Your Turn To Give Advice To Me

I’m working on a project relating to practical steps for recovery, and I need your input. If you are recovering from an eating disorder, please take a moment to send me your thoughts about the following:

• What are the safest foods for you to eat? 
• Please respond with a particular food item(s), category of foods, or nutrients. And feel free to address the type of preparation, if it contributes to the ease of eating
• What are the characteristics of a food that makes it easy to get in? 
• Ready made? 
• All-in-one-dish recipes? 
• Low Fat? High Fiber? Whole grain? 
• The flavor or lack thereof?
• Portion size?
• Calorie-dense or low calorie density? 
• Trusting because someone else has been able to eat it?
• Trusting because you believe it to be good for you?

• Which of the following, if any do you own? Do you use?
• Crock pot/slow cooker?
• Rice cooker?
• Panini/sandwich maker?
• Microwave
• Telephone (to have someone else bring you food?)

Thanks so much for contributing! Please share this with your friends so they may help too! I’ll be sharing more about the project sometime soon!

Lori

Mindlessly Eating And What You Can Do About It

Shifting Toward Mindfulness

Can I argue with today’s NY Times article on mindful eating and its benefits? Me, this blog writer, who’s promoted a non-diet approach to eating with a mindfulness focus for the past 25 years of practice? Of course I fully endorse the contents of their piece! Yet I’m left wondering—why is this news? Overweight and underweight alike have been guided and supported by me to mindfully eat through:

• Separating eating from distractions
• Sitting while eating
• Plating food, putting packages away
• Setting a pleasant table to encourage sitting at it
• Removing visual cues to eat (so that eating is an intentional act), including keeping food in the cupboards, not on the counters, and avoiding family-style serving
• Acting as if our car is brand new—or has just been cleaned; keep food out of it
• Delaying second helpings by more than the useless 20 minute rule, as it takes way longer for true satiety or fullness to hit, to discourage overeating
• Focusing on eating with all your senses—smelling what you are about to eat, seeing it, hearing it’s crunch or its sizzle, noting its texture, and enjoying its various flavors

The real news is not that mindfulness is valuable. The real work to be done is to understand why we eat mindlessly. Because many of us consciously, mindfully even, choose to eat mindlessly.

    You knowthat eating in front of the TV will allow you to not be accountable—you won’t have to acknowledge how much or what you’ve just eaten. (For many of my anorectic patients this distracted eating is invaluable, quite beneficial at first, as it enables you to begin to eat withoutfocusing so much on the food. It’s just what you may need to do).

    If you don’t fully use your senses as described above, then there’s less fear you’ll enjoy the food so much you’ll be unable to stop eating.

• Because you don’t feel entitled to eat—perhaps because you think your body size doesn’t deserve to be fed, or satisfied, perhaps because you believe you should lose weight or because you overdid it earlier in the day or the week.

• Because we believe that nothing will meet our need better that numbing out with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s premium ice cream, that nothing will soothe us more than the rich and creamy, forbidden foods.  

• Because it meets some need that we haven’t been better able to cope with, because we feel hopeless, or undeserving of feeling better, because, because, because….

In these situations, not being present while eating may work like a dream. Detaching and eating may seem like just the answer.

But ultimately, this will fail you. Mindful eating requires more than mindfulness of the setting and of the food.

Self-regulation for weight management requires awareness—of hunger and of fullness. Eating enough is not based solely on the calories—but on satisfaction, on the experience and pleasure of eating. If you’re underweight and struggling to gain, maybe mindless eating is a helpful short-term strategy. Ultimately, though, you will feel more in control if you are aware of your intake. And, if you begin to allow yourself to truly enjoy eating.

Ask yourself –Is it hunger—true stomach hunger, or just an appetite to eat? Is it your reward for a hard day? An “I deserve it” of sorts? Is it punishment for “blowing it” or other self-sabotage? Is it “I’ll eat this because nobody can see me, because I can”, so called opportunistic eating? It requires awareness of eating triggers that we’d generally rather not address. It seems so Zen, so easy in this NY Times article, but it takes a major shift to eat mindfully.

To approach mindful eating, you need to ask yourself a few questions. Not just “Am I hungry?” an essential first step, but “What am I looking for this food to do?” And when you do eat without regard to hunger or fullness you need to ask yourself, “Did this work for me—beyond the moment? Or am I left feeling as bad, or worse than I did before I started eating?”  

Then next time you’re about to eat, think first about the consequence of eating mindlessly. Will it really be worth it, worth the distress afterwards, to mindlessly overeat?

Mindful eating is achievable and worth striving for. But a necessary prerequisite is being adequately fed—avoiding long periods without eating, and being prepared with adequate meals and snacks. You’ll be in much better shape for tackling those vulnerable times when mindless eating occurs.

You’re Only Cheating Yourself

Her binging and purging has abated at last, only now she’s restricting. He’s finally increased his food intake, meeting the goals we had set. Only now he’s taken up running—with a passion. She’s adhering to her meal plan, eating all that her body desperately needs. But at present her self-injurious behaviors have flared up.

Carnival photos courtesy of Cate (see link below)

As I sit with my patients I feel a bit like Temple Grandin, the autistic woman depicted in the movie by the same name, who visualized most everything she heard. Whack A Mole comes to mind quite frequently as I hear their stories. No, nothing too sophisticated or deep—just Whack a Mole. You know, that carnival game where you have a mallet and the goal is to hit as many of those furry rodents as possible that pop up out of their holes. It goes like this—you hit one, and just when you’re feeling pretty good about it, rather accomplished in fact, another rears its head, causing you to pounce on that one, too. And so it goes. If you do reallywell, you get a small, cheap stuffed animal—one that costs about a fraction of the money you just spent entertaining yourself. Here’s where this analogy ends.

Real life Whack a Mole, aka eating disorder recovery, is anything but entertaining. But the reward is invaluable. And while it, too, may have its costs—time for appointments, increased anxiety, a sense of loss of identity and of control—the rewards are immeasurable. Surely you could come up with a list of the benefits?

The carnival game analogy crosses my mind with many non-eating disordered patients struggling with weight management, as well. This I visualize more like the shell game—the old gambling game also played on city streets. Three shells are placed on a table, with a pea beneath one of them. With rapid moves of the hands, the shell guy shifts around and around, and the player struggles to identify where the pea is hidden until all hope is lost—by the player, that is.

The connection, you’re wondering? Patients often start off frustrated that their efforts to shift their behaviors, to make a difference, are in vain. They trick themselves into believing that after completing their workout, a reward of a Starbucks frozen beverage topped with caramel and whipped cream is in order. Or while dining out, they choose an entrée they feel good about, only to eat a portion that significantly exceeds their need. Or they choose what they deem a healthy snack, consuming it mindlessly in front of the TV, failing to acknowledge or to experience the pleasure of what they’ve consumed, ultimately leading to more overeating. And as a result they feel hopeless, that they can’t win at this challenge.

Naturally, this is reasonable at times. But what is senseless is the assumption they have been deceived, like in the shell game. Their expectation is that weight loss should be occurring, given all the workthey’re doing, all the changes they’ve made. Yet in reality, sometimes they are simply just moving the shells around, so to speak.

Yes, it takes more than this for change.

Finally, we are sometimes likes hamsters in the wheel of life. We go round and around, doing nothing differently at all. And doing the same thing over and over when our experience tells us it just isn’t working for us, doesn’t move us forward. Uggh, more frustration.

It’s my hope that these visuals will provide you with more than just entertainment. Rather, may they inspire you to be more constructive—to act on your motivation, to challenge your thinking, to break from your behaviors—like Temple Grandin, who exceeded, I suspect, even her own expectations, living with a condition for which there is no easy fix.