jakebe | Harewatch - Week 4: Mindful Eating (Reply)

One of the first things I've learned about myself since paying attention to my diet is how much of an emotional eater I am. If I have a rough day, cookies are just the things to console me. On good days I'll want to treat myself with something as a reward. Even when I'm bored I tend to grab things to nibble on, just for something to do with my hands when I can't put the energy anywhere else.

I'm not alone here; emotional eating is one of the biggest reasons people get themselves into trouble with food. There's a reason women crying into their ice cream after a breakup has become such a trope. In the absence of anything else, food becomes a bit of a drug. Want to make yourself feel better? Sugar and carbs'll do the trick every time. Why wouldn't you eat cake if it made you high?

The answer, of course, is the same you would give anyone who'd try and justify drug addiction. Feeling great isn't the issue; using food as a crutch to get you there is. It gets to a point where you start equate food with happiness. If you're sad, food will make it better (or at least not as bad). If you're happy, food will make it even better. It becomes this thing that you hinge your mood on, whether it works for you or not.

So what do you do about that? The answer is elegant, but difficult. You just have to pay attention to what you're eating and why you're eating it. Simple! Yet, hard to do. It's difficult to divorce the desire for something from the action of achieving something once it becomes automatic. The time it takes between having the thought "I want candy." for me and going somewhere to get candy is embarrassingly small. The impulse and the action have become practically the same thing for me. And once I get on that track it's so hard to get off of it.

Julia Cameron writes in The Writer's Diet that we might pay attention to every time we have a craving for something, or a niggling feeling to eat, and follow that impulse down to its root cause. If we're craving a sandwich because we're hungry, well, that's the end of it. But if it's 3 pm, and you've had your lunch, and yet you're still salivating over the thought of a honey bun, well...why? Paying attention to your mental state when you have those cravings is a great way to figure out what your triggers are, what's driving you to eat.

For me, the biggest triggers are stress, happiness (oddly enough) and boredom. Now I'm bringing the urge to eat into my suite of things that brings me back to the present. When I'm stressed out, and the desire to run down to Specialty's starts creeping up, I know it's my body's roundabout way of telling me it wants to calm down. Then I can stop, take a break, and work myself back down. When I'm feeling like I should celebrate something great, well...I can still give myself a treat. I can do it with the knowledge that there'll be a trade-off; either I'm going to need to run a little harder, or have a smaller dinner, or expect not to lose so much weight this week. If the long-term consequences are worth the immediate satisfaction, then I indulge. If it isn't, I'll give myself an alternate bonus or let the enjoyment of the moment be enough. Sometimes you really don't need anything else.

I'm not saying I'm perfect about this, not by a long shot. This last week was terrible for impulse eating; it's one of the reasons this is on my mind today. This is a sort of public rededication to the idea of thinking before I eat, which is one of those old cornerstones of losing weight and keeping it off.