Mindful Eating for Weight Management will Change Your Life – It Changed Mine and Many of my Clients’ Lives Too!
Mindful Eating for Weight Management is a remarkable way of bringing joy into our lives, while at the same time supporting our physical and emotional wellbeing, helping to transform our relationship with food and with our bodies.
In this extended blog article, first published in the Breathing Space journal for Mindfulness Teachers and Therapists, Tony O’Shea-Poon talks about the need for mindful eating for weight management, its origins and some of the benefits it has brought to him and clients he has worked with. He also shares some of the mindful eating stages and skills that he teaches clients in his Mindful Eating 6-Step Programme.
The Need for Mindful Eating for Weight Management
While eating is essential to life and can bring great joy, in affluent nations in modern times we have developed many difficulties with our food, caused by a multitude of individual and societal factors. Many different illnesses and disorders are associated with over indulging or with depriving ourselves of food. Anorexia, bulimia, binge eating and food avoidance are some of the better-known conditions, often associated with emotional distress and sometimes with obesity, diabetes or malnutrition.
While exercise, diet advice and psychological support is helpful, medical interventions to treat obesity include prescription drugs, gastric surgery and liposuction, all involving invasive treatment and associated with significant risks and side effects. It is fair to say that our relationship with our food and with our bodies is not as healthy as it could be. But there is an alternative!
Like mindfulness in general, mindful eating is starting to become more visible, with a number of chefs, cooking schools, dieticians and mindfulness teachers starting to specialise in this approach, with a wide range of goals in mind, including losing weight, gaining weight and learning to be happier with our weight and our body.
Mindful Eating is as old as Mindfulness
Mindful eating is definitely not a new idea.
When the Buddha attained enlightenment at the age of 35 in the sixth century B.C., one of the first things he taught to a group of children was mindfulness of eating.
“When you children peel a tangerine, you can eat it with awareness or without awareness. What does it mean to eat a tangerine in awareness? When you are eating the tangerine, you are aware that you are eating the tangerine…When you peel the tangerine, you know that you are peeling the tangerine; when you remove a slice and put it in your mouth, you know that you are removing a slice and putting it in your mouth; when you experience the lovely fragrance and sweet taste of the tangerine, you are aware that you are experiencing the lovely fragrance and sweet taste of the tangerine.”
Extract from Old Path White Clouds, Thich Nhat Hanh
In this passage, the emphasis is very much on enjoyment of the smell and taste of the food. While these are important aspects of mindful eating, it is only part of the story.
Stages of Mindful Eating for Weight Management
Important as it is, mindful eating isn’t just about eating. There’s a whole lot going on before and after we eat that’s very much a part of our eating habits and patterns and can be a part of our enjoyment and appreciation of food.
There are many ways of representing this and I like to use this 6-stage model with clients I work with.
The first stage is awareness of hunger or awareness of the need to shop for food or to prepare food in advance. We have an opportunity here to connect with our body and mind and understand what stories we are telling ourselves about what we need and desire.
The second stage is the active choosing of what to eat, buy or prepare. Here we can make decisions based on our understanding of the impact of food on our body and mind, as well as the impact on other beings, human and animal, and the environment.
Thirdly, we have the action of preparing, cooking and serving food. Instead of seeing this as a chore in order to get to the eating part, this action can be infused with presence and generosity as we take time to appreciate cooking for its own sake and anticipate eating through the sights, sounds and smells of individual and combined ingredients.
Before we get to eating, the important fourth stage of giving thanks and expressing gratitude comes next, gratitude for the food we have to eat and for all the people involved and all the things that have had to happen in order for food to be in front of us. We are very fortunate indeed to have such abundance and variety of food which many people do not enjoy.
At last we get to the important fifth stage, eating itself, and we do so with full presence and awareness of the sights, sounds, textures, smells and tastes of the food we are chewing and ingesting. One of the most important skills in mindful eating is learning to slow down and there are several tips and tricks that I use with clients to support them in this, which is often the hardest for them. Another key skill is removing distractions so as to be fully present with our food as we eat, not missing a single moment of this joyful experience.
It doesn’t end there. Finally, in the sixth stage we get to appreciate what we have had and the effect of the food on our thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations. A key skill here is knowing when we have had enough and being able to stop.
Benefits of Practicing Mindful Eating for Weight Management – Case Studies
If you happen to know me well, you will no doubt think that I am quite slim and perhaps have a fairly healthy diet. That’s true to a large extent now but it wasn’t always that way. One of my great loves and addictions was to eat chocolate, a lot of chocolate. For many years I could easily eat a 250-gram bar every day. That’s a lot of fat! While it never showed on the outside, a dietician advised me that my risk of visceral fat, the fat we collect around our organs, was rather high.
Having already discovered the skills of mindful eating, I began to put this into practice with my chocolate consumption. What I loved about the approach was that I didn’t have to give up my chocolate. I just had to consume it with greater awareness. Easy right? Well, not really, but you know how mindfulness is cultivated, don’t you? It’s a practice and mindful eating is no different. By practicing eating in a different way, I could consume less and actually increase my enjoyment. This is one of the great revelations of mindful eating that I love to share with my clients, along with six specific skills that they can learn and practice to obtain similar benefits.
Amy came to me unhappy with her weight and the shape of her body. She had tried many diets and was obsessed with weighing herself. She had a number of historical emotional challenges and was embarrassed to be seen outdoors. She comforted herself with take away food several evenings a week, enabled by her partner who was also overweight. My assessment identified that Amy wasn’t obese but that she experienced low self esteem. We focused on letting go of past hurts and regrets and reconnecting with the wonder of her body. She benefitted greatly by learning to tune in to her body before eating, making healthier choices, and requesting more explicit support from her partner.
Mike came to me without diagnosis but reporting eating patterns that suggested ARFID (Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder). He had a severely restricted diet, particularly avoiding most fruits and vegetables and being further restricted by some textures, tastes and temperatures of food. His primary goal was to gain weight but, following my assessment, he agreed he wanted to be happier with himself as he was, while ensuring he remained healthy. With some creative visualisation, Mike started to believe he could vary his diet and was able to slowly introduce new foods through a process of desensitisation. I also referred him to a dietician for testing and advice on nutrient intake and supplements.
Mindful Eating 6-Step Programme for Weight Management
There are many different ways that we can introduce the joy of mindful eating to our clients. We can incorporate it with our general teaching to individuals and groups and we can respond to individual expressed needs. I have personally enjoyed creating a unique programme that combines mindful eating with mindful movement, hypnotic visualisation and coaching. It is a rapid intervention taking place typically over 6 weeks that includes a number of online video and audio resources combined with weekly in-person or online support sessions. It provides space to understand current behaviour patterns, skills to help replace them and values-based goal setting.
During these six weeks, guided contemplations and creative visualisations focus on letting go of the past, connecting with and appreciating our body, believing in the future and developing resilience.
You don’t have to be a dietician, a therapist or a coach to teach mindful eating skills. As with every other aspect of mindfulness, the key to effectiveness is in your embodiment of the practice. By learning to eat mindfully yourself, you will realise the benefits directly and be able to transmit this understanding to others.
The Value of Gratitude
All of the stages and steps discussed are important in their own way and when working with clients I may emphasise one or more over the others, according to their presenting needs. However, gratitude is always an aspect that I believe requires particular attention, partly because many of us have forgotten just how much we have and partly because there is much evidence that shows more grateful people are generally happier in other aspects of their lives.
Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh has a particular take on this, bringing to our attention the inter-connected or ‘interbeing’ nature of all things. A tangerine is not just a tangerine. It is connected to everything else in a very real way and we need to be grateful for all of those things too.
“A person who practices mindfulness can see things in the tangerine that others are unable to see. An aware person can see the tangerine tree, the tangerine blossom in the spring, the sunlight and rain which nourished the tangerine. Looking deeply, one can see ten thousand things which have made the tangerine possible. Looking at a tangerine, a person who practices awareness can see all the wonders of the universe and how all things interact with one another.”
Extract from Old Path White Clouds, Thich Nhat Hanh
Is It Worth It?
Food is a big part of our lives and most of us eat every day, so we have many opportunities to practice mindful eating. Rather than depriving ourselves of food, or seeing food as the enemy, we can gain a completely new perspective and appreciation for the wonder of food and the joy of selecting, preparing, eating and appreciating food. It does require some effort to eat mindfully but, like all new habits, we can become skilful through practice and repetition. It is well worth the effort and, for some people, it is genuinely life changing.
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