Mindless Eating

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink

Have you read this book? If not, I highly recommend it. Mindless Eating is an interesting, easy to read exploration of, well, just what the title says--mindless eating. Lots of intriguing information about how mindlessly we all eat--and how powerful external forces can be in influencing how much we put into our mouths.

Wansink says that we make over 200 food-related choices every day and he points out many of the influences that can lead us to eat more than we think we are or more than we might really be hungry for. It's not a "how-to" book but it left me thinking about lots of little things in my own life and household including the size and shape of my drinking glasses (read it--you'll see).

Reading Mindless Eating also had me thinking about mindlessness in general. Most of us spend an amazing amount of time in a rather mindless, auto-pilot zone. Do you remember your last bite of food--not what you ate--do you really remember actually chewing and swallowing it? Did you see what your spouse was wearing this morning? Did you hear the radio in your car on the way to work? So much of the time we aren't really present. Not being present is often the first step down the slippery slope of emotional overeating.

Take an inventory of the biggest components of mindlessness in your life. What are the things you do routinely that encourage mindlessness? Surfing the internet? Watching reruns on Nick at Nite that you've already seen ten times? Video games?

If you are feeling courageous, I challenge you to estimate the time you spend each day in activities that you KNOW encourage mindlessness. Now list the things you do on a regular basis that help you be more present, more focused and more attentive in your life. How's the balance?

What is one thing you can do to shift the balance one small centimeter towards more mindfulness? Pick one thing that you could add or eliminate that would help you be more present in your life.

Melissa

PS: I just added a new link where I can post books I love and recommend. Mindless Eating is there and I'll keep adding to it. I'd love to hear your suggestions too.

Are you enjoying the food you eat?

It's the beginning of a lovely Fall day here and I'm struck by the way this season hits all the senses--the rich colors, the crisp temperatures, the crunchy leaves. .

The foods I associate with Fall are sensory treats too. Crunchy apples, warm and great smelling soups that simmer and fill the house with great smells and my stomach with warmth.

To take control of emotional eating, it's important to work at being present when we eat. Food is NOT the enemy. Take the time to breathe deep and experience and savor the food you put into your mouth today. If you are stuck in a cycle of dieting and judgment and self-criticism, remind yourself that nourishing yourself is a positive act--an act of compassion. Choose something you are hungry for. Something that tastes really fantastic, that has the texture you crave, that really feeds your hunger. When you are ready to eat it, take your time. Practice savoring. It's important.

Are you truly enjoying the food you eat? Do you make eating choices that leave you feeling good? Do you feel like you are in charge of your relationship with food? Tomorrow is the last day that the Emotional Eating Toolbox(tm) 28-Day Self Guided program will be available at the pre-sale discount.

Melissa

Are you ready to leave the diet madness behind?

If you are feeling alone or stuck in your journey with emotional eating, there are options.

One of the main reasons I developed the Emotional Eating Toolbox(tm) 28-Day Self-guided Daily Action Plan was to be able to share the tools that I use with private clients on a much broader basis. The program walks you, step by step, through an individualized 28-day program that will teach you the tools you need to re-design your relationship with food and take back the control it has over your life. With the Daily Action Plan Workbook and the Audio Companion CDs, I am able to help you structure each day and each step of the program in a way that fits with your needs and your schedule.

Right now, there is an unusual opportunity to combine the Emotional Eating Toolbox (tm) with an Emotional Eating Coaching Group at tremendous savings. The coaching groups are small and very powerful tools for helping you stay on track, build motivation, feel supported, and--very importantly--work through the really tough spots that have tripped you up in the past. There are two groups starting up in the next month and they will probably be the last groups for 2007.

Hope to see you there,

Melissa

By the way, the groups are tele-groups. That means we meet by phone. People call in from all over, from all time zones whether they are in their work clothes or their fuzzy slippers.

Is gaining sleep a key to losing weight?

Researchers continue to learn more about the relationship between reduced sleep and weight gain. If you are feeling out of control with food, eating or weight it is something important to pay attention to.

Do you overeat when you are tired? I know I do. It's easy to mistake feelings of tiredness for hunger, and it's tempting to eat when we're tired to try to increase our energy or alertness.

Now we are learning that being low on sleep can actually cause you to be hungrier and that skimping on sleep may cause weight gain whether or not you eat more!

Short-term sleep deprivation seems to lower levels of leptin, a hormone that tells us when we are full, and increase levels of the hormone ghrelin, which promotes appetite. Have you had the experience after a night of little sleep where you feel like you can eat everything in sight and never feel full? That's likely the low leptin, high ghrelin effect. In one study, of 12 males whose sleep was restricted for two days, appetite increased dramatically, as did the desire for sweets, starch and salty foods. In fact, cravings for high carbohydrate, high calorie foods increased by 45 percent!

Sleep restriction seems to cause physiologic effects that may actually predispose one to gain weight, and this may be at least partially independent of how much you eat. In a study involving over 68,000 women who were followed for 16 years, knowing that a subject usually slept less than seven hours a night was predictive of weight gain, including a substantial increased risk of major weight gain (greater than 33 pounds over the sixteen years) and obesity. Women who regularly slept five hours or less were 32% more likely to have gained at least 33 pounds over the 16 years than those who slept 7-8 hours.

Even when researchers controlled for levels of caloric intake and activity, those who slept less gained more weight. The weight gain was not accounted for by the amount of food that was eaten!

Other studies of men and women have documented higher levels of body fat in individuals who sleep less than 8 hours a night. Although the complicated relationship between sleep and weight is far from well understood, certain findings seem to be consistent, and at least one point seems clear. Sleep is not a variable that should be overlooked in anyone’s self care.

For busy people, sleep is often the first thing to go when the to-do list gets too crowded. It's a huge mistake—for lots of different reasons—and staying in control of your relationship with food is one of them.

Melissa

The Number One Mistake Emotional Eaters Make

It has nothing to do with food--but it flavors everything.

The number one mistake people make when they are trying to gain control of emotional overeating is that they get mad at themselves and beat themselves up emotionally when things don't go as planned, when they have a slip,or when they overeat. Self-critical judgment is a dead-end place.

You tell yourself you're "wrong" or "bad" or "hopeless." You "screwed up" and you'll have to do better tomorrow.

Like children, adults don't thrive with punishment and negative words. Think about it. How often is the moment that you decide you've "blown it again" the very same moment you decide to go ahead and finish the bag of chips or the cookie dough or the what-ever you just got mad at yourself for eating?

Judgment and self blame are negative, closed, dead-end places.They do nothing to encourage creative problem solving, optimism, resourcefulness--the very things needed to move forward in your emotional eating journey. In fact, when we pile on the self-blame and the guilt, we're more likely to want to go to bed and pull the covers up over our head than we are to want to keep moving forward.

Curiosity is the opposite of judgment. Curiosity is the tool of problem solvers. Curiosity is one of the most powerful tools you can learn to use in making peace with food. Curiosity provides the power to ask questions that will open doors and propel you forward in a journey to take the power back from food and diet. Curiosity allows you to see options and opportunity and new solutions. It's the avenue for learning how to "do it differently."

It's impossible to be absolutely curious and full of self-judgment at the same time.

It might be hard to imagine changing old habits of self blame and that feeling that you "deserve" to be hard on yourself, but my clients are amazed at how powerful that shift feels when they learn how to make it--and how much momentum it provides.

Three ways to engage your curiosity:

Next time you are struggling with your eating/weight/relationshipwith food, try on the following questions. Work to suspend judgmentand approach the questions and your answers with curiosity:

1. What do I know about what made today (this afternoon, this week) so difficult for me? What contributed to my struggles?
2. How was today (a difficult day) different from yesterday which was a little bit better? Is there anything I could learn from the difference that I might incorporate into my life or routine?
3. What was going on for me before I overate? What could I have done insteadof eating?

Learning to let go of the self-blame and embrace a curious mindset is a major component of the 28-Day Emotional Eating Toolbox (TM) program. If you are interested, you can also enroll in a program that includes the Toolbox Self-guided program AND small group coaching.

Mindful Eating: Transforming Your Relationship With Food

Are you sick of yo-yo dieting?

Do you weigh yourself more than once a week?

Do you spend more time thinking about food and diet then you spend thinking about your life?

For many women (and men, but especially women), making peace with food is a crucial step in getting on with their life and creating the life they want to live. Many successful, intelligent, highly talented people tell me that food/weight/diet is the one area of their life in which they feel incapable. Diet's don't work--they just keep people dieting (and gaining and losing and binging and miserable). Making peace with food not only allows people to begin eating normally again, it really allows you to get on with your life, without food and weight and eating decisions swallowing way-too-much of your energy. Emotional eating is a term that is used to describe eating in response to our emotions or feelings vs. our physiological hunger.

Top 10 signs that you are eating emotionally:

1. The hunger comes on suddenly and the need to eat feels urgent--physiological hunger comes on slowly and it's okay to delay eating.
2. You keep eating even if you aren't hungry anymore or the hunger doesn't go away even though you are full.
3. You eat to the point of physical discomfort.
4. You don't know whether you were hungry or not when you ate.
5. After you eat you realize you aren't really aware of how much you ate or how it tasted.
6. You have feelings of shame, guilt or embarrassment after eating.
7. You eat because you are bored, tired, lonely, excited.
8. Hunger accompanies an unpleasant emotion--anger, hurt, fear, anxiety. Emotional eating begins in your mind--thinking about food--not in your stomach.
9. You crave a specific food and won't feel content until you have that. If you are eating for physical hunger, any food will fill you up.
10. You keep eating (or grazing, or nibbling) because you just can't figure out what you are hungry for. Nothing seems to hit the spot (physical hunger goes away no matter what food you choose to fill up on).

Mindful eating is a term used to describe a way of eating which uses internal cues about hunger, appetite and fullness to guide our relationship with food. It involves listening to your body to know what and when you need to eat. Dieting, restricting and counting calories or fat grams and focusing on weight are not components of mindful eating. Mindful eating requires learning what to do when what your body and mind need and want are not food.

If you struggle with emotional eating, here are 3 things you can do to begin to transform your relationship with food:

1. Slow down
   Learning and change don't occur when we are operating on auto-pilot. Slowing down allows us the space to make conscious observations and choices about our behavior. Slow the pace of your eating. Put the food on a plate. Don't multi-task while you are eating--give your food your complete attention.
2. Pay attention to hunger Make it a practice to notice how hungry you are before you start to eat. If you don't feel physically hungry, notice that and begin to investigate what that's about. Notice when you choose to stop eating and how full and comfortable or uncomfortable you are at that time.
3. Ask questions
   One of the most powerful things you can do is to work at cultivating curiosity about your feelings and your behaviors. If you find yourself eating because you are stressed, tired, angry or bored, ask yourself what other coping strategies you have for dealing with these feelings. What choices do you have besides eating?

Is emotional over-eating an area you need to work on? Taking control of emotional eating is a process, but one that is well worth it. Taking the time to learn the tools to re-create your relationship with food and your eating allows you to move beyond the restrictive, self-critical diet mentality and get on with our life.

Starting with mindful eating creates a ripple effect--like throwing a pebble into a pond. When you learn to slow down and be mindful of your eating, learn to recognize and respond to your hunger cues and cravings (no small tasks!), you realize that most of the time when you are obsessing about food, you aren't really hungry. When you can figure out what to be mindful of and what to do instead of focusing on food, the ripples lead most people to lives where food takes up so much less time and energy and their minds are freed up to do much more powerful things.

I see people who tackle mindful eating grow and expand in so many different ways when they are no longer trapped in the food-diet craziness. It's so powerful that it's become a major area in which I work with people.

Ending Emotional Eating: How to Begin

A first blog post is like a first step in any new direction.The decision to take the step often feels like a much bigger deal than the actual step itself.

And yet, if we get caught up in making sure that very first step is absolutely perfect--obsessing about every little detail and nuance--we may find ourselves frozen and not moving forward at all. Stuck before we've even begun.

As I sat here wondering about how to begin this blog, I realized that the paralysis I was feeling is similar to what we may feel when we contemplate the idea of changing our relationship with food, with our bodies, with dieting and eating and weight.

If we let ourselves think too far ahead, the goal can quickly seem so big and overwhelming that we feel afraid--or don't know where--to start. And yet, it's in starting that change begins--just like it's in writing that I begin to see this blog unfold.

Our steps don't need to be perfect, they just need to be steps.

Steps are the most powerful actions we can take.

So away we go . . .

Take care,

Melissa