"Mindful Eating vs. Cognitive Defusion for Food Cravings"
Mindful eating is the practice of being fully present for a meal.
This may involve slowing down the pace, savoring every bite,
and starting to get in tune with your body's fullness cues.
When you're distracted, you tend to eat faster and longer.
For example, men and women randomized to eat while watching TV
averaged an extra slice of pizza and 71% more mac & cheese,
totaling nearly 300 additional calories.
That alone could bump your weight like 8 pounds a year.
This may help explain why one survey found
overweight individuals reported they ate nearly half their meals
while watching television.
Stanford researchers found that on the weekends
about a quarter of kids' calories may be consumed in front of the TV.
Similarly, study subjects told to eat while giving their full attention
to a radio conversation or a detective story recorded
on cassette tapes (like an old-school podcast)
ended up eating significantly more;
for instance, up to 77% more ice cream compared to undistracted eating.
Even just engaging in conversation,
eating with friends can inadvertently boost intake.
Distracted eating may also affect subsequent consumption.
Have people play computer solitaire while eating a fixed-calorie meal,
and they eat nearly twice as many cookies a half-hour later,
as if they hadn't fully consciously registered how much they ate
when they were distracted.
Conversely, if you have people listen to an audio clip
encouraging them to eat mindfully, focusing on the looks, smell, taste,
and texture of the food, hours later they eat fewer cookies
than those either eating in silence or listening instead
to some neutral audiobook content.
Attending to the sensory qualities of food and our body's reactions
is just one aspect of mindful eating.
Mindfulness has been described as a moment-to-moment awareness,
cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, in the present moment,
as nonreactively, nonjudgmentally, and openheartedly as possible.
Just being aware may not be enough.
Practicing mindfulness to deal with cravings is said to involve
three skills: awareness, the ability to monitor one's cravings;
acceptance, the ability to refrain from judging yourself;
and then something called disidentification,
or cognitive defusion,
the ability to separate oneself from your cravings.
When we're struck with a craving, a typical reaction is instead
what's called cognitive restructuring, a psychological term
for challenging your thoughts
and replacing them with alternative thoughts.
For example, if you're hit with the thought
"I need to eat some chocolate," instead of just reaching
for a candy bar, a restructuring response might be,
"No, I don't.
I can have something healthier instead."
This rarely works.
More than a hundred self-identified chocolate cravers
were randomized to an hour of cognitive restructuring instruction
and then given a bag of chocolates to carry around with them for a week
to see how well they could resist the temptation.
And they didn't do much better than the control group
that tried it after no instruction at all.
In contrast to cognitive restructuring,
the mindful eating approach called cognitive defusion
involves teaching people to defuse their thoughts
as merely thoughts, placing mental distance
between themselves and their cravings.
A defusion response to the thought "I need to eat some chocolate"
would involve simply observing the thought,
("I notice I'm having the thought that I need to eat some chocolate"),
and thanking one's mind for the thought, ("Thanks, mind").
A "mindbus" metaphor is used, in which people are taught
to imagine themselves as the driver of a bus
and their thoughts as mere passengers.
You visualize yourself taking control and being like,
"Thanks for the feedbacks, folks, but this is my bus,"
as you stop the bus and let the negative passengers off.
Cognitive defusion was tested head-to-head
against cognitive restructuring in the same chocolate experiment,
and those who got an hour of defusion instructions
had three times greater odds of remaining chocolate abstinent
in the face of a week of constant temptation.
Then defusion was put up against acceptance:
instructing people to observe a thought or feeling,
accept its presence, and build up a degree
of tolerance for uncomfortable feelings.
Study subjects were randomized to less than a half an hour
of coaching on defusion, acceptance, or a control group
that spent the time learning a muscle relaxation technique.
They were then asked to carry a bag of chocolate candy
around for five days, untouched.
The acceptance group failed to beat out the control group,
but the defusion group did.
Of all the mindfulness skills, cognitive defusion
appears to be the most effective,
a simple and efficient approach to manage food cravings.