EAT WITH YOUR MIND
We’ve all done it: eaten something so fast that we don’t even
taste it. We’ve inhaled bags of chips, sucked down giant milkshakes, mowed
through a plate of cookies, and swallowed a candy bar so fast that we don’t even
remember unwrapping it.
We do it when we’re eating on the run, grabbing something
quick—usually a greasy burger or a sweet dessert—and stuffing it into our mouths
so quickly that it barely registers in our mind that we’re eating.
We do it at home, plowing through our favorite snack foods while
we’re watching television after a long day.
We even do it at mealtimes, when we’re sitting down to the same
old thing, mindlessly shoveling food into our mouths as we sort through the
mail, read the newspaper, or check in with friends on Facebook.
You probably did it at your most recent meal. Quick: What did
you have for dinner last night? If you can’t remember, it’s probably because you
wolfed it down mindlessly.
If you’re anything like me, you can mindlessly inhale a big bowl
of ice cream and be hard pressed to remember, even half an hour later, what kind
of ice cream it was. This kind of eating is called mindless eating because while
our mouths do the chewing, our minds are paying zero attention to what we eat.
When we eat mindlessly, we don’t taste our food or appreciate the flavors of
what we’re consuming. What’s worse, we don’t pay attention to how much we’re
eating, or what ingredients are in the food we’re gobbling up. We ignore the
signals our body sends when we start to feel full. We just keep eating and
eating, making poor choices, focusing on everything else except our body’s
reactions to the food we’re taking in.
WHEN WE EAT MINDLESSLY, WE DON’T TASTE OUR FOOD OR
APPRECIATE THE FLAVORS OF WHAT WE’RE CONSUMING. WE DON’T PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT
OR HOW MUCH WE’RE EATING, AND WE IGNORE THE SIGNALS OUR BODY SENDS WHEN WE START
TO FEEL FULL.
|
OUT-OF-MIND EATING
I think mindless eating is one of the top contributors to
America’s obesity epidemic. I know there’s a lot more to it—we eat too much, we
eat the wrong kinds of food. But have you ever thought about why we do that?
Nobody’s setting out to gain excess weight. Nobody intentionally eats foods that
will put them on the fast track to the emergency room.
We don’t sit down at the dinner table and say to ourselves, “I
am going to eat so much at this meal that my pants won’t button an hour from
now.” We don’t grab a bottle of cola and think, “What my body really needs right
now is 16 teaspoons of sugar and a load of artificial caramel color!” And we
certainly don’t wish, when we’re biting into a piece of coffee cake, “I sure
hope this raises my heart disease risk!”
This is the problem: we are so accustomed to not thinking about
the food we eat that we’ve eaten ourselves sick. Eating mindlessly gets us
nowhere but to the ER and an early grave.
It’s time to change all that and start eating mindfully. It’s time to start paying attention—really
paying attention—to what you put in your mouth, how it tastes, how it makes your
body feel, what it’s made of, and what potential it has to save or sabotage your
health.
It’s time to start listening to your body while you eat, so when
it starts telling you that it’s getting full, you’ll hear its message loud and
clear and put down your fork.
It’s time to bring mindfulness—an ancient principle of
awareness, awakening, and enlightenment espoused by philosophers and wise people
throughout history—to your kitchen table.
IF YOU CAN’T REMEMBER WHAT FOOD YOU HAD AT YOUR LAST MEAL,
YOU PROBABLY ATE IT MINDLESSLY, WITHOUT THINKING OR NOTICING HOW IT TASTED OR
HOW YOUR BODY REACTED TO IT.
|
My 10 Food Prescriptions are all really important, but being
mindful of what you eat is the most important one of all. Mindful eating is my
number one Food Prescription, because if you can open your mind and become fully
aware of food and its impact on your health and your life, everything else you do as you follow The Doctor’s Diet will be
easier. In and of itself, that one change alone could make all the difference
for you in your quest to lose weight for good.
FULLY CONSCIOUS EATING
So, what is mindful eating? Here’s a great way of thinking about
it. You know Highlights, the children’s magazine that
you see in dentists’ offices? One of the regular features in Highlights was a comic strip about two characters, Goofus
and Gallant. The strip showed how Goofus and Gallant acted completely different
in various social situations. For example, on a crowded bus, Goofus would stay
seated while an elderly woman held on to a pole for dear life; Gallant would get
up and offer her his seat. Goofus would keep the dollar he found on the street;
Gallant would put up a sign looking for the money’s owner. You get the idea.
You can apply Goofus and Gallant thinking to mindful eating as
well. In most eating-related situations, there are mindless choices and mindful
choices. For example:
- Reading labels. Mindless eaters ignore them, paying no attention to a food’s ingredients. Mindful eaters read them carefully, using the information on them to pick healthy foods and limit those with added sugar, unhealthy fats, and artificial ingredients.
- Choosing portion sizes. Mindless eaters guess at them and overeat. Mindful eaters take note of serving sizes on nutrition labels and help themselves to a limited amount of food by using measuring spoons, cups, a scale, or a memory device (such as, a serving of protein is about the size of the palm of your hand, minus your fingers).
- Grocery shopping. Mindless eaters wander up and down the aisles buying whatever captures their interest. Mindful eaters make a list and stick with it.
- Meal planning. Mindless eaters wait until mealtime to figure out what to make. Mindful eaters plan meals in advance, either by the day or week, making sure they have all the right foods on hand for healthy meals.
- Choosing foods. Mindless eaters eat with only the present moment in mind; if something looks good, they consume it. Mindful eaters consider food choices before rushing to eat, considering whether the food fits in with their short-term and long-term health goals.
- Eating. Mindless eaters watch TV, read, stand, walk around, drive, talk on the phone, or do many other kinds of multitasking while eating. Mindful eaters focus on their food, blocking out other distractions so they can taste, smell, and enjoy what they’re eating.
- Timing. Mindless eaters rush through their meals. Mindful eaters slow down, allowing themselves to taste every bite, to chew their food fully, and to give their bodies time to recognize and react to food.
- Tasting. Mindless eaters barely notice the taste of foods. Mindful eaters savor every bite, paying attention to flavor, texture, spiciness, crunch, chewiness, and other attributes of deliciousness.
- Appreciating natural flavor. Mindless eaters sprinkle salt or sugar on everything. Mindful eaters reduce their dependence on salt and sugar and enjoy the natural sweet and savory flavors of food.
- Focusing on the body’s reaction to food. Mindless eaters ignore feelings of hunger and fullness. Mindful eaters listen to the signals sent to their brain by their digestive system and respect the body’s innate ability to recognize hunger and satiety. (This is a skill that may take awhile to develop, so don’t worry if at first you’re not good at deciphering these signals.)
GETTING TO KNOW HUNGER
If you’ve been eating mindlessly for years—or even decades—you
may be very much out of touch with what hunger and satiety feel like. Eating
mindfully starts with getting reacquainted with these feelings. One way to do
this is to let yourself get hungry, and to pay attention to how it feels. As an
experiment, go a little longer than usual without eating, and then spend a few
minutes focusing on your sensations. Sit in a quiet room, without any
distractions, and really zone in on what your body is telling you. Mindfully
experience the feeling of an empty stomach, the “growling” of your belly, the
sense of emptiness or gnawing that occupies your middle. Do a mental body scan
to look for other signs of hunger. Do you feel headachey at all? Are you
light-headed? Do you feel impatient or irritable? These sensations can be
unpleasant, but they are true signs of physical hunger, and it’s good to be in
touch with them so you can recognize them.
Then, go into the kitchen and eat a meal. (The best time to do
this is when you’re alone, so you can really zero in on your physical
responses.) Eat slowly, keeping close track of how you feel. Notice your stomach
feeling fuller and the emptiness in your belly subsiding. Note any changes you
experience in your body and mind as you move from hunger to satiety.
During the days that follow, continue to monitor these feelings.
Over time, you’ll get much better at recognizing them, and at distinguishing
hunger from thirst and fatigue, as well as from emotional hungers such as
boredom, sadness, and loneliness.
USING MINDFULNESS TO RESET YOUR PALATE
Here’s another reason why developing the skill of mindful eating
will help you lose weight. As you start to follow The Doctor’s Diet and begin to
implement all of my Food Prescriptions, you’ll be eating food in a much more
natural form than you may be used to. As you cut out added sugar, unhealthy
fats, fried foods, preserved meats, and other kinds of processed foods, you’ll
replace them with whole, unprocessed foods, such as vegetables, fruits, nuts,
legumes, whole grains, and lean meats and fish.
At first this change may be jarring to your taste buds—food may
taste dull and boring without all those additives, sugars, and fake flavorings.
But be patient—I promise you that before you know it, your taste buds will come
around to your new way of eating, and your palate will be reset. Real foods may
taste a bit bland at first compared with fake foods, but by cutting down on
processed foods and using mindfulness to fully taste and appreciate whole foods,
you’ll soon come to prefer their natural flavors.
Resetting your palate is a crucial part of The Doctor’s Diet.
Once you do this, you’ll be much better able to appreciate subtle flavors, and
you will no longer need a big wallop of sugar or a heavy shake of salt to make
foods taste good.
FOLLOWING THE HEALTHY DIET RESETS YOUR PALATE SO YOU CAN
TRULY ENJOY THE TASTES OF WHOLE, NATURAL FOODS.
|
OPEN YOUR EYES TO BLIND EATING
Mindfulness means more than being aware of what you’re
eating—it’s being fully conscious of what is in the food you eat and being
honest with yourself about its potential impact on your health.
The opposite of mindful eating is blind eating—for example, the
kind of eating you do in restaurants when you pretend that the 12-ounce steak
you ordered is really just 3 ounces, or when you tell yourself that the battered fried fish is really just as good a choice as a filet
grilled without coating.
We sometimes deceive ourselves about food, telling ourselves
lies about the choices we make. Our bodies know the truth, though.
Mindful eating means being honest with yourself about serving
sizes, ingredients, and choices. It means owning your decisions and making them
based on facts, not fallacies. When you’re ordering fish at a restaurant, find
out how it’s cooked. Quiz your server about whether it’s breaded and fried. Ask
if it can be cooked “naked”—grilled or baked without any extra fats or
breading.
Once you know the facts and make a selection about what you’re
going to eat, own that decision 100 percent! If you go with baked fish, enjoy it
and give yourself credit for choosing wisely (but celebrate with a pat on the
back, not a piece of cherry cheesecake!). And if you opt for the breaded fish,
own that decision as well—don’t blame it on someone else, or tell yourself
little stories that it was your only choice, or play dumb with yourself and
believe that all that fried breading doesn’t really make a difference to your
health. It does, and when you decide to have it, you need to own that choice as
something you did with your nutritional eyes wide open.
It’s all up to you—you have the choice at every meal, every
snack, to eat in a way that contributes to weight loss and robust health.
A CURE FOR PORTION DISTORTION
Eating mindfully extends beyond the awareness of what you eat
and whether it benefits your health. In order to succeed at weight loss, you
have to pay attention to how much you eat.
Even if you eat all of the super-healthy foods I recommend and
stay away from all junk food, you won’t shed pounds and burn excess fat unless
you cut back on calories. It’s a simple equation: When you eat more calories
than you burn, you gain weight. When you eat fewer calories than you burn, you
lose weight.
It’s not exactly a “calories in, calories out” situation. Some
foods contribute more to weight loss than others. For example, research suggests
that when you eat 100 calories worth of nuts, some 10 or 15 of those calories go
through your body undigested.
But in general, the only way you’re going to lose weight is by
taking in fewer calories than you’ve become accustomed to. To do this, you have
to be totally mindful of how much you’re eating. You have to
commit fully to becoming an expert in portion sizes.
You can’t count on eyeballing portion sizes. For one thing, we
are absolutely terrible at approximating how much food we eat. Even if a piece
of steak looks like it weighs three ounces, it’s likely to be four, five, or six
ounces—or more. A half cup of ice cream is likely to be closer to half a pint.
And in the opposite direction, what looks like two cups of salad greens may be
more like a cup or a cup and a half.
Go ahead and blame all this portion distortion on the fact that
food has gotten so much bigger in the past two decades. When I was a kid, foods
like bagels, muffins, pizza slices, sodas, cookies, and even ice cream cones
were way smaller than they are now—and I’m not that old, so it’s not like I’m
dredging up memories from the Great Depression. A bagel that you buy in a bakery
or grocery store today may actually contain as many as four servings of bread.
Take a look at a bag of mini bagels in the grocery store and you’ll see that,
rather than being tiny little things that many of us could easily eat two or
three of, these “mini” bagels actually weigh in at about an ounce—which is equal
to one serving of bread.
Muffins are worse. I’ve seen muffins that are so big a
bodybuilder would have trouble lifting them. These are muffins that weigh in
with more calories and fat than two candy bars.
Like it or not, in order to lose weight you have to get real
about portion sizes. You have to be mindful of how much you should be eating, and how much you are eating. To do this you’ve got to use some kind of
measuring system.
I don’t care what you use to gauge your portion sizes. You can
weigh it on a scale or measure it with a cup or spoon. You can learn how much
your kitchen dishes hold—that way, you know when you have cereal in the blue
flowered bowl that you should pour in just enough to reach the third leaf under
the rim. You can go by the sizes of your hands or fingers—for example, an ounce
of cheese is about the size of your thumb, a medium apple or orange is about the
size of your fist, and a serving of nuts is about a handful. You can even count
your foods—for example, with the peanuts I buy, a one-ounce serving is just
about 40 nuts.
And of course, keep an eye on food labels—they tell you exactly
what you’re getting.
Whatever you do, just make sure you’re being honest with
yourself. If you fill your hand with 60 nuts and call it 40, you’re getting 50
percent more calories. The only one you cheat is yourself.
MINDFUL SNACKING
Allowing yourself to get ravenously hungry between meals is a
recipe for dietary disaster. That’s why the STAT Plan includes one snack daily,
which you can eat whenever you need it: mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or after
dinner.
Eating small, healthy, well-constructed snacks between meals can
boost your energy, make it easier for you to stick with your eating plan, and
contribute to your daily requirements for fiber, protein, vitamins, and other
important nutrients.
Careful snacking can also help keep blood sugar levels stable,
which heads off the kind of binging that can occur when you’re very hungry.
The key to smart snacking is making mindful choices. Having a
snack doesn’t mean eating cookies, ice cream, cake, or a bag of chips. It means
enjoying sensible-size portions of healthy foods.
The most effective snacks usually combine complex carbohydrates
with lean protein. This combo gives you an immediate energy fix and puts some
fuel in your tank for later on, too. Together, protein and complex carbohydrates
fill you up and help chase hunger pangs away.
KEEP IT ALL IN MIND
As you move on through the rest of Food Prescriptions,
remember to keep your mind as open as possible. Be aware not only of what and
how you’re eating, but of foods you may have turned away from in the past that
might be worth reconsidering.
Opening yourself to a full awareness of food’s impact on your
life and health will make it easier for you to make choices that will pay off
now and in the future. If you really, truly set your mind to it, permanent
weight loss is within your reach.
No comments:
Post a Comment