Mindful Eating is Not the Solution

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.

Mindful Eating is Yoga for the Stomach

mindful eating, Stress Diet

Yoga for the Stomach

 

Mindful eating, or intentional eating is focusing your mind on the process of eating. The goal of yoga is focus your mind  on your body and your breath as you are doing asanas (positions). Mindful eating focuses your mind on the taste of the food, and your perception of fullness.

There are so many subtleties you can focus on while practicing yoga: how is your body aligned, are your muscles tighter on one side or another, how far can you go into the position, etc… With mindful eating, I realized that I’m doing a kind of yoga.

How to Eat Mindfully

I had a friend who once commented that he never saw anyone take so long to eat a small piece of chocolate. And it’s true! When I was on a chronic diet in my past life, I didn’t want to waste eating anything that didn’t taste good. And since I wasn’t eating a lot of food, I wanted to make it last longer. So, when I was going to have that treat of chocolate, I made it last by  breaking it into small pieces. I’d put in on the tip of my tongue and let it start melting. Then I’d move it around my mouth keeping my mind on where I was tasting it, the texture, what color it felt like, what aspects of the chocolate I loved the most. As you see, I could probably write
a booklet on the taste of chocolate and why I love it so much. It was like doing mouth yoga and then stomach yoga when listening for signs that I had enough.

 

If the phone rang while I was eating chocolate, they could WAIT until I finished! And no, I was NOT going to rush! I love Trader Joe’s big bar of Belgium chocolate because it breaks into small squares. And I break those square into smaller pieces. And NO, it’s not because I’m dieting – because I will NEVER DIET AGAIN. It’s a waste of effort – and you are probably at a point in your life where you understand this, because you are reading on this site! All those years of restricting and starving ended up making me gain weight each time I was fooled into trying a new and better diet.

Your Brain Changes the Way You Perceive Taste

And by the way, did you know that as you are continuously eating a particular food, your brain actually makes it not taste as good as it was when you first started eating it? Think about this: if you are a coffee drinker, the first sip in the morning tastes the best, correct? And then as your drinking it, you get less of a delight as you get to the bottom of the cup.

You taste in your mouth, not your stomach!

Now, I am NOT telling you to eat less food or be on a diet. But what I’m trying to explain is this: enjoy what you eat. If you just stuff it into your mouth mindlessly, you’re not going to enjoy it that much, and more likely to OVER-eat because you’re not paying attention to your stomach’s feeling of satiation. The slower you eat, the more your stomach has a chance to tell you when to stop eating because you’ve had enough. And that way you don’t have to use some artificial one size fits all portion control size like those worthless diet plans use!  Eat mindfully, eat intentionally what you like and what’s good for you, and until you’ve had enough.

Mindful Eating is NOT Enough

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Women Believe Mindful Eating is a New Diet Plan?

Mindful Eating, or intuitive eating is a newer approach to controlling the amount of food you eat by paying attention. But it is still not going to be a solution to out of control binging or emotional eating. And for many women, they secretly  are still hoping that this approach will help them lose weight. The best trainers will tell you “this is NOT a diet” or another way to restrict the food you eat, lots of women still believe it may be a way to lose weight. However, when all you see are average weight women teaching this approach, and pictures on the website of size 10 women, you can be misled to believing it helped them – “and maybe it will help me?”

Eat When You’re Hungry

If you are eating because you are hungry, the mindful eating approach will help you manage how much you eat. It’s a great practice to let you slow down as you eat, and give your body a chance to tell you when you’ve had enough to eat, or when you’re still hungry.

But if you are stressed out, and ready to attack the refrigerator or the pantry, mindful eating is not going to solve your problem. That’s because mindful eating doesn’t deal with the stress triggers that make you go to the refrigerator or panty for comfort food. In fact, the term “comfort food” expresses exactly why you are eating the food! It’s an attempt to sooth emotions that are out of control.

Unmanaged Stress Is More Powerful than Mindful Eating

Once you start a binge, it’s really hard to stop yourself in the middle of this out of control state. You must learn to manage stressful feelings BEFORE you are out of control. Try this actual technique that has been proven to work:

  • STOP, do some IMMEDIATE stress relief. (I have some powerful, proven methods that can stop out of control behavior IF you use them).
  • Tell yourself: “I will eat whatever I want, AFTER I do 5 minutes of stress relief”  (for me, HeartMath is the best….)
  • And then sincerely do a practice for 5 minutes. (check out my Youtube video to learn how to do EFT tapping on your hand)

The way your brain works- like your mother told you: “Count to 10 before you speak” – is the same concept. You can stop a behavior BEFORE, but once you start eating out of control, (or anything else…) it’s very hard to stop once you start.

I am NOT claiming that Mindful Eating or even Stress Relief prior to Intuitive Eating is going to help you lose weight (and maintain it, which is the thing that all weight loss gurus leave out). But I am telling you that stress relief has been PROVEN to help you with emotional management which WILL help with out of control eating, and out of control stress of ANY kind. And stress relief does have a positive impact on your metabolism, and can improve symptoms of Hashimoto’s thyroid disease.

YOU can do it! Get the inside scoop and get great pointers about how to manage your stress, improve your self-esteem, learn how to to answer fat-shamers and lots of information that will EMPOWER you to be accepting and happy in your own body!

If you’re on Facebook, please visit and “like” my new page , StressDiet to get the inside information Diet Gurus don’t want you to know!

 

ONLY YOU can

You can make your own Mindset

Fat Guru

mindful eating, Stress Diet

thin Dave Asprey photo still being used

2017 Dave Asprey photo from interview with JP Sears- not thin anymore

 

Learn from a Fat Diet Guru

Are you smart enough to learn from a Fat Diet Guru? All the people who are telling you how to lose weight are thin – or they are using photos of when they were thin to sell you their diet. Dave Asprey above still uses that great thin faced photo of him during his thin period of time after he completed his diet. Now look at the picture of him being interviewed by the hysterical JP Sears. Man boobs,  neck fat, etc… Now I’m NOT pointing this out to insult him. If you look at me, you’ll see plenty of fat- it’s just an observation. But he is HIDING behind his thin photo to sell his diet!! NOT HONEST at all!

“Get thin like me“, these Diet Gurus claim. But how honest are they actually?

Diet Gurus LIE

First of all, we KNOW that 95%of diets fail – you lose weight, but then you regain the weight you lost plus additional insurance pounds to keep you from starving to death next time. So how is it that all of these Diet Gurus who are selling diets and diet books are thin? Are they in the magic 5% of dieters that actually maintain weight loss?

More likely they are either genetically gifted with a body structure and/or have a naturally fast metabolism, like my friend Yolanda who I write about all the time. She always ate like a Sumo wrestler and stayed thin while I ate rabbit food and constantly put on weight after each diet. OR they are Eating Disordered people who try to make YOU eat like them: under-eating (possibly with Anorexia Nervosa, or Bulimia) and over-exercising their entire lives. Are you willing to give up the things you enjoy eating FOREVER? Are you able to turn down dinner engagements with friends because there are foods you won’t eat? Are you willing to not even eat a piece of your own BIRTHDAY CAKE for the rest of your life? And even WITH that understanding that the food you enjoy will be off limits, there is STILL NO GUARANTEE that you will be able to maintain any weight loss you achieve even while still “watching” what you eat??

Why you Can’t Maintain Weight Loss from Dieting

Within days of starting a restricted weight loss diet, Mother Nature, via your normal body life saving mechanisms is alerted and ready to prevent you from starving to death. No, you cannot control this yourself. You may think you’re disciplined to prevent yourself from eating – and you may be- but you cannot control your metabolism which slows down about thirty percent (!!) to maintain your weight set point. So that means after you reach the weight you are happy with – and maybe you’ve thrown out your fat clothes, because some IGNORANT Diet Guru told you that would keep you motivated, your body is still in “saving your life” mode. You go back to “normal eating”, but probably still not eating a lot of the foods you now think are “the devil” (my daughter’s description of potato chips). But mysteriously…. you start seeing numbers increasing on that scale. (KILL YOUR SCALE!!).

Nature is working as it should, and you WILL regain that lost weight and probably go upwards past your weight set point. But the Diet Gurus will tell you that you cheated. You ate too much, you were lazy and didn’t exercise enough. Well, DON’T BELIEVE THEM. Because your self-blame and body hatred will just increase the stress you are feeling and doubly affect your thoughts, mood and metabolism and make matters worse. And after a while, you’ll just go back on another diet and be stuck in the same revolving door cycle as before. All while spending your money enriching these Diet Gurus who are laughing all the way to the bank.

Revolving Door of Dieting

Ready for a Fat Diet Guru?

You’ll know you are cured from diet obsession when you are ready to listen to and learn from an HONEST fat “diet” guru who will tell you the truth. If you are lucky enough to listen while you are still relatively “normal” sized, you can prevent yourself from gaining even more weight that won’t come off. You may be very unhappy to hear facts about how dieting and exercising is a myth. But it’s the truth. A heavy person who can show you how to test your metabolism to see if you have “functional” hypothyroid can show you how to reverse that condition by eating more and exercising less. I know, it sounds crazy…. but there is tons of evidence to show you why this is so.

And a Un-diet expert who has gone through it herself can also show you a way to use stress relief to stop hating yourself and your body…. to use sleep and relaxation to show your body that you don’t need to stay in starvation mode. (Let’s talk and see if I’m the right person to help you)  Until that happens, you have about a 5% chance to get into that magical group of people who lose weight and keep it off. I certainly don’t want to mislead you to tell you that this will help you lose and MAINTAIN weight loss. NO GUARANTEES.

Restricted Diets Cause Binging

Are you a emotional eater? Do you binge? I bet you never binge on broccoli! When you are under stress or your inhibitions have lowered (a bit of wine, pot, or other affect) that’s when you go for the comfort food, or the “bad” food you have tried to avoid. That’s another huge reason that diets fail. Until you manage your stress by substituting another way of dealing with it, you will continue to use food as your drug of choice. After you finish stuffing yourself, you feel even worse from the guilt. That’s another reason never to diet or claim that a particular food is “bad”.

Lots of women are doing “intentional eating” and mindful eating believing, because the Diet Gurus are slender, that they will lose weight. Unless they tell you that is NOT the goal of mindful eating and that it is NOT a weight loss program, you are actually just trying another diet that won’t give you permanent weight loss, or any weight loss at all. In fact, some people do GAIN weight while eating mindfully. Until you start seeing Fat Mindful Eating Gurus, it’s just another rabbit hole you will pay for both with your money and with ultimate disappointment.

Serenity Prayer for Dieters

I’m not lying or misleading you like other Diet Gurus are so happy to do. I want you to know the truth. Once you have gained weight, it’s going to be almost impossible to lose and maintain that weight loss. Only about 5 percent of people manage it. I believe, IF you don’t have thyroid problems, IF you learn to relax and have a stress relief program you follow daily, IF you get adequate sleep, IF you eat enough and often enough, and if your weight isn’t the result of genetics,  you increase your chances of getting into that metabolic zone where it’s possible to SLOWLY lose weight and maintain it. But your best chances are if your mind is on being happy and healthy- and not related to your weight. Do the things that give you joy, and give away your special talents and skills that you can share with others. Then any weight loss is a natural offshoot of taking care of yourself (and helping others). Be happy and accept yourself as you would if you are tall or short, fat or thin (for men- have hair or are bald).  Love yourself like your dog loves you (or would love you if you had a dog).

love yourself like your dog loves you

 

 

 

 

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NY Times Finally Tells the Truth about Dieting

mindful eating, Stress

multiple bodies from skinny to fat

This article is really important- even for people whose weight has never been an issue.
I wish this information were taught to children starting in elementary school – and all the way through college. It would have prevented me from dieting myself to overweight. It would have stopped me from blaming myself for regaining weight after every diet. It would have convinced me to stop stressing over my body. It would have changed the whole course of my life.

Is there someone whose life you can change by freeing them from maniacal, roller coaster, yo-yo diet cycle that just ends up creating the very thing you want to avoid – being overweight?

I wish this article was studied in MEDICAL SCHOOL- instead of having to deal with doctors who are constantly telling people to “lose weight” and telling their patients that “being overweight will kill them!”

Wouldn’t it be great if you could give this to people who are telling you to eat less and exercise more? Wouldn’t it be great if they read this article and would finally stop them from judging overweight people as lazy, slothful, and unable to control themselves? Could learning this information finally stop us from making fun of overweight people – as the last politically correct group that can be shamed?

What do you think? I feel like making copies of this and carrying it around to give to people buying diet food and falling for the Diet Industry Lies. I’ve been writing about this for a long time- but when the NY Times publishes an article, people are more likely to believe that.

Read it all the way through and finally FORGIVE yourself. Work on changing your mindset: Love yourself the way you are. Eat mindfully and enjoy your life without punishing yourself for not having the perfect body. You can make your own Mindset

 

Binging and Emotional Eating

mindful eating

stuffing chocolate into your mouth and swallowing so fast you don't even taste it!

Do you binge on comfort food when you’re stressed?

Emotional eating, or stress eating results in eating when you’re not hungry.  Emotional eating is to fill an empty heart.

Emotional Eating is a response to stress. You choose comfort foods, almost like a drug – to make you feel better. It may feel better while you are stuffing the food that you haven’t had for a long time, but shortly after, you will feel a lot worse. You may feel uncomfortable from all the food you stuffed into your stomach. You probably also feel guilty for eating the food that you “shouldn’t” be eating.

I have never heard of anyone binge on broccoli, have you?
The reason is because no one tells themselves that they CAN’T have broccoli. It’s an “allowed” food.

The food of choice in a binge, and when it is “stress eating” is called a comfort food. It’s the food that you deny yourself when you are trying to be “good” or eat clean, or are on a diet. It’s your “devil food”.

There’s a much better strategy to eating that will prevent you from binge eating. It’s called: “Eat what you want!” Well actually, it doesn’t have a real name; but you get the meaning. If you don’t diet, and don’t deprive yourself of any food, then it doesn’t have power over you. 

The way to deal with binge eating and emotional eating is two-fold. 

#1 – Don’t deny yourself any food (unless it’s poison- aspartame, HFCS – corn syrup – or something you are allergic to that will make you sick).

#2 – Use stress relief to deal with the emotions that are making you feel stressed, and in need of comfort.

There’s a lyric from a song that explains #1: “Give me a drink of water, make it against the law; see how good the water tastes because you can’t have it anymore”.

If you always allow yourself to eat everything you desire, you won’t binge on it, but once you can’t have it, it’s the thing you want the most!

Stress relief is the most important activity you can do for yourself. If stress is what’s making you eat, it’s also effecting your metabolism. So you have a double negative effect: Eating more, and metabolizing it slower, so it’s more likely to make you gain weight.

Use your time eating as a mindful stress relief activity. Stop multi-tasking, enjoy your food, relax and restore your energy.

For more tips, get my free report.

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