What I am about to suggest is pure clinical conjecture on my part but I suspect that that the very same mechanisms that turned on the civility might be also conducive to more conscious presence.  Indeed, Dr. Liljenquist’s study showed that “subjects in a lemony room were more likely to volunteer with charities and shared more cash with partners in a trust-based exercise.”  In short, lemon scent somehow facilitated volunteering and sharing, two behaviors that seem to accompany mindful, conscious presence.   Indeed, volunteering is an act of conscious, thoughtful,  deliberate  consideration, a moment of mindful analysis of others’ possible needs.  Sharing is a behavior of non-desperation, a behavior accompanied by a sense of contentedness, a kind of social behavior in which the giver probably feels (on some level) that he/she has enough on his/her own.

I am, of course, not familiar with the specific rationale behind Dr. Liljenquist's study (does lemon scent facilitate oxytocin release?) but I encourage you to conduct a simple personal experiment.  Next time you sit down to eat, cut a lemon in half, take a noseful before you eat and see if doing so makes a difference in terms of how mindful you are during the meal.  Or, perhaps, wipe the dining table with lemon-scented surface-cleaner before you eat.  Or you could try using a sprig of fresh thyme  as an incense.  If you detect an increase in the “civility” of your eating, come back and share your experience.  If you find no difference, come back and tell me that this hypothesis is a lemon. 

Here we go.  Choose the timing and, having curled your fingers into a gentle fist, knock on your guy’s mind-door.  He’d ask (we hope): “Who’s there?”  “You, honey,” you’d say, to awaken him to his own presence (we can only hope, of course, that he knows that he is on the inside, not the outside).  In other words, confuse him with a joke of your choice or any other gesture … And then say: “I love you and I want you to start taking care of yourself … There’s this book on mindful eating, you should read it …”  Two things are likely to happen at this point: he will either agree (if so, good, end of exchange) or (which is what I predict) he will shake his head right off the bat and give you objections.  This is where the tip sheet “on how to get your guy to read a book on mindful eating” comes in.

1. If your guy says he doesn’t want to eat any “vegan crap,” explain – in as few words as possible – that he won’t have to watch his portions or change what he eats, that the book is about the “how” of eating.  Let him chew on that a bit.
2. If your guy says that he’s “got it under control,” smile (non-patronizingly) and emphatically add that this book is about respecting our sense of sovereignty, that, for all intents and purposes, it is libertarian self-help, that it’s not preachy and that it respects any self-change at any pace.
3. If your guy starts with character assassinations of the author he hasn’t met and calls the author “just another Buddhist-health-nut-foodie-Nazi,” tell him that my favorite pastime is to lay down on the floor with a bowl of wasabi peas and watch South Park, that I don’t consider myself a Buddhist or a non-Buddhist, for that matter.  On the “health-nut” point you can tell your guy that while the author did bench-press 400 lbs. in Allegheny County Jail in 2002 (while working as a drug and alcohol counselor, a fact that can be attested by Correctional Officer Correy), he can hardly get through a session of P90X without taking a long break.
4. If your guy continues with character assassination on the author and questions his (author’s) sexual orientation, you can assure him that the author had been blissfully married for 18 years and, just to help the guy relate, add that pretty much throughout this entire time the author sported a pair of love handles (of varying size).
5. If your guy questions the author’s motives accusing Dr. Somov that he just wants to sell his books, tell him that Dr. Somov will admit any time that he wants to sell his books and add that Dr. Somov also made a point to plug other guys’ books on mindful eating (such as Meal by Meal by Donald Altman or Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink).
6. If your guy says that he probably won’t be able to relate to the author because his name is strange and that he probably doesn’t like American football, tell your guy that the author still has all ten fingers on his hands, puts his boxers on one leg at a time (unless he goes “commando”) and, most importantly, that the author was on Carson Street, more than tipsy, on January 25^th of 2009, the night the Steelers won their 6^th Superbowl!  You can also add that the author would watch water polo into the night if they only televised it.
7. If your guy, all of a sudden, says “A-ha!” and triumphantly adds that they do televise water polo, tell him that he is just bickering.
8. If your guy still insists that he won’t be able to relate to the author, proposing that the author is probably just another stuck-up Ph.D., tell him that the author doesn’t even believe in the concept of “self” (in the traditional sense), and, for good measure, tell him that the author did not think it below himself to pick up cigarette butts from the street at the tender age of 8 when he experimented with smoking, and that he is still tempted to do that (but now, for an entirely different reason of eco-consciousness).  And tell him the author currently enjoys driving a used Hyundai Elantra, and admits to having once had a penchant for expensive sedans (that he would always fiercely haggle down in price and never wash).
9. If your guy still insists that he wouldn’t be able to relate to the author because the author probably listens to strange music, tell your guy that the author can just as easily groove to Deep Purple’s “Smoke On the Water” as to old-school Dr. Dre, and, in the spirit of full admission, tell your guy that the author right now – as he is writing this – is grooving to a Tinariwen track (from Saharan “poet guitarists and soul rebels”) that (regardless of what critics say) sounds (to author’s ear) as a brilliant mixture of Delta blues, reggae, and nomadic consciousness.
10. Now, if your guy still is not interested, bombard him with the following potpourri of author-trivia that might peak his interest (because guys tend to like this kind of irrelevant info-junk): tell him the author served in the Soviet OMSBON (in a formerly celebrated military unit that, by author’s admission, was nothing more than glorified military police on his watch);  tell your guy that the author bought his last Timex watch in Laramie, WY Wal-Mart on sale for $39.99 back in 2000 and still wears it, as jewelry, even though it had been needing a battery since 2004; tell your guy that the author does polar-bear swimming and has built himself an ice-box in his backyard (which totally froze up this past winter, so the author had to just limit himself to taking cold showers); and, finally, after a wry smile, tell your guy that the author has this strange notion that … everybody is already perfect and doing their best, so there’s really no pressure.  That last bit is bound to get your guy to think that the author is just crazy enough to check out.

This should do it, I think.  Bottom-line: talk to your guy, and if you don’t have a guy, talk to your “inner guy.”  Get yourself out of your own way.  Go ahead and knock on that mind-door, see who opens it …

Emotional eating is utterly misunderstood and unnecessarily demonized. Emotional eating isn’t the problem, it's emotional overeating and mindless emotional eating are the problem. Furthermore, emotional eating is simply inevitable. I propose: we learn to use it in moderation.

Emotional Eating is Inevitable

Whether we eat or overeat, whether we eat when hungry or when mindlessly triggered (by any number of environmental stimuli that are designed to pull the strings of our appetite), whether we eat mindfully or mindlessly, one thing is clear: we only eat what we like.  In other words, we all eat for taste.  Indeed, when we shop we buy only what we like and want to eat.  Even the most health-conscious are guiding their food selections on the basis of taste.  How something tastes is a hedonic consideration, i.e. a fundamentally emotional consideration.

Let’s face it: your body doesn’t give a hoot whether you eat what tastes good or not so good, as long as food isn’t rotten.  Taste is mind-business.  Whatever we eat, however mindlessly or mindfully we eat it, we only eat it if it tastes good, i.e. gives us a good feeling, a feeling of pleasure.  Even zero-calorie mud-cakes of the third world countries are flavored with butter for taste as you enjoy the illusion of fullness.  Bottom-line: all of us, mindful-eating writers, mindful-eating readers, foodies, you name it, all of us are eating for pleasure.  Emotional eating is inevitable.

Now, if we hit a period of true starvation, sure we might switch to boiling leather belts and shoe-laces, but, if you have an internet connection to be reading this, chances are that everything that you eat, you mentally pre-screen for taste.  So, let us once and for all bury this behaviorally unrealistic goal of entirely eliminating emotional eating.  You have been eating for pleasure and you will continue to eat for pleasure, i.e. for emotional reasons (think dessert, for example), unless, of course, you are into moralizing, stoic, self-punishment, in which case you can righteously eat last week's borsch for dessert.

I repeat: the problem isn’t emotional eating, the problem is mindless emotional eating which leads to emotional over-eating.

Emotional Eating Is Coping

Aside from normally-hedonistic emotional eating that we all engage in, day in and day out, some of us also eat to cope, i.e. not just for emotional pleasure but to reduce emotional distress.  Eating for pleasure or eating to reduce distress are two sides of the same coin but our dichotomous minds (not without some help from self-help authors) divide this indivisible coin in half.  This, of course, creates the twilight of hypocrisy.  On one hand, we are encouraged to slow down and savor the food we eat – i.e. to enjoy it (which is mind-business).  On the other hand, we are told to never eat for emotional reasons.  If this sounds like nonsense, it’s because it is.  Any pursuit of well-being is simultaneously a reduction of distress and vice versa.

But at any rate, it is this form of emotional eating that came to be demonized in self-help literature.  Emotional eating with the explicit goal of alleviating emotional distress – motivationally – is a form of self-care and, as such, it needs to be celebrated and welcomed.

Say you feel depressed, so you sit down to eat.  This is a step towards self-care and just because someone other than you or even you at a different point in time could cope via, say, exercise or meditation or support, it doesn’t mean that right this very moment you can.  If you could have more resources at this very moment, if you could be right now psychologically-healthier than you are, you wouldn’t be you, but you are you, not some theoretical you or abstract you, not the you the way you used to be, not the you you would like to be, but this here-and-now/real-time you, doing your best with what you got.

I don’t know about you, but I am willing to celebrate any coping, self-care moment, however theoretically imperfect it might be.  I know you are doing your best (yes, without knowing you!), which is good enough for me, and I hope it can eventually feel like it’s good enough for you too.  To sum up, before we continue, emotional eating isn’t about self-destruction but about self-care (which is good news) and emotional eating, as a form of coping, can be fine-tuned (which is even better news).

Emotional Eating Works!

Before we talk about how to fine-tune emotional eating, let’s pause to appreciate why it’s so appealing as a coping strategy.

PACIFIER = ORAL COPING:  From day one, feeding has been a default parenting intervention and the pacifier has been our first coping tool.

FEEDING = CARING: Many cultures explicitly equate feeding with caring.  So then, why is it that it is okay to show your care for others by feeding them, but self-feeding is not an acceptable form of self-care?!  If food is love, of course, food is self-love…

MEAL-TIME = SUPPORT-TIME: We have been conditioning ourselves to see eating as a family ritual, as a time of togetherness, as an opportunity for social relating and belonging, as a means to emotional well-being.

EATING = GROUNDING: Eating is a ritual, and as such it’s comforting in its predictability.  Also eating is a sensation-rich, unambiguously physical activity.  As such, eating is an effective reality check at a time of uncertainty or confusion, a behavior that grounds and centers a suffering mind.

EATING = RELAXING: 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.  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, rest and relaxation.   Did you know, for example, 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., in their book “Buddha’s Brain,” note that merely "touching your lips can also bring up soothing associations of eating or even breastfeeding when you were a baby" (2008, p. 82).

Mindful Emotional Eating: Leveraging More Coping Per Calorie

All coping can be viewed as a cost-to-benefit ratio: you give something up (say, time when you sit down to meditate) in order to get something (say, peace of mind).  Same with emotional eating as a coping strategy: you reduce distress at a possible weight gain, a change of mind at a possible expense to body.  The idea behind mindful emotional eating is to leverage more coping per calorie, i.e. to make emotional eating more effective.  How?  By making it more mindful.  How?  The short of this can be expressed as the following set of five principles:

1. when eating to cope with emotions, accept emotional eating as a legitimate coping choice, not a coping failure;
2. when eating to cope, first activate the parasympathetic response through relaxation
3. when eating to cope with emotions, follow a predictable eating ritual, with clear start and end points;
4. when eating to cope, whenever possible, try to do so in company, not in hiding
5. when eating to cope with emotions, remember that emotional eating does not have to mean emotional overeating.

Now, this is just a map, not a turn-by-turn MapQuest itinerary for change.  Simply reading through this, of course, isn’t going to change anything: mindless reading about mindful eating is pointless.  Building of a new habit involves a process – in this case, a series of mindful emotional eating precedents – which, in a manner of speaking, lay down the habit-tracks for your future coping behavior to run on.  So, you’ll have to research the experiential nuts and bolts of this on your own.  My goal – at this point – is to merely help you re-think emotional eating, and, most importantly, to de-pathologize it.

Non-Objection: “Emotional Eating is Mind-Gain at Body-Cost.”  What Isn’t It?!

When presented with the reframe that emotional eating is a form of self-care, I frequently hear this objection: “emotional eating is kind of self-care that takes care of the mind at the cost to the body.”  Of course, it does!  And, come to think of it, what doesn’t?  Most of us are constantly taking care of our minds at the expense of the body.  Take any extreme sport for example: you go skiing or rock-climbing – for mind’s fun – at the possible expense of paralysis.  Or, you decide to run a marathon just to feel good about yourself, to feel accomplished, while knowing all along that it is probably not all that healthy for your knees.  Right?  Right.  Forget the extreme sports and take the example of something less extreme.  Sex – on a physiological level – is a pretty violent process.  Heart rate goes up and all that somatic arousal jazz.  Right?  Right.  So, what are we supposed to do?  Get a permission from a cardiologist every time?  

If these examples of putting  mind over body didn’t do it for you, ponder the mind-over-body priorities that come with everything we consider heroic: soldier/policeperson/fireperson putting body in jeopardy to make a difference for the mind (e.g. in pursuit of freedom, duty, etc.).

Let’s face it: from long hours at work to long hours in the gym, we are constantly paying with body for mind’s gains.  And, as far as I am concerned, that’s existentially and psychologically healthy.  A mind that is doing the opposite – sacrificing mental wellbeing for physical wellbeing – is either mindless or vain.  On the other hand, a mind that is taking care of itself and paying for its psychological wellbeing with body, knows itself from what it isn’t.

Sure, emotional eating is just oral coping, just an adult version of thumb-sucking, but who are we, after all, the consciousness that tries to change its distressed mind with the help of hand-to-mouth self-feeding or the thumb we metaphorically suck?  Who are we: the Psyche or the Achilles’ heel?  (There I go, once again, with rhetorical questions.  But, just as a heads-up, we aren’t past the last one of them in this essay).  Of course, we aren’t the thumbs we suck, we aren’t our bodies, which is why we can gain and lose weight up and down and left and right and still feel the same way about ourselves.  Body is mind’s money and that’s why mind is throwing it around.  But it doesn’t have to, which is the point of this writing.  You can learn to both take care of your mind with emotional eating and not overpay with your body.   How?  Once again: by making your emotional eating more mindful, i.e. by leveraging more coping per calorie.

Middle-Way Psychology

There’s a good chance that all of this radically contradicts just about everything you’ve read about emotional eating and that’s okay. In inviting you to shift this paradigm, I would like to also remind you that the idea of moderation is as old as the world.  Remember the story of historical Buddha: he went from a life of indulgence to a life of anorexic-ascetic to a final realization of the importance of Middle Way and staying away from extremes.  Never eating to cope – as I see it – is an unrealistic extreme.  Eating to cope mindfully is Middle-Way.  Remember Aristotle?  He too talked about the “golden mean” and the importance of balance and non-excess.  Self-restriction of eating, in general, or of eating to cope, in particular, is a set up for overeating and emotional overeating, respectively.

Steady Your Coping Paradigm

Of course, you don’t have to cope by eating.  If you can cope without eating, then, of course, do.  But if you can’t, consider optimizing your emotional eating coping. Or run the risk of self-denial that, as you have probably figured out, is an extreme that boomerangs with emotional over-eating.  Your coping is only as steady as the coping paradigm you stand on.  For years, you’ve been hearing from self-help authors and your therapists to stay away from such absolutizing words as “always” or “never.”  Time to take self-help extremism out of self-help.  Next time you hear or read something along the lines that you should never, ever eat to cope, that you should always avoid emotional eating, think Middle-Way.

Golden Age of Moderation

It might not be immediately obvious but the pulse of Western self-help literature is beginning to shift from all-or-nothing, black-and-white, unnecessarily-Stoic extremes of self-improvement towards Middle-Way psychology of self-acceptance and moderation.  In closing, let me highlight the work of a fellow psychologist, Dr. Linda Craighead, the only self-help author on the topic of overeating who, to my knowledge, is too shifting the paradigm of emotional eating towards a position of balanced moderation.  Here’s a sample of her provocative clarity about what she herself calls Effective Emotional Eating:

¨  “You don’t need to completely eliminate emotional eating.  You can learn to use food more effectively to feel better occasionally without relying on it to fix all your feelings. Deciding to have a treat may be the most viable option you have in certain situations”

¨  “Eating for emotional reasons is viewed as an acceptable coping strategy provided that you are able to stop at moderate fullness and that you don’t’ use this strategy all the time.”

¨  “When nonfood alternatives are not easily available or are not working for you, you are encouraged to make a conscious decision to allow yourself self-soothing eating.”

I emphatically concur.  The golden age of non-perfectionistic self-care, in general, and non-judgmental attitudes about emotional eating, in particular, is upon us.

I started this essay with a rhetorical question and I’ll close it with a rhetorical question: will you, overeater, be a part of this new mindful-and-effective emotional eating paradigm or will you keep beating yourself up for trying to take care of yourself?

Resources:

Self-Acceptance Manifesto

Mindful Eating Tracker

The hand-to-mouth eating motion is just as automated as our bipedal loco-motion.  It’s, pardon my Spanish, loco to think that merely reading about mindful eating will do you any good.  It won’t, not without an experiential journey to accompany your insights.  After all, to walk, it's not just enough to have wings of intention, but you also have to have fairly well-conditioned hamstrings and a path of change long enough to get you to your destination.

Consider this: you have invested literally a lifetime into mindless eating.  It's gonna take you a few clicks to override your mindless eating reflex with a habit of mindful eating.  It's a marathon not a Blitzkrieg, a process of deciding to be mindful, time and again, not a one-time decision to stop being mindless.

The goal is simple: to set one mindful eating precedent at each meal.  Most of us eat at least 3 times a day.  If you have a mindful eating exercise to try at each meal, that’s about 1,000 mindful eating precedents (just rounding up 365 days worth of 3 mindful eating precedents per day).  Imagine how far a 1,000 precedents of change will get you!

To date, I have finished three self-help books, one page at a time.  Not that it's any big deal -- just grist for the mill to make the point below.  Eating the Moment -- on overcoming overeating one meal at a time; Present Perfect -- on overcoming perfectionism one self-evaluation at a time; and The Lotus Effect -- on overcoming an identity crisis one self-description at a time.  I am working on my fourth: Smoke Break -- on overcoming smoking one craving at a time.  You see the pattern?

Each book is an experiential curriculum, each book featuring well over 100 exercises, meditations, practices, and activities.  Eating the Moment – in particular –  features 141 mindful practices, with each “mindful practice” having alternate forms, which allows a reader (interested in systematic, methodical, non-impulsive change) to have a practice/exercise to try at each and every meal.

Why am I sharing all this math, these writing notes of a self-help author?  To highlight the importance of experiential homework.  Both as a writer, reader, clinician and a do-it-yourself self-changer myself, I cannot emphasize enough the absolute necessity of experiential homework.  Sure, epiphanies happen.  Sure, people do, now and then, have a 180-degree  turnaround on a dime.  But that’s rare.  More often than not, change is built 1 precedent at a time.

So, here’s the  staging itinerary of this change journey, if you are working on mindful eating (and not just mindlessly reading about it):

Phase 1: Informational  Awareness: “I know about mindful eating.  I tried it…” -- learn about the nuts and bolts of mindful eating, about its endless nuances and subtleties.

Phase 2: Experiential Awareness: “I experienced mindful eating, saw that it is useful, and I am trying to integrate it into my eating life…” -- shop the approach, try it for size, pilot mindful eating for a bit to see if it makes any difference for you and if it does, commit to turning it into second nature.  In other words, build a new reflex: a reflex of mindfulness, of presence whenever you open your mouth to eat.

Phase 3: Habitual Application: “I developed a habit of mindful eating -- whenever I eat, instead of tuning out, I tune it to eating & to myself!” -- ride the new habit to sunset.

Anything short of this is cheating yourself, and why would you do that?

Habits aren’t changed, they are built, just like the proverbial Rome, over many, many days.  How many?  My guess: about a year worth of days, about a 1,000 precedents of change per habit.  Is this a random number?  Yes.  What’s my basis for it?  An ancient saying that you’ve heard a million times: a road of a 1000 miles begins with 1 step. Time to take it:

Resources:

Mindful Eating Tracker

3 Problems with Craving Control Based on Self-Talk

Craving is emotional reasoning.  Self-talk, however, is a method of logical reasoning.  Self-talk is a collision of emotion and logic.  You’ve seen this happen inter-personally (between people): when person is all emotion and the other is all reason, it’s not a pretty clash.  The same problem carries over into the intra-personal application of self-talk (when you talk to yourself): the clash of logic and emotion only dials up the inner tension.

In its reliance on logic and reason, self-talk, as a craving control strategy, 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 when your mind’s wisdom has been reduced to a nutritional tantrum of “I want!”

The second problem with self-talk is that it… divides  and fragments us.  Indeed, by definition, self-talk is a method of self-persuasion.  You are selling to yourself.  As such, self-talk inevitably splits us a salesperson and a customer, into an angel on one shoulder and devil on the other.  Divided, no one stands the sales pitch too long.

Finally, self-talk tends to be chaotic and unorganized.  So, exactly when it counts, such as when you are having an intense craving (to over-eat, to over-drink, to over-express yourself), you end up having to think on your feet.  So, here you are – psychologically on fire – having to play the chess of strategic, long-term thinking…. Such a make-it-or-break-it moment is a time for decisive action not a moment to improvise.

In sum, self-talk as a craving control/impulse-control strategy, with its endless, back-and-forth sparring between reason and emotion is like a tiring tug-of-war.  In my work, I recommend that you drop the rope (of this self-talk tug-of-war) and try out other craving control strategies such as relaxation or mindfulness or a combination of these two.  But now and then, when clients have a history of using self-talk and seem to favor it, I help them optimize it. 

2 Strategies for Optimizing Self-Talk Craving-Control

This is based on the work I’ve done with chronic substance use folks while working in a correctional system good seven-eight years ago (Somov, Change/Recovery Equation, 2003).  As part of lapse/relapse prevention training, I and my staff would offer intense craving control training, offering all four craving control modalities (self-talk, distraction, relaxation, and mindfulness). 

When it came to self-talk, I recommended two broad strategies for optimizing it:

1) take the “improve” out of it, and

2) distill self-talk down to a personalized “party line” and over-learn it.   

So, we’d work with inmates helping them, first, articulate their self-talk, then, edit it down to a personally sentimental punch-line; then, we’d give the inmate-clients a chance to record a lapse/relapse prevention memo tape with a craving-control module which, among other things, featured this turbo-charged self-talk. 

The guys (it was all guys) would keep the tape and take it with them when released.  While still on the treatment pod (cell-block), they’d be free to check out a hand-held tape recorder to record, to re-record and to listen to their own tapes in order to program their minds for recovery upon release from the jail.

Here’s how you can optimize self-talk craving control (note: the suggestions below are written with overeating problems in mind, feel free to edit the wording to apply it to whatever impulse/craving problem you or your clients may have).

CREATE SELF-TALK SCRIPT:  Take the “improve” out of self-talk.  Leverage the usefulness of self-talk by formalizing it into a script.  Brainstorm various self-affirmations, self-motivational statements, catch phrases, health-oriented slogans and wellness party lines.  Combine the most poignant ideas into a self-talk script.  Write them down and practice saying this self-talk script until you memorize it.  Next time you have a craving, try to talk yourself out of eating by repeating to yourself your entire self-talk script mantra-style.  Take the quesswork out of your craving control self-talk!

RECORD AND PLAY-BACK: Record your self-talk script and get into a habit of playing it back both preventively when you anticipate cravings to arise and in response to cravings.  Experiment with shorter and longer versions of the self-talk script.  Take charge of programming your mind.  If struggling with post-work binge-eating or nighttime overeating, for example, listen to the script on the drive home to get into a healthy state of mind as you walk through the door.

Question Remains: Who’s this Self that’s Talking to Oneself?

You have thoughts, right?  Question is: who’s thinking them?  Using thoughts to change how you feel and/or act is a cognitive strategy that relies on thoughts, not on the Thinker of these thoughts. 

This is, as I see it, a fundamental limitation of the cognitive camp.  There is more to us than just our thoughts.  You’ve had all kinds of thoughts pass through your mind in the course of your life – some felt good, some felt bad.  Question is: who is feeling these thoughts?  Feelings themselves?  Yeah, right! 

Who you are is a profound philosophical question and any answer to this question is just a finger pointing to the moon and no finger pointing to the moon is the moon itself.  Any self-definition is a description of self but a description isn’t that/who it describes. 

Mindfulness – as a craving control strategy – begins where self-talk leaves off.   Whereas self-talk is a cognitive strategy, mindfulness is a meta-cognitive strategy, i.e. it is above or aside from cognition. You’ve heard people say: “step back from your thoughts.” That’s an invitation into a state of meta-cognition, an invitation into a state in which you experience yourself as separate from your thoughts, a state in which there is nothing to do about a craving thought but to merely witness it pass.  This is what makes mindfulness (or meta-cognition), in my clinical opinion, superior to self-talk, distraction, and even relaxation. 

All of four craving control strategies (self-talk, distraction, relaxation, mindfulness/metacognition) are just different roads to craving-control Rome.  Make no mistake: if used, they will all get you to a place of self-control.  But some of these paths are shorter than others, some are better paved. 

As far as craving-control highways go, mindfulness is an autobahn.  It is a way of controlling cravings by not controlling them.  It’s a way of dropping the rope of this to-use-or-not-to-use, to-overeat-or-not-to-overeat tug-of-war; it’s a way of stepping out of this reason-on-logic duke-it-out match.  In short, mindfulness is a short-cut to craving-control Rome.   That said, if, however, you are planning to take the self-talk route, at least, pack well!

References/Resources:

1st step: empower yourself

Somov, P. G. (2008).  A Psychodrama Group for Substance Use Relapse Prevention Training.  The Arts in Psychotherapy, 38, 151-161.

Somov, P.G. (2007).  Meaning of Life Group: Group Application of Logotherapy for Substance Use Treatment.  Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 32 (4), 316 – 345.

Somov, P. & Somova, M. (2003). Recovery Equation: Motivational Enhancement, Choice Awareness, Use Prevention: an Innovative Clinical Curriculum for Substance Use Treatment. Imprint Books, ISBN: 1594571929

Mind, just like stomach, is subject to conditioning and programming. Ivan Pavlov, the first psychologist to be awarded a Nobel prize for the theory of Classical Conditioning in 1904, understood that the mind (just like body) imprints onto environmental stimuli like an orphan duckling and that the environment always works to enslave the mind in return. Pavlov, a Russian who knew his Slavic history, understood the stimulus-response dynamics of slavery. Let us break for a bit of etymological safari to clarify the sentence above.

Slave (n). circa 1290, "person who is the property of another," from O.Fr. esclave, from M.L. Sclavus "slave" (cf. It. schiavo, Fr. esclave, Sp. esclavo), originally "Slav," so called because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples.

(continue the mind-flow)

Pavlov, a Slav-descendant of slaves, whose scientific career spanned from pre-Soviet Russia into the era of Stalinist purges, did not allow himself to be turned into a propaganda dog of cultural conditioning. Instead he openly barked on the fast-growing sequoia of Stalinist dictatorship. While treasured by Lenin, Pavlov was only being tolerated by Lenin's successor, Stalin, but he refused to be conditioned and to have his mind enslaved. Pavlov, ever a free-mind responsible for his own de-programming and re-programming, wrote appeal-letters to no one less than Stalin, in what would have been construed, by the standards of that time, as nothing less than a daring tone. He knew how not to be a robot. Let us break for another bit of etymological safari to clarify the sentence above.

Robot (n). 1923, from Eng. translation of 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots"), by Karel Capek (1890-1938), from Czech robotnik "slave," from robota "forced labor, drudgery," from robotiti "to work, drudge," from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude," from rabu "slave."

(continue mind-flow)

The Soviets (just like Nazis) knew how to build a reflex. We did send up a couple of well-trained Pavlov-dogs into space - no small feat! We knew how to tow a party-line, but, as descendants of slaves, we also knew how to rebel against mind-numbing. The tradition of Soviet dissidence counts among its fallen hundreds of thousands of minds that dared not to be conditioned. During the Gulag days of the USSR, minds that refused to become robots became slaves in the Gulag. In the post-Gulag days, minds that refused to be conditioned turned off the TV and had heated debates about what's what in the privacy of Russian kitchens. Which brings me full-circle back to Pavlov's classical conditioning. But, as you guessed, let us break for yet another bit of etymological safari.

Paul (n.). masc. proper name, from L. Paulum (nom. Paulus), literally "small" (see paucity). Cf. O.Fr. Pol, It. Paolo, Sp. Pablo, Rus. Pavel

(continue mind-flow)

Pavlov, semantically a son of "small," "is a pillar of modern psychology and his contribution to this discipline is, probably larger than the contribution of any other person with the exception of Freud" (as Rubin Ardila noted in American Psychologsit in1969). I, just another English-speaking Russian with a name "Pavel," born in 1969, the year of American moon-landing, am positioned to make a much smaller difference, but one that, I believe, might be of personal interest to you. As you have noticed from the arguably strange format of this writing, there is a certain kind of circularity to it: I tell you something, I get your mind-flow going making new associations between familiar words that, hopefully, lead to, not exactly epiphanies, but minor yet possibly useful insights. And then bam! We pause for some silly etymological safari and look into the history of words. We break the mind-flow, awaken a bit, and then continue the mind-flow. What's happening here is designed to parallel the process of de-conditioning/re-conditioning that just might come in handy with the problem of overeating. That's right, my dear reader, I am still writing about mindless eating and how to make it mindful. You see, mindless eating is a classic conditioned reflex: for example, if you eat in front of TV, then after a while, TV and eating become associated with each other, so that when you turn on the TV, you automatically turn on your appetite and vice versa, when you sit down to eat, you turn on your appetite for TV. The result is - you guessed it - mindless programming and conditioning of the mind to go blank when you open your mouth. Let us break for one final etymology safari before we summarize all this tangential sleight-of-words into practical advice.

Television (n). formed in English or borrowed from Fr. télévision, from tele- + vision. The word "tele" stems from Greek tele- which means "far, far off." The word "vision" stems from videre "to see," from Proto-Indo-European base weid- which means "to know, to see" (e.g. Sankrit veda "I know").

(continue mind-flow)

As you see, the word "television" basically means "seeing what is not here," i.e. not seeing and not knowing what is here and now right in front of you. The Soviet way of de-programming from cultural programming was to come home, boil a few potatoes, warm up yesterday's cutlets and/or borsch, to maybe pour yourself a shot-glass of vodka or, for minors, a glass mug of kvas, and to talk about the Orwellian nonsense that is happening outside the family's kitchen, about where to find a pair of American denim jeans that fade on knees so as to not remain on slave-knees of Soviet propaganda. I'm stereotyping my own people, of course, but I don't think they are that ego-frail to mind. In a nutshell, the Soviets kept themselves awake... over eating... by turning off the official TV and tuning in to each other and their own selves. The American way, unfortunately, is in just the opposite direction: the land of the free has been enslaved by TV, by watching what is not here and by mindlessly ignoring what is in front of one's own nose. American mind, for decades, is being programmed to be an eating zombie. Americans aren't to blame: after all it was another Russian scientist, Boris Rosing, who invented the cathode ray tube in 1907 and gave the world a slave-driver in each living room.

So, here's my small, name-proportionate, attempt at waking up the sleeping/overeating beauty of America: make a small change, kill the TV-eating reflex. How? For starters, eat in the kitchen, not in the living room. Reclaim your eating moments one meal a time: small changes, you know, add up to new reflexes.

Break the pattern to restore your mind-flow. Program the following noun for yourself:

Self (n). - a slave to eating or a master of eating?

Make a choice of what to serve yourself: a sense of self-presence or another portion of mindlessness. Break out of your associative chains! Is it doable? Heck, you guys put a man on the moon...

Resources:

Mindful Eating Tracker
(workshops in PA, MD, NJ, VA in April-May 2010)

References:

Etymonline.com

Ruben Ardila, Nobel Prizes for Psychologists, American Psychologists, 1969, 24, pp. 604-605

Of course, you always had a choice to surrender but then, as now, I enjoyed this strange challenge: with practically no footprint to call my own, with barely enough Russian soil underneath a single tippy toe, I’d have to stabilize my balance and then fling a knife into my opponent’s turf.  That’s right: you had to be grounded on your own turf to play and as your life-space diminished, it’d be harder and harder to balance yourself to play.  But that wasn’t the end of the challenge: even if you managed to balance yourself on your tiny bit of turf, and even if you managed to “stand” the knife, you still had to be able to reach over well into the enemy territory to carefully carve out the turf you won (from wherever the knife “stands” to the edge of the circle) – all without ever stepping onto your opponent’s turf until it has officially became yours.  Bottom-line: you had to make sure not to over-reach with your throws.  If, in desperation to win back, you over-reached and “stood” your knife too far for you to reach, you got penalized by a loss of turn.

“Nozhichki” taught me that satisfaction of our needs has a cost to others (“zero-sum”), the importance of balancing appetite, and not to wear sandals.  Speaking of appetite and zero-sum …

Ahimsa, a Sanskrit term that means “avoidance of violence,” is an ancient doctrine of compassion, a pre-Christian “thou shall not kill” commandment that dates back to Vedic teachings and applies to all living beings.  Ahimsa is not a do-no-harm philosophy; there is no such thing as a free lunch or a free breath. If you have a lung, if you are living, you are consuming resources, consuming other life.  Ahimsa is a harm-reduction philosophy that aims to minimize your footprint in the ecosystem to a bare minimum.

In Jain tradition, an Indian worldview that predates Buddhism, the doctrine of ahimsa took the form of vegetarianism and veganism.  Ahimsa-eating is ethical eating, a way of eating that doesn’t monopolize the circle of life.  Jains quite rationally reasoned that to eat is to take life, i.e. to kill, i.e. to start a chain of karmic vendetta, a cause-and-effect boomerang.

In formulating their life-stance, Jains drew arguably an arbitrary line of division: they looked around and basically decided not to eat anything that looks like them or, rather, looks at them.  A simple way to draw a visual line of distinction between flora and fauna is whether you have eyes or not.  I know I am oversimplifying (but it’s a blog, after all, not a dissertation): Jains basically decided not to eat what they can identify with, not to kill-to-eat animals or insects, their bio-kin, and went vegetarian and/or vegan.  They figured that since a banana, doesn’t look/yell back at you in pain when torn off the stem, then it must not hurt and, therefore, it must not be all that karmically bad to consume it.  This makes sense.  Compassion is, indeed, based on identification: the more you can identify with, the more you can forgive; if you can’t identify with something, it’s easier to be violent with it.  Bottom-line is that Jains voted against eating animals both out of compassion for animals and in a self-serving attempt to minimize their own karmic/moral footprint.  So, they stopped playing “nozhichki” with their kin, put away their hunting swords and switched to farming sickles.

So, ahimsa-style eating, non-violent eating, has come to be synonymous with vegetarianism and veganism, i.e. with what you eat and don’t eat.  Unfortunately, I think this misses the point: the point of conscious moderation.  Ahimsa-style eating – as I understand it – isn’t about what you eat and don’t eat but about how you eat.  If you eat mindlessly, you over-consume, no matter what you eat.  Whether your eating kills more cows then necessary or mows down more rice fields than necessary, mindless eating is violent overconsumption.  Mindful eating, on the other hand, allows you to curb your over-consumption and, consequently, to minimize your zero-sum footprint to a functional minimum.

I’ve been eating vegetarian for the last ten years, with at least five (not necessarily consecutive) of these years, eating vegan.  I’ve also had a few sticks of beef jerky while motoring up and down on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a couple of occasions.  I don’t care how you conceptualize my eating style nor do I care what you yourself eat, as long as you consciously balance your footprint to a co-existing minimum.  To over-eat is to over-consume, i.e. to trespass on the life-turf you really don’t need to carve up and conquer, i.e. to engage in unnecessary violence.  You don’t have to be a vegetarian or a vegan to eat with compassion, you just have to be mindful.  So, unless you find a way to sustain yourself on blue packets of synthetic Equal, recognize that anything that moves and breathes underneath the azure sky is equally alive.  Reconsider moderation as compassion.  Enough said lest I over-kill the point.

Resources

Mindful Eating Tracker

360 Degrees of Compassion

Syadvada

Four Footnote Knife-Throws re: Jaina System into the Informational Circle of Your Mind

“The Jainas were the first to make ahimsa, non-violence, into a rule of life.”

“Its scheme of the universe is said to be grounded in logic and experience.  Its central features are its realistic classification of being, its theory of knowledge with its celebrated doctrines of syadvada and saptabhangi, and its ascetic ethics.”

“Jainism holds that all knowledge is only probable or partial.  It gives us a “somehow,” or a “perhaps,” or a “maybe” (syad).  This is the doctrine of syadvada.”

“Consciousness is the essence of the self (or soul).”

References:

Indian Philosophy, S. Radhakrishnan & C. Moore, pp. 250-251.

Imagine you are in the business of teaching people to meditate, literally.  Indeed, imagine yourself as a medieval Zen master charged with managing a Buddhist monastery.  Day in, day out you got a bunch of bums banging on your door seeking admission, refuge, protection, i.e. room and board.  Unable to read minds and screen out dharma bums from sincerely-motivated seekers, you come up with a brilliant scheme.  You decide to turn the dining hall into a meditation hall.  You come up with “oryoki” – a highly codified eating protocol that emphasizes a precise order of movements, stopping when you are full, cleaning up for yourself, and liturgical chanting. 

This brilliant solution kills several birds with one stone.  First, you’ve got a captive audience: a hungry stomach means an attentive mind.  Second, insisting on mindful consumption assures that monks do not mindlessly overeat and monastery food supplies are appropriately utilized.  Thirdly, by instituting a carefully choreographed, synchronized-eating ritual, you are making sure that a) the rag-tag team of bums that walked into the door acts as a united community, b) that the individualistic maniacs who still over-value their ego have it repeatedly challenged at each meal by being told when to open and close their mouths, and c) that there is not that much of a mess in the mess-hall when everyone’s done eating.  Lastly, most importantly, by turning eating into a platform for meditation, you assure a complete integration of meditation into the nuts and bolts of daily living, modeling “internalization” and “generalization” of mindfulness precedents into daily living.  Good deal, huh?

But here’s the problem: rituals, like bones, tend to ossify, traditions designed to keep the mind flowing become stagnated and crystallized, and form begins to eclipse the essence.  An Oryoki meal is, frankly, a hassle.  A beautiful, metronomical choreography of body and mind that is largely irrelevant – in its classic form – to modern-day living.  An oryoki meal – unless you are monk in residence – is a must-have exotic experience, not unlike say a night over at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater or 28 days at a rehab.  Let’s face it: any one can relax, recover and regain their sense of mindfulness in a serene atmosphere.  The challenge is to import the attitude of mindfulness into day-to-day living without having to go on a sabbatical at every meal.

What am I proposing?  Oryoki-lite. 

Oryoki-lite requires no set of begging bowls; any bowl or plate (even paper plate) will do.  Oryoki-lite doesn’t call for a half-lotus asana on the floor; a chair at your regular dining table will do.  Oryoki-lite is not about the protocol but about breaking the protocol; it is about waking yourself up with something as simple as using your non-dominant hand to eat or using an unfamiliar set of utensils to throw your eating kinesthetics off balance so as to wake up your mind.  Oryoki-lite requires no need for knowledge of Tibetan chants; a simple “mm”-mantra of savoring in between mindful bites will do.  Oryoki-lite isn’t about Buddhist-form but about Buddhist-essence, about just waking yourself up without Buddhist fanfare.  After all, that’s what the word “buddha” means: the one who is awake – not the one in an orange robe with a set of begging bowls and a mantra in his/her mouth, but anyone – you, for example – being simply present, not full-time (that’s for monks), but at least, now and then, perhaps, as rarely as one mindful eating moment per meal. 

Enough said about just eating.  Grab a paper plate and give your mind a try.

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!

“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?
-----------------------------------------------

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
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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

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.