Mindful Eating, when to and when not to

A well-respected and thoughtful fat acceptance blogger recently wrote about mindful eating. As part of what she said, she mentioned mindful eating, and how it is unrealistic for people to engage with every bite they put in their mouths. All eating is not for pleasure. Sometimes, it is purely utilitarian. In essence, sometimes, you just need to cram it in and fill your belly and move on. I like reading this woman's blog, even if I don't agree with 100% of the things she says. Of course, I could say that of many blogs and people. I'm sure no one agrees with all of what anyone else says. One of the reasons I like reading her blog is that she gives me food for thought through her perspective and this was one of those occasions.

I agree that not all eating can be mindful for everyone, nor should it necessarily be. That being said, I think that it's important to distinguish between the types of people who need to attend to the experience of eating and the types of people who do not. It's also important to think about the type of food being eaten and whether or not it, arguably, should be the type of thing to be eaten mindfully.

First, I'd like to address the latter of those two statements in the previous paragraph. There is food that is eaten for nutritional purposes and food that is eaten purely for pleasure. If you're gobbling down your lunch in an attempt to get something in your stomach before heading back to the grindstone, then you really don't have the time to enjoy it. That means that the chips, candy bar, cookie, etc. should be left in the lunch bag. What's the point of gobbling such things down when you can't take the time to enjoy them? They are, after all, empty calories.

Before I get any further, let me assert most definitively that I'm a big fan of empty calories. In fact, I've been criticized rather vociferously and personally attacked because I eat chocolate everyday and this is an indication of my eminent demise from heart disease, diabetes, and the moral decay that accompanies the consumption of food that exists purely for sensory pleasure. In no way am I saying, "don't eat empty calories." What I'm saying is, "don't eat empty calories unless you're going to enjoy eating them." If your eating is utilitarian and just meant to fill a hole, then fill it with nutritious food that you find palatable, not junk which is for the senses only. To me, eating chocolate in a hurry is like renting a DVD and "watching" it by scanning through the chapters and watching mere seconds of each one. You're getting almost nothing out of it for the investment.

Getting to my other point about the types of people who should and should not try hard to eat mindfully, there is a difference between people like me who have suffered from compulsive eating to the point of weighing nearly 400 lbs. and people who don't. I had (and possibly still have) a particular type of disorder in which I abuse food in order to fulfill psychological needs. I needed to learn how to stop doing that and I have to keep being mindful in order to not slip back into that way of living again. For me, mindful eating is a way to avoid compulsiveness. It's way of making sure that I eat for the right reasons because I'm at particular risk of eating for the wrong ones.

The question of how to distinguish is a tricky one because I can't speak for anyone but me. Well, I could, but then I'd be displaying a pretty hefty ego. That being said, I do believe that one of the hallmarks of compulsive eating is conceptualizing how much food you want to eat before you put it in your mouth and taste it and deciding you won't be satisfied unless you can have that amount. Compulsive eaters often want the whole bag or half a pizza or they aren't going to be satisfied. You're not looking at the sensory experience. You're certainly not thinking about satiety. In fact, you're likely to eat to the point of illness. The point of compulsive eating is to comfort, placate, or numb through volume and the very experience of consuming food. You're not tasting your food or filling your belly, but satisfying a deeper need for a particular type of experience based on desire and expectation. It has nothing to do with putting energy in your body or lighting up pleasure centers in your brain with sugary or salty delights.

Mindful eating is like a remedial experience for those who abuse food the way I did. Allowing ourselves to simply say, "it's okay to just keep cramming food in because food is utilitarian sometimes," opens the door to rationalizing a broad range of compulsive eating as utilitarian eating. And, make no mistake, compulsive eating isn't about nutrition or calories. You can eat heads of lettuce, bowls of fruit, or vats of beans and rice compulsively. Most people don't, but it's possible to get your comfort from anything. Lots of people successfully alter their lifestyle to a healthy one, but still keep the compulsive eating. They just lose weight by transferring the target to one which doesn't have an impact on their fat cells. That doesn't make it a mentally healthy thing to do. It just avoids the obvious consequences. It's what I did when I was in college and lost a tremendous amount of weight. And this way of transferring rarely works in the long run as the core psychological problems are left untreated.

So, I think that there are certainly people out there who don't need to work on mindful eating and that it's not something everyone "should" do. However, it's something I have to do and have to keep doing. I have a problem and if I find a way to rationalize compulsiveness, I will. Concentrating on what I'm eating and attending to the smell, taste, and texture is an exercise in mental health for me, but it's not an exercise everyone needs to do. However, I think it's irresponsible to offer up the notion that mindful eating is not always important without a deeper understanding and recognition of the fact that it is very, very important for some of us, especially those who are very fat and are the likely audience for a fat acceptance blog and are more likely to be compulsive eaters.

Birthday

My birthday is coming up in the not too distant future, and like most people, I have been thinking about how to "celebrate" and that means food. Many people view these times as ones in which to indulge and let themselves off the hook for a day. Last year, as my birthday rolled around and I was about 3 months into altering my relationship with food, I also thought I'd allow some indulgences. What happened ended up being a surprise.

I had planned to eat some small portions of cake and ice cream. I had no intention of going overboard. I just figured I'd buy the equivalent of a half slice of cake and one scoop of ice cream. I also thought I'd have a special, though modestly portioned, dinner and not worry about the calories overall. I figured that I'd probably be at no more than 2500 calories if I ate a few extra rich foods in moderation, and I figured that'd be okay.

When the day rolled around, I didn't end up caring that much about the food aspect at all (even though I did nothing special to celebrate and just relaxed around my home). I had about a scoop of ice cream, maybe a bit less, that I found buried in our freezer. I didn't have a special dinner or cake, and I didn't really care. It wasn't that I was trying to "be good" or suppressing any desires to enjoy more or less nutritious food. It ended up being the case that the food wasn't important enough to me to go to any trouble to obtain it. If it had been around, I might have eaten more, but in the end, I didn't care enough. It ended up being the case that thinking about having special things was a bigger deal than actually having them.

This year, my "plan" is essentially the same, but it may end up being the case again that I will be too indifferent to go to the trouble to acquire anything special. I want to buy small portions of a few things I don't normally eat and I'm not going to worry about the calories, but I don't anticipate that I'll overeat by much or at all. One of the things that I realized this year as I planned this is that I actively do not want large portions of treat foods anymore. If I were given the option of a big portion of ice cream or cake, I wouldn't want that much.

The reason for this is not because I've grown into some paragon of food virtue. It's not because my stomach has shrunk from a year of reduced portions so that I can't eat larger portions (though it has shrunk so I get full faster, and would likely feel sick if I ate larger portions). This is the consequence of the mindful eating process. It takes so much time and effort to concentrate on every bite of food and fully attend to eating it that I find it tedious to eat more than 3 or 4 bites at most of any food which I'm consuming for pleasure. The fact of the matter is that it gets boring eating a lot of a sweet if one has it in great quantity when you are eating slowly, pausing, and paying attention to the experience to the maximum extent possible.

I know I prattle too much about "mindful eating" but it has had a significant impact on how I eat. One thing I realized thinking about my birthday besides the fact that I really just want a few bites of sweets to celebrate is that it has created a clear mental divide for me between compulsive eating which is done for the psychological satisfaction of mindlessly shoveling food into my body and the pleasure of food. The existence of the latter does not mean that I never feel compelled to do the former. It just means that I the blurred line between these two types of eating has become quite clear and sharp. I think for many people, myself included, it's very hard to separate eating spurred on by psychological compulsion and that which is done for pleasure. We think food is our medication of choice because we love it, and we do enjoy it immensely, but it's not always eating out of love of food nor is it always eating out of compulsion.

I can no longer say that I ever eat a lot because "I love food". I eat a little when I'm loving food. I eat a lot when I'm hating myself. The motives for eating are entirely different. Eating small amounts to gratify a sensory need for food is a joy. Eating large amounts to relieve anxiety or drown out bad feelings is a problem.

Being able to separate these two types of eating is extremely helpful in stopping the problem eating because it is not about the food at all. It's about me, my motives, and my actions. This is a major step for me in a mental process whereby I separate food from my psychological issues. It's part of why I don't have "trigger" foods which I binge on anymore. Recognizing that it's not the food itself but my feelings, compulsions and habits unloads that gun.

I can't say with any certainty that I'll never ever eat compulsively again, but I feel better being aware of what drives that desire and that it isn't getting all mixed up in a love or enjoyment of food. It's not that I'm weak in the face of tasty food and just can't stop. It's that I have a need that I'm trying to fulfill which is unrelated to the food. Recognizing this will give me the opportunity to attend to that need in a more constructive way, and hopefully break the unhappy relationship between my psychological pain and food.

The Next Serving

Back when he was struggling to overcome bulimia, Elton John once said that he used to eat an enormous serving of curry thinking only about eating the next one. He said something to the effect that his mind was on the upcoming second serving before the first one was in the toilet. The point of what he was saying was that he wasn't even enjoying the first one, but rather focusing on getting more.

I mention this because I have also had many times where my focus was on the quantity of what I could eat, not on what I was actually eating. I could enjoy a candy bar more if I knew there was more waiting for me. The sheer notion that another round was available made eating the first one more gratifying. It's as if I couldn't enjoy anything as well or as much unless I knew there was a "buffer" zone of more on hand. Rather than deriving value from the actual sensory delight of the food I had in hand, I focused on the entire quantity.

One of my psychology professors so long ago once tried to make this point in a different way. He said that 'fat people think about food all of the time, except when it's right in front of them.' I found what he said insulting and judgmental, and I immediately rejected it as yet another thing that people without weight problems said about those with them because they didn't really understand us. The fact of the matter is, he was right, but how he said it and who it was coming from ensured that I would reject the message.

This notion of extracting pleasure only from copious amounts of food or feeling dissatisfied with a small portion is something that pervades a lot of Western cultural thinking. You often hear people complain about recommended serving sizes on food packages and say that the companies conceptualize a serving size as far too small to satisfy as a means of skewing nutritional information so that it appears more favorable. Perhaps the fault lies not with our food manufacturers, but in ourselves.

"Enough" is a highly subjective term based on body frame size, activity levels, and gender, but the truth is that most of us have formed our ideas of how much food is enough to satisfy (regardless of food type) based on cultural norms and life experience. If you are served huge portions in restaurants, you come to think of that as "enough". If your family eats heaping amounts of food, that is what you tend to think of a "enough". The bigger the cultural serving size norms are, the more people will require to satisfy their conceptualization of what portions they should eat. In many cultures, the norm for portion sizes is far smaller than that in the U.S., and that is why so many American tourists complain about them.

Of course, people like old Elton and I have disordered eating. If we are focusing on the next serving while we're supposed to be enjoying the first one, we're dealing with an issue that is beyond portions. It has to be addressed before portion control can be considered. Frankly, I've thought about this and I have not come up with a definitive explanation as to what causes this sort of thinking. Perhaps it's about growing up poor and trying to get your share. Perhaps it's about needing a feeling of being over-full or extracting gratification from the oral sensation of eating more so than the enjoyment of the food itself. Perhaps I starved to death in a past life and that part of my soul won't be gratified until it has eaten enough for both lives.*

I don't know what caused this tendency to attend to the food I don't have rather than what I do have. However, for me, the cure was mindful eating and a fair amount of self-induced therapy where I kept telling myself that "more is not going to be better." And the truth is that more really isn't better. Paying attention to the food is better. I'm doing this more and more with every bit of food I eat and it really does help. I don't know if the root cause may yet come back to bite me in the ass and I may find my ability to focus on what I am currently eating unraveling. For now, I just want to be aware that it was once the case, and could be again unless I continue to cultivate a different perspective every time I approach food.

*For the humor impaired, that is a joke.