- Is mindful eating
actually hurting your relationship with food?
The truth may surprise you.
(calm music)
Welcome to the series, I'm Alyssia
and I'm so glad you're here.
Today, before we get started,
I wanna remind you to subscribe and hit the bell.
I also wanna remind you that in this course
the additional download materials
are in emails every single day
so even though the videos are on YouTube,
you've gotta sign up at mindovermuch.com/foodfreedom
to get the daily goods.
Also, it is completely free.
So I've been talking all month about how mindfulness
really healed my relationship with food
and a lot of times when I say that,
people think I mean mindful eating but I don't.
So as you know by now,
mindfulness is a nonjudgmental awareness
of the present moment
and it helps us shift our relationships to things around us.
It doesn't actually change the external circumstances.
It just changes how I approach it and interpret it.
This is true for people, for food,
for my relationship with Krispy Kreme.
The truth is when I approached mindful eating at first,
I had a real aversion to it.
I didn't wanna eat slow
and I thought that mindful eating had to be slow
and also focusing so much on the food
was really triggering for me
and I found that it's not for everyone
and I'm gonna talk about maybe who it's not for
and who it is for today.
I really first started to explore this in grad school.
Like I said, I went to grad school to study mindfulness
because I was like, how the heck did I heal my relationship
with food through mindfulness and not mindful eating?
It didn't make sense to me
and when I was doing all my research,
I came across a program called MB-EAT,
the mindfulness-based eating awareness training.
It's based off of a mindfulness program MBSR,
it's the mindfulness-based stress reduction program
and that's where most of the research around mindfulness
really started in the seventies.
So this mindfulness-based eating awareness training program
was based around that.
I came across it in some of the published literature
that showed that people were healing
their relationships with food
especially people who struggled with binge eating
through mindfulness.
So I decided to go through this certification program
to learn what it's all about.
I liked a lot of things about the program.
I'm gonna share some of the tools tomorrow
in a binge eating specific video
and I also talk about some of those tools more deeply
in the Mind Over Meal Prep course
but I don't like everything about the program.
I've actually been working on my own project
that I'm gonna talk about soon.
I've adapted it a little bit and you'll hear more on that.
So that program focuses on mindful eating
and bringing mindfulness to meals,
bringing that nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment
to the eating experience.
Now, most of us are not typically mindful when we eat.
We're distracted.
Don't swipe up, don't swipe up.
So the practice can really give you a lot of information
about yourself and your habits.
It helps us tune into our bodies
to receive those messages that we've talked about
that dieting and conditioning can get us disconnected from
through dysregulation.
If you don't remember what I'm talking about,
watch the videos earlier in the series
because those foundational concepts are all essential
to understand before we get to this week's content.
So how do we do mindful eating?
There's really no right or wrong way
and this really surprised me.
The most important thing is to sit down
without any distractions or devices.
You wanna be fully with the food
to not have anything stimulate your mind wandering away.
It does not have to be slow
and this was really a surprise to me.
It can be helpful to be slow
to help you tune in and pay attention.
When we slow down,
sometimes we can take everything in a little bit more
but it doesn't have to be.
There are other ways to connect mindfully with the food
without it being slow
and the biggest way is through the senses.
I love the senses and the thing about mindfulness,
the senses becomes such an important part
because we can only be with the senses here and now.
We can't be, for instance, I can only smell
or see or hear something right now in this present moment.
If I'm thinking about something I smelled yesterday
or heard yesterday
or thinking about a sound I've heard before,
that's actually not something I'm hearing now
or smelling now.
It's a thought, right?
The senses are only here and now.
This is amazing to me.
When you approach food mindfully with the senses,
take it in fully.
How does the food look?
What are the colors and the shapes and the textures?
Does it look appealing to you?
Does it look unappealing?
How does it smell?
I've noticed the smell.
When I smell my food before I eat it now
which I never really did before,
it makes a huge difference in the experience of the taste.
I mean, really, it makes a difference to just pay attention
but smelling it specifically actually affects the taste buds
then when you finally taste the food, notice it fully.
What is it like in your mouth?
What's it like to have the food touch the taste buds
on your tongue?
What are the textures like?
What does it feel like to chew?
Can you notice even the impulse to swallow?
Notice the sounds as you chew and as you swallow
and then when you go to take your next bite,
do it all over again and notice what's the same,
what's different, how does it change bite to bite,
how do your taste buds change on the first
compared to the second, third, fifth, 10th bite?
Now of course, again, being slow can help us get granular
but it's not necessary to eat as slow as a turtle.
I actually don't know if turtles eats slow
but you know as a turtle walks, you get it.
It depends on you.
Now, you don't have to try this approach to eating
at every single meal.
Just try it once a week or a couple times a week.
There's no pressure here.
The point is not to eat like this all the time.
It's just to start to pay attention when we eat sometimes
because then slowly we'll do it more and more
without having to think about it.
In today's email, I included a guided eating meditation.
Remember, you have to be signed up for the emails
to get the additional course materials.
Mindful eating might not be right for you
and I have to talk about that too in this video.
I personally prefer mindfulness.
I've come around to mindful eating now
more than I've healed my relationship with food
but at first, I was very averse to it.
It didn't make sense to me 'cause everyone was like,
oh, mindfulness
and you work on healing relationships with food
then you must love mindful eating and I was like, mm mm mm.
I was curious about why, started researching
and I actually wrote a paper entirely about this in school.
What I've found is it comes down
to the type of disordered eater you lean towards.
Now, there's a spectrum and it's sort of like on one end
there's the more restrictive eating
and then on the other end, there's binging and overeating.
Because it's a spectrum,
you're not necessarily one or the other.
Some people are exclusively one or the other
but a lot of people are somewhere in the middle
and kind of go back and forth between.
I was both.
So I'm not talking diagnosed eating disorder here
and this is just a disclaimer
that you have a diagnosed eating disorder.
I'm not referring to you necessarily.
Although, some of this probably still applies.
I think most people struggling to make peace with food
have some disordered eating habits
and that falls on a spectrum.
That's all I'm saying.
Most of us who diet, we restrict when we diet
and then our bodies become dysregulated.
We talked about this last week I think
and we start to feel starved and then we binge to compensate
because remember a diet technically is starvation
to the body because we're depriving it of food
and our bodies are like, oh my God, what's happening,
I need to retain what's here.
No, one's come to visit me in 15 years.
And then eventually when the food's there,
we're like, must consume everything.
(screaming)
Okay, so this is normal
but of course we do it and we think
there's something wrong with me
which leads to a lot of judgment and then what does that do?
It just makes us binge more.
Eventually, we feel so terrible about ourselves
that we go through the cycle again.
Oh my gosh, I'm a terrible person, I'm judging myself,
why am I the only one who can't get this together?
I'm judging myself and now I've gained all this weight.
Now I have to start a diet all over again.
It's a terrible endless cycle.
That's also a habit loop that our brains get used to.
We get used to depriving
until we can't stand it anymore and binging
and then we train ourselves
to do it again and again and again.
Now, you may see both of these
restriction and binge eating tendencies in you too
and I encourage you to meet yourself where you're at now.
So how this relates to mindful eating.
For those in a binge mindset,
mindful eating can be really helpful because when we binge,
we tend to turn off to what our bodies say.
We don't stop when we're full.
We don't know how.
So tuning into the present can really help and be grounding
and I'm gonna talk more specifically
about binge eating tomorrow
but for those with restrictive patterns,
if you're there now, mindful eating could help
but for me, it was very triggering.
So much focus on the food was really overwhelming to me
and it made it very hard for me to stay present
and what I found was in the MB-EAT program
when I did the certification, they specifically said,
this is not for people that struggle with anorexia
because of that restrictive tendency
and it can be triggering for some people.
So if this is you, it's okay.
It's about tuning into your inner wisdom
and knowing where you're at right now
and no one else can tell you that.
For restrictive eaters,
if you're struggling with restrictive eating and again,
I'm not talking specifically you've been,
have a diagnosed eating disorder
but you tend to lean towards restriction or dieting
then mindfulness in general may help you more.
It helped me a lot more during my restrictive times.
Mindful eating was more helpful
when I was binge eating and turning off
but typically when I was restricting, I was,
it's not that I was so aware of my body signals
but I was very aware of everything around food.
Mindfulness shifts your relationships to things around you
without focusing on the external things.
So I can shift my relationship to food
without focusing on the food and that's what I needed
was to stop focusing on the food so much
because it was stressing me out.
Now, meditation.
You can meditate to practice mindfulness.
Remember, it's just a tool.
So meditation isn't just about anxiety, relieving anxiety.
It's about practicing being present.
Now, I recommend every single day just whatever you can do.
Even five minutes, it will build up over time
but even five minutes a day can make a big difference
and I've also put some guided audio meditations
in the course materials that you've been getting via email.
You can still sign up and get them all.
Don't worry, it's free but you can also bring mindfulness
to the rest of your life without meditating.
So how can you tune into the senses?
One of my favorite ways is washing dishes.
When I'm washing dishes,
I hear the sound of the water running,
I hear the dishes clanking,
I get a special soap that I love the smell of
and I just notice the smell of it.
I feel the soapy bubbles on my hands and I just,
it's a great opportunity to tune into the senses
while doing something I don't particularly love
but when I'm present with it, I just dread it so much less.
Another way is through walking meditation,
just going for a walk but really being present
with the senses around you,
present with your feet hitting the floor,
present with the sounds,
mindful showers, feeling the water on your skin,
feeling the soap, hearing, just really tuning in.
There's always an opportunity to tune into mindfulness.
The hard part is remembering to do it.
So again, there are some guided audio meditations,
regular meditations but also eating meditations
and walking meditations in the email course.
Now, I just encourage you.
This is a lot to take in.
Be patient with yourselves.
All I want for you is to find confidence to trust yourself.
The whole reason I wanted to make this series
and what I've always wanted for the channel really
but I wasn't sure how to do it
is to help you feel that you can take responsibility
for your health
without needing anyone else to decide for you,
not a doctor, not a nutritionist, not me
and these people can help and they can provide outer wisdom
but they can't build up your inner wisdom
which is essential to put outer wisdom into practice.
Remember, the frosting on the cake.
Okay, so tomorrow we'll get deeper
into binge eating and tools for that
and connecting with your inner wisdom there.
If you found this video helpful about mindful eating,
please share it with someone on your social media
and let me know in the comments,
what do you think about mindful eating?
Has it resonated with you?
Has it made it harder?
Share your experience so we can communicate
and really get to know each other in this community.
Thank you so much and remember,
especially when you're practicing mindful eating,
it's all a matter of mind over munch.
(calm music)