Eating Mindfully

Book excerpt: How common and effortless it is to eat in an uncontrolled, unaware, mindless manner. If you've ever continued to snack when you were full, cut calories despite being hungry, or used guilt to guide your eating, you've experienced mindless eating firsthand. Let's face it. Deciding what to eat is not an easy task. It's so tricky that in the United States eating concerns and weight obsessions have reached epidemic proportions, with serious health consequences for a large part of the population. What turns an everyday activity like eating into such an overwhelming process? The answer to that question is, of course, a complex one. Throughout the book, we will return to that question with some answers. But the bottom line is this: To make smart, healthy eating choices, your body and mind work together to send you essential clues about what you need and want to eat. These clues give you information about ''how much'' and ''what'' to eat. The sensations and emotions that signal when you're full, famished, or just wanting to eat something rich and delicious are a complex combination of bodily and emotional feelings. If you are attentive and responsive to these cues, your eating will be healthy, in control, and well regulated. Dieting and disliking your body are incredibly detrimental to your emotional, mental, and physical well-being. They inhibit your ability to accurately decode your body's messages and feedback. The dieting mindset is akin to taking a knife and cutting the connection that is your body's only line of communication with your head. The dieting mindset can skew your knowledge of healthy eating so badly that you have no idea of what to eat. Mindless eating is then manifested in two ways. You can either ''obsess'' or ''ignore'' internal feedback from both your body and mind, rather than responding thoughtfully to your hunger and to your concern about your health. In this book, you will learn how mindlessness unknowingly corrupts the way you eat a meal, and how it manifests in a variety of eating problems. You will gain insight into why mindfulness, which is, of course, the opposite of mindlessness, can provide you with valuable skills to control the way you eat.