(bright upbeat music)
- Hey munchies, welcome to the channel.
If you're new or if you're not,
I haven't done a video explicitly around mindfulness
and relationships with food in a while.
And since over the holidays, stress eating,
emotional eating, and binge eating
tend to come up more frequently.
I thought this might be the time.
About a year ago, I started sharing on the channel
about my own journey
toward healing my relationship with food,
and it really changed my life.
At the beginning of this year,
I really dove into sharing food freedom content,
and even created a chorus to help guide others
through some of the work.
So, if you are struggling
with an unhealthy relationship with food
and turning to food to cope with stress or emotions,
I hope that this video can help.
First, it's important to acknowledge
what an unhealthy relationship with food is
as well as what a healthy relationship with food is.
A lot of the people I work with one-on-one
are clients who come to me and initially they say
they want a healthy relationship with food,
and it becomes clear that they sort of think
that means that they'll love to eat salad all the time,
and they'll never give into cravings
and they'll never want to eat cake.
Now, of course only you know
what your healthy relationship with food looks like to you.
But to me, it's about how I relate to food, right?
Relationship, relate, so if I have a lot of judgments
around foods being good or bad, or allowed or not allowed,
if I have rules,
then I relate to food in this kind of dualistic way.
And I tend to internalize that as a reflection of myself.
So it's not just that the food is good or bad,
but that I am good or bad if I eat certain foods.
So healing, my relationship with food
was really about healing my relationship with myself,
and that involves taking the morality out of food.
We are not good or bad people based on what we eat period,
you are worthy regardless of what you eat.
The next thing to acknowledge
is that every transformation requires transition, okay?
So no transformation happens overnight
and that includes healing our relationship with food.
So, if you think about a before and after photo
of a weight loss journey, for example,
so people tend to become inspired
by seeing this difference, right?
They're like, whoa, look at where that person was
and look at where they are now,
but what's missing in that
is all of these transitional moments
between that the person had to go through, right?
So why don't they include every single transition moment
in that before and after?
Well, first of all, because you can't,
every moment is a moment of transition.
This one, and this one, and this one and that,
but also because a lot of the transition moments
seem boring or not worth noting or noticing, right?
Nothing is happening right in this moment.
I'm the same right now as I am right now.
So, it can seem like there's not much happening.
When trying to lose weight,
we won't look very different from one moment to the next
or one day to the next,
and even sometimes one week to the next.
We might need a snapshot comparison of months even
to really see the difference.
But then you really only end up seeing just that
it's a snapshot, it's not the full picture.
Okay, so in the same way
with healing your relationship with food,
it's a slow process, right?
Where little by little,
we get to know ourselves and explore a different way
of being with food and with ourselves.
And I can't teach you everything I've learned in this video,
but I wanted to give you a few key strategies
that might help you during this holiday season
if food becomes a stressor,
but keep in mind these are long-term strategies
for people who really want that healing not band-aids.
So the first of which is practicing mindfulness.
And I share this with my clients
that I healed my relationship with food through mindfulness,
not mindful eating, okay?
Now, mindfulness and specifically meditation
really helped me learn to beat here now
in this present moment.
If you think about binge eating,
we don't binge when we're present.
That's probably why most of the time, before we realize it,
we've finished the entire bag of this or box of that,
it is mind less rather than mind full.
So if we can be present more often,
we can make conscious choices
rather than reacting compulsively and without awareness.
We can respond rather than react.
I often use this framework that I've created
called Blips of Awareness.
So essentially we spend most of our waking hours
on autopilot and research has shown
that our mind is wandering more often than it's not.
It's part of being human.
And if you've ever sat down to meditate,
most people notice that the mind wanders away
pretty quickly, pretty regularly on its own.
So, meditation helps to train the brain to be more present.
I look at it as a practice of being present.
When I sit down and meditate in the morning,
this is when I'm practicing being present.
So, if I have this autopilot baseline
and the top of this graph of sorts is a conscious awareness.
Then every time I go from autopilot to being aware.
So like, if I sit down and meditate,
I create this sort of blip of awareness
that lasts for some period of time while I'm practicing
and a blip doesn't have to be meditation.
It's anything that brings me back to that present moment
to that conscious awareness,
but which only happens through the census.
So it could be, I'm washing the dishes
and I notice the smell of the soap,
or I feel the warm water on my hands.
I could take a few mindful breaths in the middle of the day.
I could go for a walk while paying attention
to how it feels in my feet or the breeze on my skin.
All of these moments are like little blips of awareness
and we come into awareness and then at some point,
our mind wanders away.
So my goal with this framework and this understanding,
is not necessarily to be conscious in every single moment,
because I am an imperfect human
and that's just not possible,
but rather can I bring more moments
of consciousness to my day?
And perhaps at some point
more moments of awareness than not.
We can only make a responsive choice from the present moment
from that top of the graph.
So, if I'm here now and aware, paying attention,
I have agency, this ability to choose,
and this is how we regain control over food
rather than feeling the food is controlling us.
We respond with an intentional choice
rather than react compulsively without awareness.
Okay, so it's not easy.
And even now that I've healed my relationship with food,
I still struggle, especially this time of year,
because it's just hard.
It's a stressful time with family and friends
and finances and time and food is comforting, right?
So there's nothing wrong
with you looking for comfort amidst chaos.
And that would be my next recommendation
is to have a list of healthy coping mechanisms on hand
that you can turn to the first support when it gets tough.
Many people turn to food as a maladaptive coping mechanism,
they want relief.
The present moment is uncomfortable
and they want to get away from it
and find something else that's comfortable.
It makes sense, right?
So we all need coping mechanisms
and I encourage you to actually make a list.
So some of my go-tos coping mechanisms
that make me feel better going for a walk,
talking to a friend, cuddling with a pet,
watching a show that I love,
expending some energy through exercise or doing a craft.
Now I look at coping mechanisms
as a way to be with whatever's coming up
in me rather than a distraction.
And sometimes it's true when we're really activated,
we might need a way to just get through this moment
or get away from this moment for a minute
to kind of calm down.
But at some point to really cope,
we have to acknowledge what we're feeling.
So, what are things that you can do
to help you stay with that emotion
and kind of explore it a bit?
One of my favorite tools to use and share with others
is a feelings list and feelings wheel.
And I'll actually link these
in the description box below for you to download.
But I do this in the morning as a daily practice,
and I try to grab this one I'm activated as well.
Is can I find a word or two to name my feeling
in this moment?
So, this helps to increase emotional intelligence
and the ability to regulate my emotions,
which is imperative to healing our relationship with food.
And I've done videos on that in the past.
If we tune into the feeling,
we may also be able to ask ourselves,
what is the need that I have in this moment
that's not being met?
So humanistic psychology suggests that negative emotions
are tied to unmet needs.
The point here is not to remove all negative emotions,
but rather to see how can we meet our needs more fully?
It's also important to acknowledge that food
can be a coping mechanism.
And I sort of take an unpopular
or kind of controversial approach
when I say, and I share this with clients,
I think food actually can be okay as a coping mechanism.
It only becomes a problem if it's our only coping mechanism.
And it also becomes a problem
if we're not aware while we're turning to it.
So sometimes I do still today,
turn to food for comfort, it's comforting.
It's a comforting sensory experience,
but the question is, can I be present with it?
If I really want food to comfort me,
then I want to pay attention to how it tastes,
the delicious flavor and texture and what I love about it,
to notice the comfort that it provides
to be mindful rather than engage mindlessly, right?
My next offering is to give yourself permission
to enjoy the foods you love
to notice the rules that you have around food
and notice tendencies to restrict
or to not allow certain foods.
So research shows that restriction and dieting
actually lead to binge eating.
And I like to use the example of a rebellious teenager.
So when you're a teenager and your parents tell you,
you can't do something, what do you wanna do?
Exactly that thing that they told you you couldn't do.
So it's kind of similar with food.
I found in my experience when we tell ourselves no,
somehow it becomes all we can think about,
there's this scarcity around it and letting go of the rules,
letting go of this dualistic thinking,
it's scary because it seems like,
well then what do I cling to now?
How do I know what to eat if I don't have any rules?
Well, we know what to eat
by learning to listen to our bodies,
to listen to our hunger, and our fullness, and our emotions,
and what our entire mind body are telling us.
It's what I call inner wisdom.
And I've done a video on that in the past as well.
So letting go of the rules means every food is allowed,
and when there's no food that's bad
and every food is allowed,
then some of those foods that we used to think were bad
can kind of become disenchanting.
I don't need to eat 12 donuts just because they're here
if I actually know and believe that in any moment
I could go get a doughnut and give it to myself and eat it
if I really wanted,
if I could actually give myself permission to do that.
So I encourage you always,
but especially during the holidays,
to give yourself permission to enjoy
and rather than rules, or guilt, or judgment,
can you challenge yourself to be present with the experience
and enjoy it fully?
Noticing how delicious it is,
and while also being conscious and aware.
So the final suggestion I'll touch on here
is practicing self-compassion and non-judgment,
these are huge concepts in mindfulness.
So judgment is really a block
and it stems from black and white thinking.
So if you're someone who has
that black and white thinking pattern strongly,
and most of us with an unhealthy relationship with food
do have this pattern.
Then we also probably have strong patterns of judgment
it might be judgment others,
it might be judgment of ourself,
judgment of what's good and bad,
because judgment is this duality.
It's good, it's bad, it's yes or no,
it's black, it's white, right?
But mindfulness, the definition of mindfulness
that I share on this channel,
is a nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, okay?
Nonjudgmental, so if judgment is there,
we actually can't be mindful.
It's not mindfulness if there's judgment there,
it's essential to be nonjudgmental
to really be in the present moment.
And the first step here is just noticing,
noticing judgments here right now.
So start by just noticing the judgments
that you have around food.
The rules simply noticing is enough
to begin to change the pattern
because usually we're not noticing
and we're acting compulsively, but when we start to notice,
we're present and then we have this ability to go,
"Hmm, what do I wanna do now?"
We have choice, agency.
I also look at self-compassion
as the sort of antidote to judgment.
Self-compassion is simply talking to yourself
as you would a friend.
If you think of a time recently,
when you made a mistake or maybe you ate too much,
or something like that,
consider if this was your best friend
and they came to you and they said,
"I ate too much, and this is what happened,
"and I'm feeling really terrible about it."
What would you say to them?
I actually encourage you to do this as a journaling prompt
and I have my clients do this, write down a letter.
What would you say to this friend?
And then read it back to yourself,
and then consider how is it different
than the tone that you usually take with yourself?
Probably you're not gonna tell your friend,
you're disgusting, just stop doing that,
get a grip, get it together.
You're gonna be kind and understanding and reasonable
because you're a good human being.
Self-compassion is not about making excuses for yourself,
it's about seeing clearly without that block of judgment.
So, there are some approaches
that I hope can support you this holiday season.
These are not bandaid strategies,
which for some of you might be frustrating, right?
These are tactics to use if you are really wanting
a lasting shift and the way we relate
to food and to ourselves,
I encourage you to really get curious
about and get to know your relationship with food
and start to see yourself clearly,
how do you relate to food right now?
What emotions, and thoughts, and judgments, and rules,
do you have around food?
Really get curious and be willing to explore
as best you can without judgment.
If you enjoy this kind of content and want more,
let me know in the comments
and also in the description, like I said,
I included those feelings list and feelings wheel,
you can download those for free.
And I also included a link for a waitlist,
a signup list for my program.
So I think in January,
I might restart a 10 week small group program
for healing emotional eating
and relationships with food through mindfulness,
depending on interest.
So sign up to let me know
if you would be interested in that,
and if you want a quick run through of this kind of food,
freedom style content,
I have also linked my food freedom course
in the description which is a paid course.
Regardless of your path and approach forward with food,
I hope that you can be kind to yourself.
This stuff is really hard.
And just remember that the way you eat
says nothing about you as a person,
you are perfect just as you are.
And I know I didn't use to believe that about myself,
in a lot of things I still don't.
But the work of self discovery I think
is trusting that it is true
and that you are worthy just as you are.
So I hope you know that I see you, and I love you.
I hope you'll subscribe if you want more content like this,
I'll see you soon with more videos and remember,
seriously, it is all a matter of mind over munch.
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