a time, can help you not only manage weight (by reducing mindless overeating) but also to nourish and enrich your mind.
While all of these 10 skill-sets of mindful eating are important, I’d highlight the following five of these ten as absolutely essential (in no particular order): Hunger Recognition, Craving Control, Fullness Recognition, Process Focus, and Mindful Emotional Eating skills.
Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of “Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time” (New Harbinger, 2008) www.eatingthemoment.com