- [Narrator] Hello and welcome.
This is an overview of Mindful Eating: A Practice,
which is a four class series.
Let's take a closer look at class one and its contents.
Class one is devoted to mindfulness,
heartfulness, compassion, and non-judgment.
In this session, we'll watch a video by Jon Kabat-Zinn
on The Attitude of Non-Judging
that we can bring to our mindful practices.
We will continue to set the stage
with another video by Kristin Neff.
She features the key point that this is a mindful practice
and knowing that we can always begin again
helps us to decrease blame and shame with understanding
and an inner self-compassionate voice.
In this class, we'll focus on mindfulness
as the intention to observe non-judgmentally
with a sense of curiosity and kindness,
what is happening moment to moment.
We'll learn that mindful eating
is not about good or bad foods, or even dieting.
Rather, mindful eating is about developing awareness
of our experiences with food,
and sensing our physical cues of hunger and satisfaction
and replying or responding to those cues
in a loving, compassionate way.
Mindful eating helps us shift from being controlled by food
to being at ease with our choices and with eating.
Mindful eating is not a diet.
It is a way of living with intention.
In our first class,
we will unpack the mechanics of why we eat.
Being able to understand our underlying motivation
for eating will help us develop more mindfulness.
Some of the reasons we eat are physical reasons
like hunger and thirst.
This may show up as a rumbling in your tummy
or maybe you're starting to feel
a bit of a headache come on.
Then there are external environmental triggers.
These are things like advertisements
or seeing food like popcorn at the movies
or seeing your child's unfinished food
or maybe it's watching other people eat
or seeing other people eat or just the time of day
or perhaps it's a holiday.
External environmental triggers are all around us,
as are internal emotional triggers.
Internal emotional triggers include things like stress,
boredom, frustration, anger, loneliness,
or feelings of sadness.
They also include the feelings like happiness,
love, celebration, and reward.
And internal emotional triggers can also happen
from the restrictiveness of dieting
which may lead to overeating.
We will learn how emotional eating is not always a problem.
In fact, it's part of our culture and part of our humanness.
However, emotional eating can become a problem
when it's the primary way we cope with
or avoid our feelings.
In this series and each class,
we will include mindfulness-based guided relaxation sessions
where you can do body scans
and check in with your physical, emotional,
and mental states of wellbeing.
Through our mindfulness-based practices,
we begin to understand how thoughts influence our feelings,
how feelings fuel our actions,
and how actions drive our results.
Mindfulness is best supported with a sense of curiosity,
kindness, gratitude, and generosity.
At the end of this session, you will be given your practices
or your homework for the week.
We will discuss what you learned
through these practices and homework
the next time we come together.
Let me give you an example
of what some of the practices will include.
There will be breath practices, journal prompts,
practicing noticing your physical hunger,
external triggers and internal triggers,
as well as researching resources on mindful eating
that will be able to better support you.
Through the handouts,
you'll become more aware of physical cues of hunger,
cravings, experiences with when, what, how much you eat,
eating habits, and where your energy flows after eating.
You'll start to understand the why and when
of your eating habits,
becoming more fluent with your physical signs of hunger,
emotional triggered eating,
and environmental triggered eating.
In addition to your journal prompts and self-awareness,
you will practice mindful exercise
which will help you survey your inner world.
By taking time to check in with yourself,
by pausing, taking a few breaths in and out,
you'll allow your body to relax
and then you'll be able to notice what you're thinking
and how you're feeling and be able to check in
with what you might actually need.
From that information,
you'll be able to respond to your body
with compassion and intentionality.