Here’s an exercise. Take a raisin and spend some time eating it. Feel free to imagine the grape it once was swinging on a branch in vineyards bathed in sunlight. Plop it on your tongue and hold there. Take bite and experience the burst of sweetness. Chew many times before swallowing.
Now you’ve performed mindful eating. Could you envision it for every meal you eat, every morsel of food?
That’s the goal in a wonderful nugget of eating disorders research based on mindfulness. The practice stems from Buddhism and described as a calm awareness of one's body functions, feelings and consciousness. Some say its knowing consciousness itself. Whatever the definition, in recent years mindfulness has become part of many new therapeutic approaches, such as dialectical behavior therapy, cognitive therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy.
One of the therapists at the forefront of this new paradigm is psychologist Ruth Quillian Wolever, from Duke University's Center for Integrative Medicine. Her premise is that eating disorders are inordinately complex. Issues of eating wind tightly around deeper troubles with emotions. As a means of relief, people with eating disorders externalize their psychological battles by depriving themselves -- to “starve” uncomfortable feelings -- or overeating -- to stuff them back down. The relief is only temporary, however. And sometimes, it doesn’t come at all. With repetition, over time, a person’s normal sensations of hunger or fullness mix with feelings of panic, sorrow, or anger so that it eventually is frightening to eat or depressing to feel full.
Enter mindfulness, which teaches to control not by fighting back, but by accepting the uncomfortable emotions, thoughts or physical urges. You feel the feelings and ride them, like a surf board on a wave. Eventually you’ll reach the shore, anchored for a time on terra firma.
As applied to eating disorders, Wolever and her colleagues have developed mindfulness exercises to help individuals ride the tides as well as to heighten awareness of the signs of hunger and satiety. The idea is to keep the mind focused on eating, and nothing else.
In pilot studies, the technique looked so promising, Wolever and principal investigator Jean Kristeller, PhD, of Indiana State University have launched a larger, NIH-funded study. More to come on that.
She’s also offering 10-month certification courses for health care professionals
For example, in one of mindfulness to anorexia nervosa, researchers conceived of an exercise called “the thought parade” in which the participant imagines that her thoughts are written on cards carried by marchers in a parade. She simply observes the parade of thoughts, such as “I’m a blimp” or “my stomach is sticking out.” But she does not buy into or act on them.
“This exercise promotes the ability to observe cognitions nonjudgmentally and with acceptance, rather than engaging in anorexic behaviors in reaction to such thoughts,” Wolever and Kristeller write.
In the same vein, the yogis say that any feeling of discontent contains a message, a built-in wake-up call. It says that you're out of touch with your most authentic self and you need to remake the connection.
So rather than resisting, running away, depriving or overindulging, first stand still, fully where you are in this moment—even if where you are today is frustrated, angry, insecure or just plain scared.
Ask yourself questions like: "What's behind that feeling of fear? What really makes me sad? And then pay attention what arises.
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