How can a Mindfulness-based process help you end your struggles with food and weight?
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Mindfulness skills are a critical foundation and enable participants to recognize and acknowledge their emotional states without engaging in their usual reactive behaviors (bingeing/restricting).
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While in a state of mindful awareness, the individual is better able to make choices about how to respond to negative emotions and what else to do as a reaction to feelings other than binge eating.
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Mindfulness practices increased ability to observe hunger and satiety cues, increased willingness to experience negative feelings that previously triggered binge eating, decreased believability of negative thoughts common in binge eating individuals, and increased ability to choose adaptive behaviors in stressful circumstances.
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Interventions that incorporate mindfulness meditation are particularly well-suited to the complexity of behavioral, emotional and cognitive dysregulation observed in eating disorders.
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"Mindfulness approaches provide individuals with a heightened ability to simply observe feelings, behaviors and experiences, to disengage automatic and often dysfunctional reactivity, and to develop wiser and more balanced relationships with themselves, their eating and their bodies."
- The number of binges was reduced to one per week, from four. And for those who were still binging at the end of the program, less food was being consumed.
Other studies have found:
- Reduced anxiety and bingeing
- Increased self-acceptance
- A unifying of mind, body and spirit
- A development of healthy acceptance of oneself and an awareness of one's response to emotions
- An inner relationship with oneself that was more aware and authentic
- Greater sense of safety, trust and freedom
What Mindfulness is
Mindfulness is the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening in the present moment. You watch the functioning of your own mind in a calm and detached manner so you can gain insight into your own behavior. The goal is awareness. One watches the universe within. Looks but does not judge, does not compare, label or categorize. One does not analyze but just observes.
Venerable Henepola Gunaratana
The purpose of meditation is personal transformation. The you that goes in one side of the meditation experience is not the same you that comes out the other side. It changes your character by a process of sensitization, by making you deeply aware of your own thoughts, words and deeds. Your arrogance evaporates and your antagonism dries up. Your mind becomes still and calm. And your life smoothes out. Thus, meditation properly performed prepares you to meet the ups and downs of living. It reduces your tension, your fear, and your worry. Restlessness recedes, and passion moderates. Things begin to fall into place and your life becomes a glide instead of a struggle. All of this happens through understanding.
Venerable Henepola Gunaratana
Mindfulness moves us in the direction of being able to simply see, simply hear, simply sense, simply think (thoughts passing through), simply feel (emotions coming and going). We train in being present with whatever arises in our experience, whether it is pain or pleasure, agreeable or disagreeable. This is our path.
Pema Chodron
What Mindfulness (and Evolved Eating) is not:
- Therapy
- Hypnosis
- A Religion
- A path to sainthood
- Just a relaxation technique
- A kind of trance
- A path to improve you or make you perfect
- A way to get rid of things you don't like
- A way to checkout or run away from reality
- Something to do only while eating
- Only for people who live on mountaintops
