[MUSIC]
My name is Ashley Mason
and I am an Associate Professor of
Psychiatry at the University
of California, San Francisco.
I direct the Sleep,
Eating and Affect Laboratory where we study sleep,
eating and affect independently
and as they relate to each other.
Much of my research has
focused on craving-driven overeating.
Particularly in people who feel that they eat more in
response to their food cravings than they wish they did.
The issue with these cravings is often that
they aren't for things like
broccoli and brussels sprouts,
but rather they're for things like brownies,
cookies, and foods that we don't find in nature.
A major component of
my research program has focused on developing
interventions for people who wished that they
ate less of these crave-worthy foods.
In normal times, we're often in
environments that structure what and when we eat.
For example, if we're working in
an office and we had to pack
our lunch ahead of time with
the knowledge that we'd have only
a certain time to eat it,
then it's easier to stick to
our plan of what and when we eat.
The office life can in this way,
support us in healthy eating behavior.
In pandemic times though,
we've been locked in our homes and have been able to eat
anytime all day pretty
easily because we're only steps away from our kitchens.
There are several strategies though,
that we can use to promote
a healthier eating pattern when we don't
have our usual supports that come with
a more structured office and work environment.
First, the golden rule.
If a food isn't in our house we can't go down
to the kitchen to eat it in
the five-minute window between meetings.
For example, if we don't have
cookies and brownies, or chips,
or other foods that we find
difficult to resist in our homes,
we are just less likely to eat them.
Second, keep food out of sight.
The more often we see bags of chips or boxes of cereal,
the more that we're consciously and non-consciously
reminded to eat these foods
surely for the pleasure of eating them.
Put food away in the cupboard
and in cabinets where it's out of sight.
Third, consider planning out
and prepackaging your snacks for each day.
This way you know what you're going to get to snack on
and you're not going to be making
decisions based on moments of Zoom,
exhaustion, or fatigue.
Nobody is at their best in making
decisions in the middle of
a long streak of Zoom meetings.
Fourth, don't discount
the power of putting food into dishes.
When we eat chips right out of the bag,
it's pretty hard to know how many we've eaten.
Always put them in a dish,
preferably a small dish,
so that the dish looks full and satisfying.
Finally, a new idea in
the literature is something called exercise snacking.
Perhaps give this a try.
Next time you have a 15-minute break between meetings,
instead of reaching for a food snack,
reach for an exercise snack.
Go on a walk around the block, for example.
It doesn't need to be an exercise session
that involves sweat or heavy breathing,
it can just be as simple as walking around for a while
before your next hour that you're
spending in your chair at your desk.
Next, I want to talk about how
easy it is to just keep eating.
I'm going to use chips as
an example for the time being because
most folks would say that eating
chips is not something that contributes to their health.
Like we were talking about earlier,
when we eat chips right out of a giant bag,
it's nearly impossible to know how much we ate,
especially when we're eating mindlessly without
awareness while doing other things like watching TV,
reading a magazine, chatting on the phone and so on.
What we are eating might actually be quite delicious,
but we're largely missing out on
that one we're eating mindlessly.
Next time you find yourself at the bottom with a bag of
chips wondering how you could have just eaten them all,
try sitting quietly and
reflecting on how your body feels.
What is the true reward
of having eaten an entire bag of chips?
Often how we feel while we are overeating chips,
involves feeling that we've escaped into
another mental state of distraction.
But how we feel after we ate
all those chips might feel quite different.
Bloated, thirsty from saltiness, nauseated, guilty.
Well, the feeling of distraction while
mindlessly eating the chips, the distraction,
it might feel rewarding in the moment,
the true reward's after we're done eating.
The feeling bloated, feeling guilty or upset,
nauseated, and so on, aren't actually rewarding.
These rewards can last for far longer
than it took us to mindlessly
overeat the bag of chips in the first place.
There are a few practices you can try
to work toward eating with more awareness,
which can translate into less overeating of
foods that aren't contributing to your health.
Foods like chips.
The first step is to shut off those distractions.
Turn off the TV,
put down the magazine,
quit out of social media apps,
and finish up that phone conversation.
The second step is to select the food you'd like to
enjoy and put it in a dish or a napkin.
Just make sure it's outside of
its packaging and just take out a little bit.
Then without any distractions,
slowly eat it and notice the texture,
the taste, and the experience of eating it.
You might find by eating this way,
that you choose to eat far less of the food.
After a few mindful bites,
you might have derived the best part
of the reward from the experience.
Then you won't have to
experience the rewards of overeating.
Instead, you can step away from the food and resume
the activities you paused chatting with a friend,
reading a magazine, and so on.
I hope you'll give some of these strategies for
achieving healthy eating goals a try as part
of your health style and I invite you to bring them with
you wherever post-pandemic life takes you.
Whether it's back into the office
or into a brand new work environment.
[MUSIC]