Women Believe Mindful Eating is a New Diet Plan-WRONG!
Mindful Eating, or intuitive eating is a newer approach to controlling the amount of food you eat just by paying attention. It's a funny thing but when you look for a picture of "mindful eating" online you'll primarily find people eating salad and fruit. But Mindful eating/ Intuitive eating is NOT eating "clean." And implying that eating only vegetables and fruits is clean means eating everything else is "dirty." That is NOT a true example of mindful eating. You can eat chocolate mindfully. And I don't believe that chocolate is unhealthy or dirty eating!
Mindful Eating Doesn't Stop Binging or Emotional Eating
But Intuitive or mindful eating 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 coaches will tell you “this is NOT a diet” or another way to restrict the food you eat. But lots of women still believe it may be a way to lose weight. When all you see are photos of average weight or smaller bodied women with thin privilege teaching this approach you can be misled to believing it helped them lose weight, “and maybe it will help me?”
This is NOT MINDFUL or INTUITIVE EATING!
Eat When You’re Hungry
If you are eating because you are hungry, the mindful eating approach will help you figure out what you want to eat and then manage how much you eat. It’s a great practice pay attention to what you are eating, to let you slow down and give your body a chance to tell you when you’ve had enough to eat, or when you’re still hungry. But it's not designed to make you only eat salad and "clean" food- whatever that is!
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. And if your issue is that you are actually secretly trying to use mindful eating to lose weight, you are fighting a losing battle- that you won't win!
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 and start mindful eating! 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 use my Inner Balance device from HeartMath and do one of their "cardio-contemplation" exercises. It's much easier to do than traditional meditation that has you focus on your breath. HeartMath has you focus on joy, love or a happy experience. THAT I can do! And with the Inner Balance, I can see how this focus is calming my heart rate variability (HRV). That is one of the methods used in a lie detector test to show stress and lying! Once my HRV is calm my whole body follows and lowers my stress level!
Tell yourself: “I will eat whatever I want, AFTER I do 5 minutes of stress relief” (for me, HeartMath is the best….)
EFT To Stop Emotional Eating
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, diabetes, hypertension, and many other illnesses!
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 page , facebook.com/StressEatingSolutions to get the inside information Diet Gurus don’t want you to know!
Start to accept yourself now to lower your stress level and get out of the diet revolving door! Love yourself like your dog loves you- young or old, thin or fat!
