Am I Full Yet?

Hello Mindful Eating, Goodbye Dieting

Find out how to lose weight without  counting carbs, points or calories... without the deprivation of dieting.

From the influential seat that is the therapist’s armchair, I’ve given lots of lip service to eating mindfully. “Appreciate food’s texture, taste, color, just like that French woman,” I’ve routinely suggested to clients with eating issues at a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital and my Concord, Massachusetts, private practice. Their reaction mirrored my own: great idea, but I’m kinda busy. 

It was never clear to me or my clients how to get from chewing slowly to losing weight until shortly after I attended a workshop with Jean Kristeller. This Indiana State University clinical psychologist is connecting the dots with an innovative, sane alternative to dieting that marries age-old attention-focusing practices of mindfulness meditation with modern-day wisdom from food science.

Mindfulness-Based Eating Awareness Training, I learned from Kristeller, has helped binge eaters eat with more control, less compulsion, by teaching them the seemingly impossible – to feel their hunger, trust their tastebuds and find satisfaction in the quality, rather than the quantity, of food.

The National Institutes of Health, I also learned, has recently forked over $1.8 million to Kristeller’s research teams at three U.S. universities to assess if adding accepted weight-loss strategies like portion control to eating meditations can be a potent prescription for the obesity epidemic. And yet, I was still thinking great idea, but… committed carb counters aren’t ready to sit quietly and breathe deeply like chunky monks if there’s no calorie-burning or appetite-suppressing pay-off.

Not until I led an introductory workshop myself and watched veteran dieters stop eating mid-bite because they felt satisfied, and heard them chant, ‘We want the training, gotta start the training!’ did I get it. More than this year’s South Beach Diet, mindful eating seems to be exactly what the diet doctor needs to order.

More than a state of mind, mindfulness is a practice that involves awareness and acceptance of the present moment. In other words, if you focus on breathing, right now, exactly as you are, you are practicing mindfulness. (And you are not dwelling on how fat you feel, beating yourself up for overeating earlier, promising yourself to be “good” starting tomorrow or whenever you get back to counting carbs.)

Mindful eating is bringing that same awareness and acceptance to the everyday activity of eating. Psychologist Susan Albers captures the sensual pleasure of the practice in her paperback “Eating Mindfully”: “Mindful eating includes feeling the saltiness of each potato chip on your fingers when you pick it up. The taste of salt when you put the chip on your tongue. It’s listening to the loud crunch of each bite, and the noise that chewing makes in your head….”

Kristeller and Albers are far from the first to advocate a slow-down diet. It’s the moral of a favorite fable about the Buddha feasting, then fasting, and it’s the message of bestselling anti-diet books by Susie Orbach (“Fat is a Feminist Issue”) and Geneen Roth (“Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating”): savor everything in moderation. But American dieters, ever-focused on the quick fix, have shown little interest in yesteryear’s all-you-can-mindfully-eat plans. Eating to your stomach’s content has sounded more like a set-up for weight gain than a path to permanent weight loss. Thanks to researchers like Kristeller, who’ve turned a scientific eye to the practice, mindful eating is commanding another look.

The exciting news is two-fold: the techniques have drastically improved, and there’s mounting evidence to suggest mindful eating can help you tame unruly eating habits and lose weight. Informed by recent research on food-intake regulation, Mindfulness-Based Eating Awareness Training offers more explicit direction for assessing when you’re hungry and it’s time to eat, when you’ve eaten enough and it’s time to turn your attention away from food. This is something children before age five do instinctively and enviably.

Case in point: if you eat with careful attention, you can’t help but notice after three or four bites something called taste-specific satiety, your tastebuds' decreasing ability to find pleasure in a particular food’s flavor. This law of diminishing tastebud sensation is the reason why you’ll eventually get bored with chicken Caesar salad, but can still delight in a switch to chocolate ice cream. People keep eating partly to regain that initial burst of flavor, even though it isn’t going to happen. Realizing how quickly tastebuds tire of the same old-same old may not keep you from heading back to the salad bar for a little something else, but might make it easier to put down your parfait spoon before you polish off the whole pint.

For people lost at sea with binge eating disorder, such lessons are proving a life raft. According to Kristeller’s yet-to-be published study, 85 binge eaters decreased binging (both the number of binges per week and the amount of food per binge) and increased their sense of control over eating after nine training sessions. Weight loss wasn’t the study’s focus, and, no surprise, subjects didn’t lose weight on average, but they did reduce their risk of diabetes, among other weight-related health issues, evidenced by lower fasting blood sugar levels and decreased insulin resistance. It’s worth noting, those participants who faithfully meditated and attended sessions did lose weight. Over the next four years, Kristeller and colleagues at Duke and UPenn are taking aim at obesity with an expanded twelve-session program designed to cultivate “inner wisdom” through mindfulness and “outer wisdom” via nutrition education.

The seed of Kristeller’s program was actually a raisin. Early in her career while working at University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Kristeller’s path crossed that of Jon Kabat Zinn, the forefather of modern-day mindfulness. Then as now, Zinn likes to introduce mindfulness with a raisin meditation, which involves eating a raisin like it’s your first.  “It could help people become more aware of their eating,” Kristeller realized, “but that 10-minute experience wasn’t enough for people with real problems.”  So the mindful psychologist began developing what would be enough for her clients struggling with compulsive overeating, a problem she understood professionally and personally. (Like Geneen Roth, Kristeller once seesawed between the miseries of binging and dieting.) Her Eating Awareness Training grew from that first lesson.

Like other mindful eating plans, Kristeller’s deems no foods good or bad, advocates no particular diet. The only plan is to eat while eating, rather than mindlessly opening mouth, inserting fork while reading the paper, watching TV or driving. Unlike dieting, meditative eating is a life-long learning process that encourages curiosity, not fear, about what happens when you eat in different situations, under different stress levels, in different states of health, as you age. Diets are doomed, Kristeller believes, because they overlook the satisfactions of eating, from eating as social celebration to the more solitary act of eating to relax or reward yourself.  “But mindful eating isn’t a cure,” she warns, “especially if it’s used as permission to be self-indulgent.”

In addition to her more scientific approach, what distinguishes Kristeller’s plan is its emphasis on formal meditation. “Teaching mindful eating without meditation practice,” she says, “is like urging someone to play a sport without getting in shape.” Another distinction: triggering foods are approached in incremental baby steps. Only after controlled consumption of more neutral foods (raisins, cheese and crackers) do students tackle taco chips and chocolate cake.  Successful graduates have gone on to take all-inclusive cruises without gorging.

Wanna start the training now?

The following lessons have helped my clients reign in their eating and head toward a healthier weight.

Place Settings Everyone

Mindful eating begins before you put your napkin in your lap, when you… start the day with a guided meditation CD (Kristeller’s aren’t available to the public, so my clients listen to mine from jeanfain.com or Jon Kabat-Zinn’s from mindfulnesstapes.com), schedule meals when you’re moderately hungry, not ravenous; plan a healthy, balanced menu; set the table with care, take a few calming breaths and then nourish yourself.

Don’t Worry, Be Mindful

 “There are some people who eat an orange but don’t really eat it,” says Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk and meditation master. “They eat their sorrow, fear, anger, past and future.” Instead, whenever your mind wanders off your plate, notice where it’s gone and gently bring it back to the table with the same kindness you’d give a puppy learning to stay.  Susie*, a 60-year-old discouraged dieter who adopted a mindfulness practice and promptly dropped eight pounds, quiets her mind before meals by reviewing the wise monk’s “Verses for Eating Mindfully” (from www.parallax.org).

Get to Know Your Hunger

Maeve, an extreme dieter who once trained for a marathon on 600 calories a day, was well acquainted with ravenous, but didn’t recognize    lesser degrees of hunger. When this 42-year-old professor learned to attend to the range of hunger cues (from hints of irritability and fleeting thoughts of food to downright crankiness and a single-minded focus on finding sustenance), she started losing weight (32 pounds in 32 weeks) with unprecedented confidence. “For years I used to chastise myself for eating muffins mid-morning,” she says. “I had no idea I was hungry.”  Asking yourself not only if you’re hungry, but how hungry you are, inspires intelligent, nutritious choices and keeps you from that impulsive, no-foods-barred state Maeve describes as “hide the dogs and small children.” 

Are You Full Yet?

We’ve all noticed the feeling of fullness that occurs 20 minutes too late when the blood sugar rises as our internal signal to stop eating. But, I’m sure you’ve also noticed, you can eat a lot in 20 minutes, especially when stressed.  Learn first to pay attention to the subtler, early cues (increasing tightness across the abdomen, decreasing pleasure in food), then practice asking yourself ‘Am I full yet?’ and spare yourself the discomfort and self-loathing associated with loosening your belt.

Got Support?

These principles are simple, but putting them into practice, meal after meal, day after day, takes, well, whatever it takes. Support comes in many forms: CDs, books, websites, lectures, individual or group work with a therapist fluent in mindfulness. [See: Wanna Learn More?] It took a group for Chrissy, a 37-year-old marketing manager with an “eating disturbance,” as she calls her reflex to snack out of boredom, stress and other uncomfortable feelings. “If I read about mindful eating in a magazine, I don’t know if I would have implemented it,” she says. “But with a group, it’s like working out with a personal trainer. You just do it.”

WANNA LEARN MORE ABOUT MINDFUL EATING?

In addition to the above-mentioned websites, check out these books and CDs:

Eating Mindfully

By Susan Albers

This psychologist who specializes in eating issues has written a palatable introduction to eating mindfully, featuring a mix of mindfulness and cognitive behavioral techniques. Sample tips are on her website (www.eatingmindfully.com).

The Slow Down Diet

By Marc David

The most intriguing, albeit flimsy, argument for paying as much attention to how you eat as to what you eat comes from this Canyon Ranch-affiliated nutritionist – slow down your eating, speed up your metabolism.

The Feeding Ourselves Method

By Alice Rosen

This comprehensive four-CD set offers tried-and-true teachings and guided meditations from the Cambridge, Massachusetts-born Feeding Ourselves program, a distinctly feminist approach to overcoming self-destructive eating.

When Food is Food and Love is Love

By Geneen Roth

In the most soothing and engaging of voices, one of the grandmoms of mindful eating serves up her best personal stories, guided visualizations and writing exercises for overcoming eating issues on this inspiring six-CD set.

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*Clients agreed to share their stories if their identities were disguised.

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