Why We Eat: Mindset and Emotional Eating
In Buddhism there are hungry ghosts. They have large empty bellies, skinny throats and tiny mouths. They can never take in enough to fill their emptiness.
They suffer constant hunger and thirst.
If eating was only about nutrition life would be easy. But we experience habitual eating, emotional eating, cultural imprints, and eating for pleasure.
If uncontrolled, eating to avoid pain, out of habit, and to experience pleasure can cause health problems like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. If observed and moderated, they can be a source of self-knowledge and enjoyment.
Eating for pleasure feels good. It is fine to enjoy the pleasures of eating and drinking while being mindful of your physical and emotional wellbeing. An occasional indulgence in ice cream, smoke, or drink, whether it is to soothe your troubled mind or just take pleasure is fine. But don't let it ruin your health.
Challenge: Working with Eating
If you are committed to wellness and optimal living, you can increase self-awareness and avoid reactive behavior like chronic over- or under-eating. Seek to be mindfully aware of the way you feel, think, and behave. Set your intention to promote your own wellbeing, using your eating as one part of the process. Apply mindfulness, intuition, knowledge, courage, and discipline to break unhealthy habits and explore what you eat and why you eat it in the way you do.
This is challenging work. It involves being able to stay with uncomfortable feelings to break unhealthy habits. The good news is that you do not have to give up the pleasure of eating, and the work gets easier as you reap the benefits of mindful eating – greater mental and physical health and increased pleasure. Over time and with practice eating mindfully becomes effortless.
Mindfulness is a key to healthy eating. It is the quality of mind that objectively observes whatever is going on internally and externally. Mindfulness enables self-awareness, the ability to perceive who and what you are, including your personality, motives, sensations, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and behavior.
Working with eating involves applying self-awareness to identify and accept the feelings that trigger unhealthy eating, rather than trying to avoid them by over- or under-eating. This sounds so easy, but anyone who has had an urge to eat something, not eat something, or scratch an itch of any kind, knows that not reacting to the urge requires effort.
You can stop there - not reacting to the urge, managing your emotions, controlling your behavior. Or you can go further to find the causes of the urge. Is it just habit and greed for pleasure, or is it something deeper, maybe a sense of loss or fear linked to past trauma? Is it an emptiness that cannot be filled?
Mindful Eating Exercise
Mindful eating brings mindfulness to the way you eat to enhance the pleasure of the experience, cultivate greater self-awareness, and enable you to change the way you eat and drink. There are formal practices which train you to use informal methods and integrate mindful eating into normal life.
The formal practice is to bring attention to every step of the eating process while experiencing sensations, feelings, and thoughts. It requires a dedicated commitment of time and is done slowly and with complete attention to eating.
Set yourself up with a serving of food, it can be a handful of raisins or anything you choose. Relax and follow the steps as you eat, taking your time in each step to be present:
- Intending to take a piece of food
- Picking up a piece with fingers, spoon, fork, or chopsticks
- Bringing it to your mouth - lifting and moving
- Placing it into your mouth
- Chewing - you can count the chews
- Experiencing tasting, salivating, and feelings like an urge to eat more quickly,
- Swallowing
- Going for the next piece
- Finishing and its sensations, thoughts, and feelings.
As you eat this way, be aware of any thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations that distract you from attention to eating. If you become distracted, as soon as you realize it, return to mindful eating.
The informal practice is to simply be mindful of the way you behave and feel when eating. Let go. Apply just a subtle awareness (5% or less of your attention) to experience the same steps as in the formal practice only without the intense focus on each step.
The formal practice enables you to integrate mindful eating into daily life. It is like dance; you learn the steps and then they become fluid movement. Over time, mindful eating becomes effortless. You naturally choose to eat in a way that supports physical and emotional wellbeing.
