Mind Your Food & Mindfulness and Eating
Food
is a necessity for our life and eating is a quintessentially primal
activity whose roots lie deep in our evolutionary past. The ingestion
and digestion of food is a non-negotiable activity that is intimately
weaved into the very rhythms of our daily lives.
Food
has been articulated as a life-giving force in numerous traditions,
from Ayurveda, Chinese medicine to coeval nutritional science. From a
biological perspective, our bodies need the right type of food to
function properly as diseases and compromised health conditions have
been scientifically linked with malnutrition.
Furthermore,
individuals suffering from diabetes, cholesterol, heart disease,
obesity, neuro-endocrinological disorders, digestive issues, cancer,
kidney and liver disease all need regulated diets. In such
circumstances, paying attention to the act of eating invariably starts
taking on more importance than simply filling one’s stomach with tasty
bites and is central to our health and well-being.
Hunger: The drive to eat
Getting
to know our subjective sense of hunger then becomes an important part
in consciously eating. Understanding how we eat, when we eat and why we
eat is necessary to correct our unstable relationship to food.
Conventionally, hunger is understood as a physiological drive, signaled
by a fall in blood sugar or a rumble in the stomach, indicating that the
body is in need of nutrition. Yet, in a deeper sense, hunger is an
existential state that drives one consciously and unconsciously to want
to eat food and functions on multiple levels from biological to
emotional to spiritual.
Today,
satisfying hunger in urban metropolitan areas has become increasingly
easier due to the 24/7 accessibility we have to food. Over appreciating
the value of the instant gratification good food provides us, our
post-modern psyche has imbued food with a relevance that goes beyond
physiological survival, making it a principle source of pleasure and
comfort. We eat sugary, fatty, fried and salty foods not to fill our
stomachs only, but to help us deal with stress and assuage other
disturbing emotions such as depression, loneliness, boredom, anxiety and anger.
Mindless munching
We
“feel bad” so we eat food to “feel good.” Eating, as the pursuit of
comfort becomes a coping mechanism to face the numerous demands made on
us on a daily basis. Behaviorally, this is more common than not. Have
you ever sat in front the TV or in the cinema with a tub of popcorn or
some other snack and have ploughed through the whole thing in the course
of the film? Or been at a cocktail party sipping a drink and chatting
with a friend while devouring bowls of nuts and chips? Or polished off a
whole bar of chocolate while sitting in front of your computer screen
trying to reach work deadlines? In such instances we are not realizing
how fast or how much we are eating. This is called mindless munching or the act of grinding down edibles with a mind contemplating everything but the food one is eating.
Conscious eating
An
antidote to this would be to mindfully observe and understand our
experience of hunger. By being “mindful,” one pays nonjudgmental
attention to the moments when and why one wants to eat, the food one
eats and the act of one’s mindfulness & eating.
By being focused on how we feed ourselves, we can aid a more
sophisticated self awareness of ourselves and our subliminal desires and
drives that motivate us to eat as well enable a balanced relationship
to food and body size.
The
reasons why we over eat, starve, grow fat, become skinny or on a more
severe note become anorexic, bulimic or obese have a lot to do with how
we are psycho-emotionally processing our sense of self and the stresses
we encounter. Hence it is very imperative to pay attention to the
emotional states behind one’s eating habits and working with them if
they are disturbed.
Guidelines to eating consciously:
Before eating do a baseline self-check on your hunger level. Ask yourself where do you feel the hunger? How hungry are you?
Involve all your senses when you eat i.e. see, smell, taste and feel the food you are eating.
Serve yourself moderate helpings of food.
Really chew your food and break it down. Eat in a slow fashion to prevent over eating.
Don’t skip meals. Avoid all distractions when you are eating.
Eat an organic plant-based diet as much as possible for yours and the planet’s health.
Therapeutically
work with yourself or with a mental health professional to reduce your
stress, depression, anxiety, anger and boredom levels.
(Dr. Sonera Jhaveri is an Integral Psyche Therapist attached to Nanvati Group of Hospitals, in Mumbai, India.)
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