Safe Overeating (a Harm Reduction Approach)
If you are shopping for a hassle-free philosophy of eating, if you resent portion control and calorie counting, you can overeat and not bother with being mindful of fullness as long as you mindfully choose what you will mindlessly overeat! (re-read the italicized part a couple of times to make sure we are on the same page).
Fuhrman, the author of the ground-breaking “Eat to Live,” couldn’t be any more blunt about this: “completely rethink what your idea of portion control is; make it huge” (2003, p. 178).
So, let’s overeat Fuhrman-way! Put together a huge, preferably, organic salad (do go easy on the dressing, though). Turn on the TV and “veg out.” Don’t worry about being mindful of fullness this time. Let's face it: being mindful every time you eat can feel like a hassle - sometimes, you just want to grab something to eat and tune out. That's perfectly understandable! Learning how to indulge in harm-reduced mindless eating is part of the eating know-how. It's akin to consciously choosing to have a designated driver when you know you might get a little carried away on the Friday night. The designated driver in this case is your stomach. With a Fuhrman-style feast in front of you, let your stomach stop you when you are pleasantly or even unpleasantly full. Sounds scary? Have solace in the fact that you’ve already survived this very fear time and time again in the years of overeating. Except this time, you are practicing harm-reduced safe overeating.
Some Food for Thought
The advice to "not overeat" - frankly - teaches you nothing. Harm-reduction approach to eating (including eating to cope) is a process of setting precedents of moderation and control. Abstinence-based approaches to managing overeating are a menu of unsatisfying "don'ts" (e.g. "don't overeat," "don't eat to cope," etc.). Lasting changes require lasting foundation. Abstinence-based (don't-do-this/don't-do-that) approaches try to build a life of meaning on the foundation of self-negation and self-deprivation. In the result, just like absence makes the heart fonder, abstinence makes the forbidden apple seem only sweeter.
You might be able to avoid being in contact with drugs; perhaps, you might even avoid contact with alcohol (by moving to a dry county?); but when it comes to food - this particular 'drug' of temptation is everywhere. It's time we learn to trust ourselves with food. Sure, you can try to never overeat - good luck with that! Or you can try to learn to overeat safely, by mindfully choosing what you will mindlessly eat. No, of course, not at every meal, but now and then when you feel fried, done in, and you just want to eat to cope a bit...
Harm-reduced overeating (as described in this post) is, in essence, yet another form of coping in moderation. If you have it in you to cope through exercise, or yoga, or meditation, then, by all means, do - but if you found yourself at the end of a very long day, too exhausted to cope, and all you want is just a coping pacifier in your mouth, then, so be it. Perhaps, the best way for you to take care of yourself at a moment like that is... to veg out, by mindfully choosing what you will mindlessly overeat...
]]>I invite you to ponder the following question: Who (and what) influences your eating and how?
Ask yourself:
Who triggers me to eat well?
Who encourages me to eat mindfully, to savor, to eat healthy?
Who triggers me to indulge, overeat, go off diet/regimen?
Who gives me the permission to be “bad?”
Who “come-ons” me to “enjoy myself” only to justify their own urge to binge?
Who triggers me to stress-eat, binge-eat, cope-eat, react-eat?
Who do I cope with by eating?
Who is my “junk-food” person?
Who always dials up for a pizza or taunts your appetite with French fries?
Who is my “sweets” person?
Who always bakes cookies, invites me out for ice-cream, or brings in donuts?
Who in my life needs me to eat to connect with me?
Who expresses their love for me through feeding?
Whose eating do I influence and how?
“Bonus” question:
How does your substance use (if any) affect your eating patterns?
Mindful New Year to you all!
]]>There is an intriguing interplay between the setting of the meal and our willingness to enjoy it. One dish, when served in an upscale restaurant, will command far more attention than it will when you have it as a leftover for lunch the following day. A banal slice of baguette dipped into olive oil will evoke more enthusiasm at a restaurant table than it will at the kitchen countertop. Should high dollar caviar be served in the backseat of a car? Heavens no, you might exclaim at the notion of wasting a delicatessen on such a prosaic setting. Note that anyone presenting such an objection is likely to sincerely believe that you will simply not be able to appreciate the delicacy unless your elbows are stationed on a heavily starched linen cloth and your waiter has an endearing foreign accent. But why the heck not?! Why should the physical coordinates of our eating be a factor in our eating experience? Why should we knowingly allow our unconscious to be charmed by the smoke and mirrors of interior design sophistication when it has nothing to do with the interior of our mouths? I concede that while the setting of a meal is not an ingredient of a dish, it certainly can be an ingredient of an eating experience. The sophistication of an eating establishment creates an expectation of quality. This expectation heightens awareness. This heightened awareness becomes a platform for mindful eating. And mindful eating is the best chef. But is it not an insult to our mind that for us to enjoy half-way decent food we have to be primed to expect it to be great?! Is this not a measure of our experiential impotence that we have to rely on presentation to attend to what is already present?!
Rebel against the set-up of the setting, against the setting up of expectations. Rebel against the elegance and eloquence of these Pavlovian bells and whistles that have conditioned us to expect more out of less. If you can’t enjoy caviar or some other exquisite gourmet item in the backseat of your car, throw it away because you can’t enjoy it anywhere. If the backseat of your Ford Taurus is good enough to make love, why is it not good enough to make love to a $250 Fritz Knipschildt dark chocolate truffle?! So, what am I proposing here? If you are going to eat well-heeled food… try eating it in the comfort of your flip-flops. Why? To minimize the distraction of the setting and to allow yourself maximum mindfulness to appreciate the exotic taste.
Pavel Somov, Ph.D./"Eating the Moment" (New Harbinger, 2008)
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“We don’t understand in an intellectual way how sugar tastes. If we have never had the experience of sugar, we don’t know what ‘sweet’ is. We can read many books introducing us to the meaning of ‘sweet,’ and we can learn and construct many ideas, but we can never have a concrete experience of ‘sweet’ in this way.” But: “If we get a small piece of chocolate and place it on our tongue, we can have a concrete experience.” (Dzogchen Teachings, 2006, p. 113).
So, here’s what I propose to you now: put whatever you are doing aside (of course, if you can) and go have a bite of something… mindfully. Remember to open your mind before you open your mouth. Set a precedent of mindful eating and then read about it.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles Moore write in “Indian Philosophy:”
“There is no such thing as pure awareness, raw and undigested. It is always mixed up with layers of interpretation.” (1957, p. 623).
Do you agree? I don’t. So, go grab a bite to taste. Bury yourself in the experience deep enough to forget that you can even think. Slow down to a mind-still. Taste yourself tasting whatever it is you are tasting. Let your interpretations of what is going on vanish raw and undigested. Bungee-jump into your next mouthful like there is no tomorrow.
“Two birds with fair wings, inseparable companions,
have found a refuge in the same sheltering tree.
One incessantly eats from the peepal tree;
the other, not eating, just looks on.”
This verse is from Rg Veda (or Rigveda), an ancient Indian text of sacred hymns. What is this enigmatic passage about? Who is this "other" bird that is not eating and just looking on? While mindful eating is a wonderful vehicle for weight maintenance, it is also an invaluable platform for daily meditation. Eating is inevitable, but mindfulness isn't. When we use eating as an opportunity to awaken ourselves from our zombie-living, we stand to glimpse that elusive, essential sense of self - that silent bird of consciousness - that witnesses our day-to-day behavioral frenzy. Mindful eating - to borrow another metaphor from Indian (Buddhist) philosophy - is an opportunity to glimpse your Original Face, to come in contact with that immutable, changeless, indescribable sense of presence that is the backdrop to everything else we think, feel or do.
What am I proposing? A simple thing, really! As you take your next bite, pull back for a sec, and ask yourself: "Who is this who is eating? Who is this who is right now governing this amazing machinery of flesh that is eating right now? Who is this who is silently supervising this marionette, this puppet of the body as it forks, and knives, and spoons, and chews, and swallows? Who is this who is now asking oneself 'Who is this?'" As you struggle to answer this arguably confusing and recursive question that folds back onto itself, know that you are looking straight into your "original face," that you are acknowledging that fundamental, inexpressible, yet very real sense of self-presence! And this "you," this bird of mindfulness that is looking on, is always full, complete, lacking nothing whatsoever, in its primordial perfection!
Are you still reading?
Stop. Go have a sip of orange juice. And have a taste of self! Feel the unmistakable pulp of this present moment. Feel the acid-sweet poignancy of this moment’s transience.
Here’s Thich Nhat Hahn in “Blooming of a Louts” (1993, 41):
“Aware of my tongue, I breathe in. Aware of the taste of orange juice, I breathe out.”
Yes! Let your tongue of mindfulness speak the language of self-recognition. Have a mindful sip of what still is. Let your tongue speak the language of self-presence. Here you are. Once again. As always. Lingering in the doorway of the gateless gate. Let this mouth moment be your passport into the ever-land of the here-and-now.
Mindful eating isn’t about eating. It’s about being. So, go be! Not later. Now. When else?
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CREATE FRICTION TO WAKE YOURSELF UP
We all like smooth sailing, for things to go just right, without any friction. And, yet, friction can be a nice wake-up call. Gurdjieff encouraged his students to give up “something valuable” but “not forever,” in order to create a constant “friction between a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’” (Ouspensky, 2000, p. 45). So, create friction as a wake-up call to your mind and raise your tolerance for friction. Every day quit something that you like but can easily live without. Make entirely arbitrary choices: avoid any kind of logical rationalization. We are not talking about wellness, but about awareness. Commit to a timeline of no more than a couple of weeks. Here’s the key: feel free to break the commitment any time, as long as this is done via a conscious choice. This isn’t an exercise in self-mortification, but an opportunity to practice de-programming and re-programming yourself. Say, you decide not to use your favorite coffee mug for a couple of weeks. As you reach for it in the morning and experience a moment of friction, you’ll have a moment of what Gurdjieff called self-remembering. You’ll appreciate yourself as the programmer: “That’s right, I used to mindlessly reach for this cup and now I am mindfully resisting this urge to remind myself of the fact that I am in charge of my own programming. I am following my own “should” now!” Ponder how you can use friction to open your mind before you open your mouth!
Be well! Talk to you in December! And thank you for opening your mind to mine.
Pavel
November 6th, 2009
EMOTIONAL EATING ISN'T A PROBLEM, MINDLESS EMOTIONAL EATING IS
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As you might recall from the "Eating the Moment" self-help program for overcoming overeating, there are 3 reasons we eat: just because, mindlessly; to satisfy biological/physiological hunger; and to change how we feel/for emotional reasons. Emotional eating is extremely common. In fact, it is pretty much hard-wired into our eating culture. Take the concept of dessert, for example. What is dessert? Dessert is something yummy, tasty. Does your body need dessert? Of course, not. So, why do we eat desserts? Because we want to enjoy the taste of what we are eating. That's an emotional reason. Dessert is for the mind, not for the body. Same goes for any kind of taste-focused cooking. As a culture, we spend endless hours pursuing various gustatory highlights. Why? Once again, because we want to enjoy what we are eating. That's emotional eating. Why? Because your body doesn't really need for the food to taste good. What your body needs is the right amount of food and a certain combination of nutritional value. Our obsession with the taste of food is nothing other than an attempt to kill two birds with one stone: to fill up our stomach and to caress the palate of your sensation-seeking mind. Nothing's wrong with that! Let cosmonauts eat spam! The point I am making is that emotional eating is pretty much hard-wired into all of our eating. If you want for your food to have a nice taste, let alone if you want a dessert, you are looking at food to satisfy your emotional desires for pleasures. Once again: there is absolutely nothing wrong with that!
Now, you might say: "Hold it, Pavel, you are missing the point! Emotional eating isn't just eating dessert, it's when we eat to cope with stress, anxiety, and all kinds of ego wounds that we sustain in the course of our day-to-day friction with life." You are right. That too is emotional eating. That is exactly how we usually think of emotional eating: eating to cope. But what is coping? Coping is when you make a conscious choice to do something to change how you feel. Pleasure-focused eating that I described above (like when you want to eat food with good taste or when you want a dessert) takes you from feeling okay to feeling some slight enjoyment from yummy food. Coping-focused eating takes you from feeling crappy/bummed out to feeling okay. Sure, these two kinds of eating kick into action at different levels of emotions but the principle remains the same: both (normal, pleasure-focused eating) and coping-focused (emotional self-regulation) eating are ways of using food to change how we feel/to change our emotions. So, here's the party-line: emotional eating is not the problem, it's the emotional overeating that is a problem. Put differently: mindful emotional eating is not a problem, but mindless emotional eating is.
THERE ARE VERY GOOD REASONS WHY EMOTIONAL EATING (EATING TO COPE) WORKS
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Did you know that the mere fact of touching your lips can stimulate the PNS (the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your body that is responsible for relaxation)? Rick Hanson, Ph.D. & Richard Mendius, M.D. note that "touching your lips can also bring up soothing associations of eating or even breastfeeding when you were a baby" (2008, p. 82). Eating (not overeating) as a coping response to stress makes good behavioral and physiological sense. Let's take a closer look.
Eating As a Parasympathetic Activity
From the physiological perspective, a choice to eat can be seen as an attempt to directly manipulate the nervous system, by switching on the part of our wiring that is associated with relaxation and rest. You see, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) of your body consists of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) which is activated during stress and prepares the body for flight or fight, and of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) that is responsible for conservation of energy and rest. A choice to eat can be seen as an attempt to turn on the PNS. While eating has been associated with increases in PNS activity (Uijtdehaage, Stern, and Koch, 1992), the mere act of mindless eating in and of itself is unlikely to turn on the PNS when you are stressed. But mindful, conscious eating might: smell and taste your food to assure maximally prompt activation of the parasympathetic relaxation response.
Answer:
Hi K.:
Is chocolate a stress reducer? There are two ways to answer this: physiologically and psychologically. While there certainly has been research of late into possible psychoactive properties of chocolate, I am not up to date on the findings of that kind of research. So, I am not sure if chocolate works to relieve stress on a physiological level. From a psychological perspective, however, I see a clear stress-reduction pathway through conditioning and expectations.
Whenever we pair up a given stimulus (chocolate, in this case) with a given response (self-care through an episode of emotional eating), we are establishing a potentially reinforceable association and an expectation (that chocolate or some other treat will lead to stress reduction by way of self-care) in the future.
The end result is a potential conditioned stress reduction effect of chocolate or any other treat. That's how emotional eating works. We, in essence, begin to equate eating something pleasant and palatable to self-care: eating becomes coping. Armed with this habit or ritual, we begin to benefit from the conditioned relaxation effects of these rituals. A mere decision to have something pleasant to eat (not out of hunger but as a way of sensorically taking care of yourself - call it the "massage of the mouth," if you wish) might trigger a conditioned relaxation response.
As you are aware, chocolate has become a kind of canonical indulgence food - either due to its intrinsic properties and/or skillful marketing. The result is that when we buy high-end chocolate we intuitively expect a kind of foodgasm, a gustatory highlight, a pleasure... and this expectation in and of itself is the beginning of stress reduction and relaxation. It's no different than knowing that you have a weekend coming up and although any given Friday might be just as tense of a work day as Thursday, the mere promise of pending relief (weekend) begins to make a difference.
Tip: buy the most expensive chocolate. Why? The fancier the presentation, the higher the expectation; the higher the expectation, the more likely you are to be mindful when you eat it (b/c you'd want to get your money's worth); the more mindful you are when you eat chocolate, the more likely you are to slow down and get into the moment of the pleasure, i.e. the more likely it is that you will have a great "eating moment."
Unless you are a World War I pilot, still flying somewhere over Europe, the chances are you are not eating chocolate for fuel, but for pleasure. Whenever we eat for pleasure, by definition, we are engaging in emotional eating. But worry not: emotional eating - in and of itself - isn't a problem, it's the emotional over-eating that is the problem.
Infusing mindfulness into emotional eating leverages more coping per calorie. So, when you indulge, indulge on quality, not quantity.
ps: If you have a question, ask me!
Pavel G. Somov, Ph.D., Licensed Psychologist
Author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating, One Meal at a Time"
www.eatingthemoment.com
contact@drsomov.com
Sentence 1: “The way of life has changed.” Monsieur Picolet equates the way of eating with the way of life. And it certainly is.
Sentence 2: “The French are no longer eating and drinking like the French.” Monsieur Picolet suggests that the way of eating is part of a national character. He is so right!
Sentence 3: “They (the French) are drinking and eating like the Anglo-Saxons.” Monsieur Picolet suggests that even a national character can change (if the French can morph into the Anglo-Saxons, nothing is, indeed, constant in this world – which is an encouraging piece of news for anyone working on changing their eating habits).
Sentence 4: “They (the Anglo-Saxons, the British, the Americans) eat less and spend less time at it.” Monsieur Picolet might be mistaken about the Anglo-Saxons (particularly Americans) eating less than the French, but he is probably right about the Anglo-Saxons (particularly Americans) spending “less time at it.” Thus, Monsieur Picolet suggests that the French way of eating was to take your time at it. Thus, the iconic culture of the cafes with side-walk seating…
So, as the French bid adieu to their café habits, I want to take a brief moment to muse on the psychology of a side-walk café. But, first, let’s establish that you (the reader) and I can relate on this point. If you haven’t nursed a cup of café au lait on a Parisian side-walk, no problem: the chances are you’ve at least had a drink of diet Pepsi at an outside table at the French-sounding bakery-café Panera’s.
Put both bluntly and psychoanalytically, the psychology of a side-walk café is sublimated loitering. Urban nomads don’t bivouac – they buy a cup of coffee. A coffee and maybe a croissant is all you really need to buy yourself a temporary admission to the safe-haven of a side-walk café. With a table, a perpetually half-full cup of coffee, cigarette and, maybe, a newspaper, a Loiterer, an otherwise public nuisance, a person of potential interest to police, is legitimized as a café Patron, and is now free to gawk at whatever he pleases from behind the privacy curtain of his sun shades.
Street side cafes are akin to metered parking which allows a given mind to park its corporeal vehicle of body on a given spot of the side-walk to partake in the ambiance of an urban moment. Indeed, a tea bag sinking to the bottom of a cup becomes a socially-acceptable pretext to cast an anchor in a given moment of time at a given coordinate of the world. This moment of paid lodging is the all-time equalizer of vagabonds and nobles.
At the risk of over-romanticizing, street-side eating is one of the more mindful, graceful and conscious moments of in our eating lives. Invested in staying put, in finishing the voyeuristic peek into the panopticon of human traffic without running up a bill, the street eater takes time: drinks are sipped, not gulped, and food is savored before it’s swallowed.
So, these tables and chairs that are scattered throughout the modern world aren’t eating stations per se but social observation posts - where eating is but a pretext of human proximity. So, dear Monsieur Bernard Picolet, worry not in principle: whether your particular café survives the economic downturn or not, the French “way of life” – if by that you do, indeed, mean taking time to eat, isn’t going anywhere. As long as the nomadic-voyeuristic spirit lives, as long as there remains a drive for a fleeting no-strings-attached social connection, the cafes, coffee shops, bistros, chaikhanas, and hookah bars - with good views and in thehub of human traffic - aren’t going anywhere. People have and will continue to use eating as a pretext to socialize and/or to commune with the nature of the place they happen to be passing through.
(1) Steven Erlanger, “Across France, Café Owners Feel Like the New Miserables,” New York Times, Nov. 23, 2008.
Pavel Somov, Ph.D. Copyright, 2008
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Alinea was opened in 2005 and already a year later was named the country’s best restaurant by Gourmet. Much has been written about Achatz’ culinary innovations in the still evolving genre of molecular gastronomy (“a scientific study of deliciousness,” (Harold McGee)). Not having the savoir-faire of kitchen science journalism, I will only say that this was a clearly exotic tasting experience that I would readily repeat as soon as I can afford to. For a more detailed review of Achatz’ genius, I refer you to Alinea’s press.
I would, however, like to muse on the semantics of the restaurant 's name itself…
The word “alinea” is a typographical character that derives from the Latin off the line and is used as a paragraph sign to mark a new train of thought.
As such, the restaurant name “Alinea” is a logical choice for a bite-sized journey that is Achatz’ cuisine. The restaurant offers two menus – a Tasting and a Tour. Each menu is a stream of gustatory consciousness in which the mind of the Chef takes the pilgrim's palate on an odyssey of fleeting encounters… in which each bite-sized course is a paragraph of mindfulness and a new train of thought…
The resulting experience is that of continuous attention and presence. Alinea is akin to a culinary harem of exotic one-night stands, in which the touch-and-go courses assure that an eater can never bite more than his or her mind can chew… It is a kaleidoscope of subdued Enya-like mood-wafts of taste amidst the uprising thermals of futuristic presentation…
I know, I know – if this sounds poetic, it's because the experience was, indeed, poetry, with each course – nothing more than a stanza; with each course - nothing less than a taste off the line of the Expected – i.e. an alinea.
Alinea – to sum up – is a non-linear eating experience for an open mind.
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