Nutrition Class 10: Mindful Eating

Breaking the Mood-Food Connection

Emotional Triggers Boredom and Procrastination Bribery and Reward Excitement/Loosening Reins Soothing Love Frustration, Anger and Rage Stress, Anxiety and Depression Many times the person using food to cope has turned off the ability to recognize her emotions along with her ability to recognize internal hunger and fullness signals. The first item on the agenda is to recognize what you are feeling.

Mood Food Action happy ice cream bored chips angry chocolate walk the dog bored chips call a friend in need angry Handout 4.2 Food-Mood Connection On this worksheet, star moods you frequently experience. Select one or two of those and list the food you associate with those moods. In the third column, list the first non-food action that comes to mind for those moods. Would anyone like to share what they wrote down? What would happen if you broke the mood-food connection and went straight to the action? (Show examples on slide. If using overheads, place a large X over the center column.) Cross out the second column on your worksheet to create a mood-activity connection. Building the mood-activity connection will take patience and commitment. Experiment with different responses and allow yourself the flexibility to sometimes eat in response to emotions. Most of the time, the emotions, moods and stressors that trigger eating are the everyday, garden variety. In these cases, trading actions for foods is a beneficial and positive way of coping. However, when problems have existed for a long time, interfere with the joy of living and seem to have no solution, professional counseling may be advisable. chocolate vacuum vigorously

Meet Your Needs Without Food Am I Biologically Hungry? Think like a baby What Am I Feeling? What Do I Need? Would You Please….? Ask for support What can I do instead of eating? Instead of eating, how do you cope? Use of the journal can help you identify your feelings. Identifying feelings that result in eating is the first step to coping. How do you deal with your feelings? Write out your feelings. Call a friend a talk about them. Talk about your feelings into a tape recorder. Just sit with your feelings and experience them if you can. Talk to a counselor or a psychotherapist. What do you need? Are you tired and needing a rest? Many of our clients eat when what they really need to do is to take a nap or go to bed. Are you asserting your needs to others? People are unable to read your mind about what you are expecting. Basic needs are often ignored or discounted: getting enough rest, getting sensual pleasure, expressing feelings, being heard, understood and accepted, being intellectually and creatively stimulated. Let’s look at Handout #10. Let’s spend some time looking over the chart of ways to meet your needs without using food. Pick out ways you believe will help you meet your actual needs when you really are not hungry, but would normally eat to cope. These are ideas that can help you break your old behavior chains. They will be useful after you are able to identify what it is you really need. Keeping a journal is one way to find out what these needs are.

Self Talk Recognize That: Negative Thoughts = Negative Feelings = Negative Actions And Round and Round We Go! Positive Thoughts = Positive Feelings = Positive Actions Now we are going to start working on what you think. What you think or believe will dictate how you feel. The first item on the agenda is to recognize that negative thoughts cause negative feelings that cause negative emotions. For example, how often have you jumped on the scale in the morning, screamed, “I’ve gained 3 pounds since yesterday! I’m hopeless. I will never lose weight. I will never control my eating.” Then, you go off to work dressed in loose fitting clothes, feeling depressed and hopeless. You say to yourself, “Why bother?” And then– you go on an eating binge. Negative thoughts>Negative feelings>Negative actions On the positive side, positive thoughts cause positive feelings cause positive actions. So, what we will do first is, identify your negative thoughts and form a countering positive thought. For example, if you happened to weigh yourself and found that you had gained 3 pounds from the day before, another line of thinking might be “I ate Chinese food last night that has a high sodium content.” It is not unusual to gain several pounds of water weight after a high salt meal”. Of course, the IE has stopped weighing herself, but you get the idea.

Negative And Positive Statements I’ve blown it, so I might as well go the rest of the way. I’ll diet tomorrow I call myself “lazy” when I don’t exercise. That’s real bad. I’m entitled to eat this food. Is it what I really want? I walked on my lunch hour. That counts as exercise too.

An effective way to look at what you just described is to put the sequence of events into a behavior chain. Start with the eating event and its aftermath and work back to what happened before each stage until you get to the trigger that set off the chain. Now go back over the chain and see if there is an alternative to any of the links in the chain. Let’s take the ex. Mary looked over her chain and decided to look at her response to her husband’s nagging. She has a choice of how she feels after this event. She can continue to feel bad (depressed), she can decide to get angry, she can ignore his comments and tell herself that he has the problem, or she can decide his comments were warranted and take certain steps to avoid such comments in the future. Similar internal discussions might take place after a chewing out by the boss. In neither is Mary helped or her problems solved by feeling “down”, “bad”, depressed guilty or any other unpleasant emotions. If she changes the way she responds to these unpleasant occurrences, she is less likely to eat as the response. Clients who end up at the binge circle can also say to themselves, “I would normally eat everything in sight right now, but I believe that I will sit down and write what I’m feeling. If I still have the urge to eat afterwards, I will.”

What is Appetite? It is the desire to eat. Affected by external factors; psychological Often in the absence of hunger Example smelling/seeing fresh baked cookies Prompts the question: What do I want to eat? The appetite is concerned with the immediate effects of eating factors including salivating, tasting, chewing, and swallowing.

What is Hunger? Internal drive to eat; physiological Largely affected by hormones and the Central Nervous System Prompts question: When can I eat? Cues tell us we are hungry, such as an empty or growling stomach, a decrease in blood glucose levels, and alterations in circulating hormones (e.g., increased glucagon and ghrelin and decreased insulin).

Hunger/Satiety Scale 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 empty stuffed starving 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 This Hunger/Satiety scale is a tool to help identify and rate hunger and fullness. Focus on the 5, neither hungry nor full. As you move left, you feel a little hungry. If you wait to eat, the urge to eat strengthens and you feel emptier. Taken to the extreme, a person is starving. Go back to center and imagine moving to the right. You feel satisfied with the food in your stomach. As you continue to eat, you feel more and more full to the point of great discomfort and even pain. As we understand our hunger and satiety patterns, we can use the scale to rediscover our hunger and fullness. empty starving stuffed overfull neutral Source: Karin Kratina, Moving Away from Diets

Rating Your Hunger Ask yourself 3 questions before grabbing something to eat: When was the last time I ate? If it was less than 2-3 hours ago, you're probably not feeling real hunger. If you’re not hungry for an apple, you are not hungry Could a small, nutritious snack rich in fiber tide you over until the next meal? Can you drink a glass of water and wait 20 minutes?

Hunger and Satiety Patterns Example 1: This person ate when they were 3 – very hungry. They stopped eating at 7 – comfortably full and satisfied. Here is an example of physically connected intuitive eating, honoring hunger and fullness. This is our goal!! Example 2: This person began eating at 6 – not hungry. Consequently, they ate until 8 – past the point of being comfortably full. Example 3: This person waited until they were 2 – very preoccupied with hunger. And then ate to 9 – uncomfortably full. Waiting to eat until you are overly hungry often leads to overeating. When we deprive our bodies during dieting, overeating frequently follows.

Respecting Your Fullness Conscious Eater Time-Out Pauses while eating Taste Check Satiety Check Rate Your Fullness After Resign From The Clean Plate Club

Savor Your Food Eat when gently hungry Sit Down in a pleasant environment Breath Deeply before Eating Slow Down Taste Each Bite Put Your Fork Down Now and Then Check-in with your fullness When you’re satisfied now, you will eat less later. Allow yourself to enjoy food for its sensual and pleasurable qualities. When you eat foods you actually enjoy eating, your total quantity will decrease. How many times have you wanted to eat a cookie, but instead of allowing yourself this pleasure, you ate a rice cake? Then because that didn’t satisfy you, you ate several more. Finally, you gave in and ate the cookie, but in the meantime, you had eaten far more than you would have if you had eaten the cookie in the first place.

Don’t Settle If You Don’t Love It, Don’t Eat It If You Love It, Savor It! Savor the Flavor demo. Have each participant