mindful eating, Stress Diet
What they don’t tell you about Mindful Eating
You’d think that Mindful Eating is the solution to all diet issues if you follow the news. Actually they tell you that Mindfulness is the answer. Well guess what? It’s NOT the solution to life or to dieting issues. Sure Mindfulness is a great practice that can help you relieve stress and dial down your perception of what bothers you. But that means you have to ignore your phone, your texting and everything else you are doing in the way of multi-tasking. You have to do one thing at a time. I think Americans (at least the ones I see around me in San Diego) are addicted to mutitasking- especially in the car when they are driving and texting at the same time. Sometimes these same people are also eating at the same time!
I was driving and found myself next to a woman in the next lane to me with a dog on her lap, coffee in her hand and the phone in her other hand. She was driving with her LEGS!! Where are the police when you need them?? Probably there’s not even a law against that (at least in Arizona, where this happened).
What is Mindful Eating?
Mindful eating is simple. It’s paying attention to JUST EATING: not reading, texting, watching TV, talking with others. It’s focusing on your food, enjoying your food, taking your time eating and chewing, and listening for when your stomach says you have had enough. Your brain can really only do one thing at a time, although we’ve been fooled to think that you can multi-task and do many things. Your brain actually cycles between paying attention to the different activities or thoughts you are performing, and in reality it takes longer, you make more mistakes and don’t do any of the things as well as if you did it alone! Then there are the misconceptions about what mindful eating actually does…. Problem 1: So many of the mindful eating gurus are thin that you might think that this is a new diet –
Mindful eating is NOT a diet. Some people lose weight, some people GAIN weight and some people stay the same while eating mindfully. If anyone tells you that you will lose weight eating mindfully, they are trying to sell you something and not telling the truth.
Problem 2: You can still be following a diet strategy while you’re eating mindfully. You can diet while eating mindfully, but it still will have a negative effect on your metabolism because dieting is stressful for your body.
Dieting alerts your body to the fact that it’s getting less food- and to prevent you from starving it AUTOMATICALLY slows down your metabolism, and makes you feel lazy to conserve calories! It also puts your body into a state of stress!
Problem 3: If you are stressed, mindful eating goes out the window.
Mindful eating takes practice- just like meditating. In fact, mindful eating is a form of meditation- focusing on one thing at a time. So many people in the west say they “can’t” meditate. But the truth is, it takes time and practice to be able to maintain your mind’s focus. There are some days when you’re great at it, and others where it feels like it’s next to impossible! And paradoxically, the days when it’s hard are the days when you need it most: when you are under stress. As with learning any new task, it takes time and practice. Start slow- for just a few minutes. Build up to 5 minutes. But commit to do it EVERY DAY. At some point you’ll find it’s enjoyable and getting easier. And this mindful practice transfers to other aspects of your life. But without a stress relief practice, being able to stay mindful when you’re eating and preventing yourself from going into a stress eating session and binging is HARD!
Mindfulness and meditation teaches you will power. That is one of the most valuable assets you can have in all aspects of your life. It’s the ability to make a decision and stick with it. I don’t mean the kind of will power to say “no” to dieting or eating a cookie or dessert (because I know that dieting doesn’t work in the long run). I mean being able to eat a cookie or two and NOT eat the entire box. Having will power means that even though you want to buy something outrageously expensive, that you can control your spending and not put yourself in debt. Having will power means that although the guy is incredibly handsome and coming on to you that you don’t cheat on your partner. Having will power means that your do the things you commit to! These are just some of the ways that having strong will power can improve in your life. Having will power means although something is stressing you out you don’t go directly to the refrigerator or panty to stuff your feelings with food. You can hold off and try an alternative to eating to calm yourself down. Having will power in your life can vastly improve your mood and even your sleep.
Stress Eating and Mindfulness
Mindful eating does not address the problems of stress eating! That’s why you need to have a go to method of dealing with stress- to STOP stress eating BEFORE it starts! If you get my report: “10 Powerful Solutions to STOP Stress Eating” you’ll be well on your way to preventing weight gain from emotional eating. Get it now and read it – and let me know your favorite and most effective method.
Diet Myths, emotional eating, Stress Diet
Miracle Weight Loss Diet
Every day, you’ve probably seen some new “miracle weight loss diet” replete with before and after photos. But what you’re NOT seeing is “after” the “after” photos. That’s because for most people losing weight is not an issue. Sure you’ll get to a “plateau” – the place where your metabolism has slowed down so significantly that even the miracle weight loss diet is not working anymore. What you have to do at this point is eat even less, and they’ll also tell you in most cases that you need to exercise more.
The photo you are seeing is the BEFORE photo from a woman who is on an extreme miracle weight loss diet where she has limited her diet to meat and water. GAG ME! Can you imagine a life where every meal is meat and water? It sounds like some new Guantanamo eating plan.
Here’s her blog: I discovered Zero Carb/no plants diet…meat and water. Can’t say I love it, but I like it enough to continue. Cravings gone, no raging hunger every 2 hours, no bloating, no gas/farting, no craziness to create three ‘balanced’ meals a day…plus snacks, because meals weren’t enough. High blood pressure…gone. Temps staying up in normal high range without thyroid or any supplements. Excess fat loss is a breeze, edema I could not get rid of (it was getting scary)…gone. If I had a time lapse camera I could see how my body is changing daily from a lumpy 100 pounds overweight old lady to having a shape even with 80 pounds more to go. My pants fit better (down a size) than the last time I wore them when this weight/size. I can’t remember the weight I was exactly…it’s been a few years, but it almost seems I weighed less and was fluffier. No matter
Guilt From Regaining Weight
You struggled and followed that diet EXACTLY. And maybe you reached your goal weight. You went into a maintenance diet mode- still “watching” what you ate. For 95% of dieters this can happen during your diet or 2 months to 2+ years after you finished the diet, the weight started creeping back. In the beginning you might have ignored it, being exhausted from the strict diet you were on. But at a certain point you realized that the weight WAS coming back! The fear and guilt is overwhelming!
Embarrassed To Show What Happened
You might have shown your before and after pictures on Facebook, Instagram and other social media and gotten so many positive comments and requests for what you did to lose the weight. But at this point you won’t answer anyone. You feel guilty and like a failure. And the diet industry is happy that you feel like that because they know that you blame yourself for the diet failure. They know that you’ll be back trying another diet.
Diet Revolving Door
The bad news is if you try another diet after each diet failure, you will regain the weight, just like before. But the worst part is that each time you rebound and add additional weight from your starting point. And it’s NOT YOUR FAULT. In fact, it’s the sign of a healthy body following its primary directive to prevent you from starving by slowing your metabolism.
Unfortunately for us who have gained weight, the likelihood of losing and maintaining that weight loss is very small. Only 5% of dieters maintain their weight loss.
But there is a way that may increase your possibility of getting into that group. It’s by dealing with STRESS. Read more about it and figure out if you are a stress eater, or have body image issues that are stressful and damage your metabolism.
Stress Causes Weight Gain Two Ways
Much of the reason that diets fail has to do with Emotional Eating. That’s when you are eating from stress. But the other invisible way that stress causes weight gain is from actually changing your metabolism. Your body is responding to stress as though you were under attack. But you can learn how to turn off both ways that stress is affecting your weight.
Get control of stress now and prevent your weight from getting any higher. The other benefit is that this training affects all aspects of your life and makes you more resilient to stress and calm.
Contact me if you have any questions-
Learn to love yourself like your dog does- (even if you don’t have a dog, you’ve heard of unconditional love? that’s it!)
Please share YOUR experiences with dieting- were you able to maintain your weight loss?
Stress Diet
There is a great fear that people now have:
Am I Addicted to SUGAR??
Diet fads come and go. The most recent fads are being gluten free, and breaking “addiction” to sugar.
I’m here to tell you that you are just as addicted to sugar as you are addicted to BREATHING! NO, you are not addicted to sugar! If you were TRULY addicted to sugar, why don’t you just go eat it straight out of a sugar bowl? Sure, it tastes good, and you enjoy eating things that are sweet. But those same things are generally in a package or combined with fat, and sometimes ALSO with salt. Hence the new fad of eating pretzels that are covered in chocolate- or salted chocolate products.
Sugar is a Stress Relief Food!
When you’re under stress, that’s the time when you reach for something sweet. It makes you feel good – it’s a treat. In fact, the first food that you eat as an infant is “mother’s milk”. The combination of sugar, fat and protein in human breast milk is very close to another food that women in particular have a hard time saying “no” to: ice cream!
Diet gurus are again into another one of their Diet Industry Lies scheme to make you feel powerless and out of control by telling you that you are an addict! Actual addiction is characterized by a continuous or an increased dependence for a particular substance in the body. Furthermore, it is accompanied by the experience of a physical withdrawl when someone stops using that substance.
This again shows you that you are not addicted to sugar. Yes, there is an emotional pleasure that is derived by eating sweet food. But there is not a physical addiction to sugar. You don’t go holding up banks because you need money for sugar!! Physically you may detect that you feel more lethargic when you stop eating sugar, but that’s probably because of a drop in your blood sugar which will level off over time.
Sugar is Brain Food
Your brain would not be fed adequately without glucose. In fact, thinking uses a higher amount of glucose than any other body part:
Glucose is virtually the sole fuel for the human brain, except during prolonged starvation. The brain lacks fuel stores and hence requires a continuous supply of glucose. It consumes about 120 g daily, which corresponds to an energy input of about 420 kcal (1760 kJ), accounting for some 60% of the utilization of glucose by the whole body in the resting state.
This is the opposite of your muscles which actually store glycogen. And glucose is the preferred fuel when you need burst of activity. In fact, your brain’s need will over ride the body’s need for glycogen. If you are walking up a steep hill and doing complicated mathematical computations, you will have to stop one or the other activity.
Restrictions Cause Cravings
The food you think you should eliminate because it’s a “bad food” according to the Diet Industry, is the very one you reach for when you’re stressed out. And this can actually be for a few reasons. Your body NEEDS more sugar when you are stressed. It’s Mother Nature’s method to give a surge of energy to your muscles to escape a predator that could eat you. That means, if you are craving sugar, you are probably feeling stressed, and may not even be aware of it! Do stress relief immediately!
Another reason that you are craving sugar specifically is – because you restricted it. You only reach for the things that we don’t allow yourself – If you “allowed” yourself to eat sugar when you want it, it won’t be your food of choice when you inhibition is lowered.
All Things In Moderation
Bottom line: you DO need sugars and carbs, just as you need protein and fat. If you want to be healthy and happy take the middle road- balance in all things. Don’t over do, don’t under-do. Do just enough – in all things.
When you are stressed and feel like you are out of control because you “need” a sugar fix it’s time for stress relief. I have a great program that helps you deal with stress eating so that you don’t feel the need to stuff your feelings with food! You become more resilient and able to handle situations that would ordinarily make you reach for a candy bar or ice cream. Read about it, and see if it’s for you!
SaveSave
SaveSave
