How do you decide what and when to eat? Because its breakfast
time or lunchtime? Because someone brought in cakes to the
morning meeting? Or is it because you're tired or bored or
stressed? Most of us eat based on what’s going on around us
rather than our own physical needs and food choice. Many of us
don't even know when we're hungry or comfortably satisfied. If
our urge to eat is usually triggered by external situations such
as the time of day or the availability of food, we may lose the
awareness of our body's messages of hunger. If eating is our
primary coping mechanism for dealing with uncomfortable feelings,
we may never experience physical hunger since we are medicating
ourselves with food before we even experience the sensations of
hunger.
For those of us whose physical needs for food have been
overshadowed by our desire for a smaller body size, we have
probably ignored our body's signals, counting on a diet, rather
than our body's wisdom or our personal preferences, to tell us
what to eat. When we eat from the "outside" instead of the
"inside," it is normal to rebel by eating formally "forbidden
foods." To change our relationship with food, we need to develop
intuitive eating. Intuitive eaters make food choices without
feeling guilt; they honour their hunger, respect their fullness
and enjoy the pleasures of eating.
If you'd like to change your relationship with food, you might
want to experiment with the following suggestion:
When you think about eating, ask yourself if you're physically or
emotionally hungry. If you're not sure, drink some water, as you
may be dehydrated. Take a few slow deep breaths, as fatigue and
stress often masquerade as hunger. If you realise you're not
physically hungry, ask yourself what triggered your desire for
food. Was it something you seen or smelt like a bakery or perhaps
an uncomfortable thought or feeling prompted the automatic
reaction of wanting food to distract you? Try going inside and
allowing the awareness to surface. Journaling may help and is one
of the easiest and most powerful ways to accelerate your personal
development. By getting your thoughts out of your head and
putting them down in writing, you gain insights you’d otherwise
never see. Make a list of some tools you can use to cope with
these feelings — exercise, meditation, calling a friend, going
for a walk, taking a relaxing bath....
When you eat, eat with awareness and enjoyment. If you're eating
while doing another activity, you will miss the "cephalic phase
of ingestion." As Marc David, nutrition consultant and author of
Nourishing Wisdom says, "You have to be there when you eat. The
belly is full but the mouth is hungry." The brain experiences
hunger if it hasn't experienced the taste, pleasure, aroma and
satisfaction from the food. If you're eating until the TV show
breaks for a commercial or you've finished the chapter, you will
miss the body's message that you've had enough food and you may
overeat. To feel the satisfaction from the food, it is important
to be relaxed and aware. The French, who eat foods with a
relatively high fat content, tend to be thin, partly due to
genetics and largely because they dine rather than eat on the
run. Careful attention is paid to the quality of the food, its
preparation and appearance, and the ambiance in which it is
eaten. Since food is eaten with great awareness and pleasure,
they are satisfied with smaller portions.
Experiment with eating for energy. After all, in addition to
tasting good and satisfying us on many levels, food is fuel for
the body. Marc David describes "eating to the point of energy" as
that point where we feel more energy than before we ate. If we
eat past this point, we will feel sluggish and actually lose
energy. It is important to make sure we're breathing fully as we
eat, bringing oxygen to the body with which to digest the food.
Conscious eating requires commitment and awareness. Cultivate a
sense of gratitude for the food. Each time we remember to eat
with awareness, we come home to that place of inner peace. As we
learn to nourish our bodies, we find that we are spiritually
nourished as well