More Thoughts on Hunger and Emotional Eating: Hara Hachi Bu

The Japanese have an expression, hara hachi bu, or “eat until you’re 80 percent full.”

Residents of the Japanese island of Okinawa, who are among the longest living and healthiest people in the world, have traditionally practiced hara hachi bu. The practice is to be mindful of your eating and eat only until you are 80 percent full.

To try hara hachi bu, eat until you feel “mostly full,” then wait 20 minutes. Pay attention to what the experience is like for you. Notice what that 80 percent really feels like.

Stopping at 80 percent fullness is actually a healthy strategy because it takes the stomach time to communicate fullness to the rest of the body. Many who stop at 80 percent will feel satisfied and will ultimately eat less. If you are accustomed to eating until you are more than 80 percent full, you might find that this stopping point leaves you less sleepy and more energetic after meals.

Practicing hara hachi bu is an excellent way to play with your experience of hunger and fullness. View it as an experiment. What does it feel like to leave the table with extra room? How difficult is it to assess that 80 percent feeling? Are there emotions or reactions that come up for you when you experiment with eating in this way?

Take good care,

Melissa

Emotional Spending?

Here’s more evidence that it pays to be mindful of your mood—or more accurately—that it might literally cost you if you aren’t. A recent study by researchers at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and the University of Pittsburgh found that study participants who watched a sad movie clip were later willing to spend four times more money on a fancy water bottle than those who watched a movie clip that was emotionally neutral.

The researchers hypothesize that feeling sad may cause us to become more self-absorbed and devalue our possessions, then try to increase our sense of self worth by purchasing something.

Whether that’s the reason, or whether participants wanted to distract themselves or boost their mood by buying something new, the results of the study remind me a lot of the process of emotional eating.

Like emotional eaters, it’s quite possible that the emotional shoppers are more vulnerable to trying to find “a quick fix” for or a distraction from the negative emotional state they are experiencing. Learning the tools that allow you to slow down, identify your emotions and strategize about how to respond to them is incredibly powerful. Clients who use the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ program often tell me that they quickly find the tools they learn help them in many aspects of their life—not only with overeating and weight loss.

When we can learn to be present in the moment and aware of how we are feeling and what we are needing, we tend to be much better equipped to make choices that are in our best interest.

What do you think?

Melissa

Mistakes That Sabotage Weight Loss and Contribute to Emotional Eating: Part Two

The term emotional eating is used a lot, but not everyone understands what emotional eating really is.

Emotional eating is eating and overeating that occurs when we use food as a way to cope with a feeling, situation, or a need that is not physical hunger. Emotional eating is eating that happens when we want to eat but our bodies don’t really need the fuel. Common kinds of emotional eating are “nervous eating,” eating when you are bored, using food as a “reward” (to feel good), or eating when you are lonely. Because this kind of eating isn’t tied to a physical need for food, it can easily cause weight gain.

Here are three things everyone trying to lose weight needs to know about emotional eating:

1. Many people don’t know that they are emotional eaters. How’s that? Well, emotional eating isn’t always as straightforward as feeling a feeling (“I’m anxious”) and then making a choice to eat. Here’s the tricky part. Over time, if you’ve learned to use food as a way to cope with certain feeling states or situations, your brain can stop identifying that you are eating for emotional reasons. Here’s an example. If when you’re stressed, you reach for a snack to comfort yourself, over time, your brain stops telling you, “You are stressed and you are going to try to cope with it by eating a cookie.”

Over time, your brain may start skipping the emotion and move directly to interpreting that stressed feeling as physical hunger. You might not even realize that you are feeling stress. Your thinking will go like this: Something stressful will happen and you will start wanting a snack. You might even feel physically hungry. Food, not stress, will be the central thought in your mind. If you are someone who feels hungry “all the time,” emotional eating could very well be playing a hidden role.

2. Emotional eating and self-blame, shame and guilt go hand in hand. If you are feeling “out of control with your eating,” odds are that emotional eating is happening. The problem is, if emotional eating goes unrecognized, or if we don’t take it seriously, it’s easy to fall into a trap of guilt and self-blame for not being able to “stay in control” of your eating.
Shame and guilt are never helpful when it comes to long term weight loss. They tend to breed isolation, negative self esteem, decreased hope, and ultimately more emotional eating and self-sabotage. If you are struggling with emotional eating and you don’t learn the tools you need to cope with the feelings, the odds are that you will continue to feel out of control with food.

3. If you don’t take control of emotional eating, it can take control of your weight loss plans. Research studies of individuals trying to lose weight find that people who eat for emotional reasons lose less weight and have a harder time keeping it off. The journal Obesity recently published an article concluding that successful weight loss programs should teach clients how to cope with emotional eating in order to improve the clients’ ability to lose weight and not regain it.

If emotional eating is something that you struggle with, it’s important to know that no diet, no fitness program, and no weight loss surgery will fix that for you.

Taking control of emotional eating requires learning new effective ways to cope with your emotions. It’s not about the food.

It’s also important to know that learning new tools to cope with emotional eating can be one of the most rewarding and life-changing gifts that you can give yourself. Learning new ways to cope with life issues and feelings allows you to tackle life head-on. When you do this, food becomes simpler, and your life grows bigger, and ultimately, more rewarding.

Take good care,

Melissa

The National Mindless Eating Challenge

Last year I blogged about (and recommended) Brian Wansink's book Mindless Eating: Why we eat more than we think . The book has great insights, tips and strategies for curbing eating we don't even know that we do. It's really an interesting and helpful read and an invaluable tool if your goals are to have more control and awareness of your eating.

Now, in conjunction with the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, Brian is offering another great (free!) resource: The National Mindless Eating Challenge.

When you sign up for the challenge (did I mention that it's free?), you fill out a brief survey about yourself, your goals, and your lifestyle. As the website says, this isn't a challenge based on height and weight and BMI, it's about taking steps that allow you to become more mindful of the way you eat, and make food choices that leave you feeling healthy, and give you the energy you want to have.

The program allows you to choose from a variety of goals. Again, this is not a weight loss challenge, although you could definitely use it to develop some habits that will help you lose weight. Don't tell anyone, but I chose "improve my family's health without their knowledge" as my primary challenge goal.

Once you've completed the survey, you will receive concrete suggestions about how to make small, relevent changes to your behavior that are customized to your survey responses. The program provides a checklist that you can use to track progress, periodic emails, and new challenges each month. I like the way the program had me chose achievable goals and actually asked me to do some strategizing around potential hurdles I might face in achieving them.

Finally, I love this quote from the Mindless Eating Challenge website:

"Food is such an important part of our life and our world, it shouldn't be the source of frustration and concern that it is to so many people. Our hope is that we can help you (and your family) make small, painless changes that can help you eat better and enjoy food more."

I've just started the challenge, but so far I give it two thumbs up!

Melissa

Why Diets Don't Work

A huge mistake that people make when trying to overcome emotional eating and lose weight is that they go on a diet. It’s ironic, because millions of marketing dollars are spent telling us that a diet is exactly what we should do. The truth is, we know that diets don’t work. In many cases, diets can actually take you farther away from the things that you need to be successful at taking control of emotional eating and creating a healthy relationship with food.

Diets do not create long term weight loss. There is evidence that diets can actually lead to binge eating and evidence that long term dieting and yo-yo dieting actually lead to weight gain. Among other things, diets are missing one of the most fundamental tools for taking charge of emotional overeating. In my emotional eating programs and the life coaching I do, I emphasize the importance of learning how to listen to yourself. This is an incredibly powerful tool, because, when you do it well, you are able to access the wisdom only you have about who you are and what your body needs. A diet not only doesn’t teach you that, it can really damage the listening ability you already have.

When you can listen to yourself you can learn from yourself. You can learn to identify when you are hungry and when you are full. You can learn to identify what you are really hungry for—whether it is hunger for food or hunger for something else. When you learn how to listen to yourself appropriately, and when you have the tools, you can tell—and you only get this from listening to yourself—what tool you need to get you through the spot you are in.

Diets don’t teach us to listen to ourselves. Diets tell us what to do. Diets don’t help you to be in touch with your body or your feelings or your needs. They don’t help you learn about your unique individual needs and preferences.

The truth is, there is no one truth that works for everybody all the time. Diets, because they externally prescribe a way of eating without considering who we are, actually put us more out of touch with our body, our appetites and our needs. Diets themselves can create a whole tangled web of complications. Lots of people who have dieted for years (and are still struggling with their weight by the way), tell me they no longer have any idea whether they are really hungry or full. They’ve been trying to eat the way someone told them to for so long, they are out of touch with themselves.

There are ways to overcome emotional eating and there are ways to lose weight and keep it off. The first step to success is realizing that dieting isn’t one of those ways.

Take good care,

Melissa

Taking Control of Emotional Eating Class: You can listen in

Yesterday I presented the first of a series of free teleclasses I will be running in 2008. We had a great class--and the feedback was incredibly enthusiastic. Thanks so much everyone! We covered a lot of ground, including some huge mistakes people make in trying to lose weight, take charge of emotional eating, and make lasting changes in their relationship with food. If you missed the call and would like to listen to the recording, you can go here.

Emotional eating and weight loss: is a fresh start really what you want?

Happy 2008!

Given that it's January, I shouldn't be surprised at all the ads promoting the beginning of the year and the opportunity for a "fresh start." Like lots of people, I love new beginnings. I like the first page in a new notebook and putting up my new calendar. In January I do think about my goals and plans for the year. But. Please don't see January as an opportunity to "start over." See the New Year as an opportunity to "start where you are."

Just because you haven't achieved your goal doesn't mean that you:

1. haven't already put some effort (probably LOTS of effort) into it


2. don't know more about yourself and what it will take for you to succeed than anyone else on the planet

When you embark on a new change, a new resolution, a new project, be sure to take your wisdom with you! No new diet, no great new program, no philosophy of eating will work for you in a permanent way if you don't take into consideration who you are, where you are in your readiness for change, and what you need to succeed. Your individuality is a crucial part of the equation.

When I get feedback from users of my Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM) and participants in Emotional Eating Toolbox Coaching Groups(TM), I'm always a bit surprised (although I shouldn't be), at how excited people are when they learn how to finally incorporate their own wisdom and their own readiness for change into the process. It can be a surprisingly hard thing to do but the Toolbox program teaches tools that are targeted at overcoming the resistance and self-criticism that often get in the way. Accessing our own wisdom and self-knowledge so that we can incorporate it with outside knowledge is often the final crucial piece that allows everything else to fall into place.

When you think about your goals or resolutions for the year, take some time to also evaluate what you know about yourself that will help you succeed. Where have you gotten stuck in the past? What could you add or do differently so that that doesn't happen again? How can you mobilize your strengths and not push too hard on the things that are just more difficult for you? What are you honestly ready to take on and what needs to wait (for now)?

These are questions we will be addressing in depth in the Emotional Eating Toolbox Coaching Groups(TM), which start on January 23. These groups work in tandem with the Emotional Eating Toolbox(TM). Once you've purchased the Toolbox program, you can join a group at any time. Each week, we'll meet you where you are in the program. We'll focus on your next step, help you over any hurdles and stuck spots, and help add some momentum to keep you moving in the direction you want to go. Take a look, and consider whether these options might be for you.

Take good care,

Melissa

PS: I'm also just added some additional individual coaching slots to my January schedule. If you would like to schedule a free consultation to have your questions answered about coaching and to investigate whether individual coaching would be a helpful option for you, please email me.

Gratitude and Emotional Eating

This week as I'm checking recipes and making grocery lists and making a mad dash out to the store to buy a jelly roll pan, I'm reminding myself that Thanksgiving isn't REALLY about the food. Thanksgiving is about gratitude.

Giving thanks and acknowledging what we are grateful for is the inspired part of the holiday. Too often,the rituals of gratitude get lost behind the pumpkin pie making, the football games and the frantic calls to the Butterball hotline.

Did you know that there is research showing that taking time out to identify and name the good in our lives on a regular basis increases our feelings of well being and contentment? Note the phrase, "taking time out." That's often hard for many of us, but in this case, it doesn't need to take a lot of time and the pay off can be immediate.

This "counting your blessings" ritual can be addictive. In one study, researchers asked their subjects to, every evening for one week, write down three things that had gone well that day and to note why each good thing had occurred. They found that people who did the exercise reported increases in happiness and decreases in depression that were still present six months after the study was over. It turned out that 60% of the subjects had decided to continue the ritual on their own (or with their partners or families) and were still counting the good things six months later.

I'm guessing you know how hard it is to start and maintain a new habit. People decided to continue this gratitude ritual on their own and it stuck. Gratitude is powerful stuff!

Taking control of emotional eating involves very similar steps of slowing down, being deliberate, being present, and learningto move your focus beyond self-critical blame and judgment. I'm not aware of any studies examining emotional eating or over eating and gratitude, but I don't doubt that gratitude is a powerful tool.

This holiday weekend, take the time. Whether you are cooking or setting the table or watching football or participating in a Turkey Trot. Slow down. Be present. Look around you. Taste, smell, touch. Listen to the others at the table. Look into their faces. And count your blessings.

Cheers and good wishes,

Melissa

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.

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.