Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Foodby Jan Chozen Bays
Review by Vishvapani
When you start a weight-loss diet you focus on a goal. That’s motivating, but the problem with goals is that you either (a) meet them, and then think the task is finished or (b) don’t meet them, and think that you’ve failed. So what would it be like to focus on the process rather than the outcome? That’s the underlying ethos of this excellent book on Mindful Eating, which clearly draws on Jan Choden Bays’ extensive experience as a both a teacher and a practitioner of both mindfulness and mindful eating. It’s genuinely insightful, not a rehash of familiar material, as so many mindful books are, unfortunately.
So the aim in practicing mindful eating is not to lose weight but to become aware of the semi conscious impulses and urges that lead us to snack, graze or binge, exploring them without judging, enabling us to choose whether or not we eat, rather than being led by habits.
The heart of the programme is stopping before you eat to ask why you feel like eating. To the response ‘Because I’m hungry’ the book offers an approach that identifies no fewer than seven types of hunger – eye hunger, nose hunger, mouth hunger, stomach hunger, body or cellular hunger, mind hunger and heart hunger. In other words, our impulse to eat comes from a desire for some kind of stimulation and satisfaction. Locating this in one of the senses or in the mind means that we be much clearer about what stimulation we are wanting and how the particular hunger we are experiencing might be satisfied. Or you might be thirsty.
This is subtle – distinguishing all these elements means tuning in to the senses, and also becoming aware of our thoughts and feelings. Of course, this has many other benefits, and the book convinced me that mindful eating is a valid entry point to a much wider path of exploration and discovery. Then again, just the idea of stopping yourself before you hit the fridge, is enough to change a habit and -by-the-bye to shift some pounds.
There’s more here as well. The familiar nutritionist’s advice to savour your food and to chew it thoroughly, rather than gulping, gobbling or guzzling gains traction as part of a mindfulness programme. Doing that implies that we become interested in the process of eating and patient with it. But mindfulness helps get at the buried, anxiety producing agenda like trying to achieve a weight-loss goal and validating the effort to focus on the present moment as an end in itself.
I’ve been practising this for a couple of months now and found it satisfying to feel that I am getting to grips with an unhelpful snacking habit. I’m enjoying food more and I think I’m more aware of the shifts in my energy and attention through the day, especially when I am working on my own at home. Oh, and by the way, I’ve lost the best part of a stone.
Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food
