Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food

Mindful Eating

Foreword

IT IS HARD TO THINK OF A BIOLOGICAL FUNCTION  more essential to sustaining our life than eating, since, unlike plants, we don’t photosynthesize sustenance out of light and air. Breathing happens on its own, thank goodness. Sleeping too. But eating requires some deliberate engagement on our parts in either growing, gathering, hunting, shopping, going to a restaurant, or otherwise acquiring a range of life-sustaining foodstuffs that often need some kind of preparing and combining by us or others to be maximally beneficial. As mammals,  we  have  complex  circuitry  in  the  nervous  system  to  insure  that  we  are motivated to find and eat food (hunger and thirst) and to know when those urges have been satisfied and the body has gotten what it needs for the moment to sustain itself for a time (satiety). Yet, it is all too easy for us in this postindustrial era to take eating so for granted  that  we  engage  in  it  with  huge  unawareness,  and  also  freight  it  (all  puns intended) with complicated psychological and emotional issues that obscure and sometimes seriously distort a simple, basic, and miraculous aspect of our lives. Even the question of what food really is takes on whole new meanings in an age of industrial agriculture, factory processing, and continual invention of new “snacks” and “foods” that our   grandparents   wouldn’t   recognize.   And   with a  huge  and  sometimes  obsessive preoccupation with health and eating in this brave new world, it is equally easy to fall into a certain kind of “nutritionism,”1 which makes it difficult to simply enjoy food and all the social functions that revolve around preparing, sharing, and celebrating the miracle of sustenance  and the  web of  life  within  which  we  are  embedded and upon  which  we depend.

On a parallel note, mind-states of unawareness, addiction, and delusion sadly abound in this world and, we might say, function as equal opportunity destroyers of sanity, well- being, and authentic relationship at every level of the body, mind, and world. Every single one of us suffers from them to one degree or another, not simply around food and eating, but in many different aspects of our lives. It is part and parcel of the human condition, perhaps made worse in this era by the particular stresses and pressures of our nonstop,24/7 connectivity, attention-deficit hyperactivity, celebrity-obsessed culture. But the good news is that the inner and outer pressures on our minds and bodies and the suffering that comes from these sometimes unhealthy influences can be recognized and intentionally worked with to the benefit of anyone willing to undertake the cultivation of even a bit of mindfulness and heartfulness. This book is a gentle invitation to engage in that healing,and a wise guide to accompany you on the journey of a lifetime into your own wholeness.

Nowhere are the elements of the human condition we call unawareness, addiction, and delusion more poignantly and tragically manifested nowadays than in widespread disregulations and disorders in our relationships to food and to eating. These pathologies of  imbalance  are  driven  by  many  complex  factors  in  society  itself.  Sadly,  they  have resulted in  cultural norms  that support particular brands of  delusion, obsession, and endless preoccupation with how much the body weighs. It manifests as a gnawing and pervasive, if  sometimes submerged and disguised or overcompensated-for, discomfort and dissatisfaction with how one’s body looks and how it feels inwardly. This pervasive dissatisfaction nests itself within ordinary concerns about one’s appearance, but is compounded by desires to fit into an idealized model of how one should look and the impression  one’s   appearance  should  make   on   others  that  shape  and  trump  the authenticity of one’s own interior experience. This dissatisfaction in the mind lends itself to  pathologies  associated with  body  image,  distortions  in  how  one  perceives  oneself inwardly and outwardly, and with deep issues of self-worth. Catalyzed in large measure by ubiquitous  media  exposure,  it  is  prevalent  even  in  children  and  adolescents, and  is pervasive across the life span and right into old age. The sadness of it all is immense and needs to be met with boundless compassion and self-compassion, as well as effective strategies for restoring balance and sanity in our world and in our individual lives.

It is well known now that these pathologies of imbalance are manifesting as never before in a number of epidemics in both children and adults, in both males and females. One  might  say  that  the  entire  society  suffers  from  disordered eating  in  one  way  or another, just  as, from  the  perspective of  the  meditative  traditions, we  suffer from  a pervasive attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. As is made clear in this book, the one is intimately related to the other.

One  manifestation of  our disordered relationship to food and eating is  the obesity epidemic of the past twenty-plus years in the United States. This phenomenon is driven by a host of  complex factors and compounded by increasingly sedentary lifestyles in adults and children, coupled with a ubiquitous availability of processed foods and by a farming and food industry that is the admiration of the world in some ways, and which runs amok in others.2 The extent of the epidemic in obesity can be gauged from graphic displays of  the rates  per state in  the United States, starting around 1986.3  It  is  now spreading to other countries, particularly in Europe. This epidemic has been driven in part by the phenomenon of supersizing, as so graphically illustrated in the movie Supersize Me, in the ever-expanding notion of a reasonable portion size (and even plate size) for one person, by increasing inactivity, and by the endless availability of high-calorie, low- nutrient foods. Many medical schools are developing research and clinical programs to better understand and deal with this growing phenomenon in both adults and children, and some are even reaching out in imaginative collaborations with forward-looking elements of the food and restaurant industries.4 Clinical programs for children abound.5

Another manifestation of our disordered relationship to food and eating is the tragedy of anorexia and bulimia, particularly among girls and young women. These disregulations in eating behaviors are often driven by distortions in self-image and body image, shaped by subterranean and often unacknowledged feelings of shame, inadequacy, and unworthiness. In many, they arise following horrendous but often hidden trauma experiences  and  histories.  In  others,  they  arise  as  poorly  understood  but  complex reactions to familial, social, and societal dynamics, compounded by the fashion, advertisement, and entertainment industries, an obsession with celebrities, and the sexualization of appearance starting in childhood. Here, any impulses to restrict food intake are life-threatening and need to be met with a huge degree of professional understanding of the tortured web of pain that people can be caught in, huge acceptance and compassion for their suffering, as well as recognition of and unfailing support for the interior  strengths  they  possess  but  may  not  recognize,  including  their  potential  for healing.

On top of all of these problematic elements in our relationship to food is the even more pervasive disregulation, pointed out earlier, in our relationship to our own lives as they are unfolding in the present moment. It doesn’t take much in the way of attention to realize that much of our lives are caught up in a preoccupation with the past and future at the  expense  of  the  present  moment,  the  only  time  any  of  us  ever  have  to  nurture ourselves, to see, to learn, to grow, to change, to heal, to express our feelings, to love, and above all to live. If we are always on the way to someplace else, to some better now, when we will be thinner, or happier, or more accomplished, or whatever it is, then we can never be in wise relationship with this moment and love ourselves as we actually are. This too is a  pervasive  tragedy…that we  might  miss  the  actuality of  the  life  that  is  ours  to  live because we are so distracted, preoccupied, and driven by attempting to attain some mind- constructed ideal in some other time that is often also, sadly, shaped by unexamined desires, aversions, and illusions. Of course, this has huge relevance in terms of eating and to how we might be in relationship to our bodies and to all the forces that might carry us into these whirlpools of addiction, disregulation, and sorrow. This is a practical choice that we can have a major personal say in, no matter what the rest of the world is doing, thinking, or selling. However, it does require a motivation to break free of  deep and longstanding conditioning and habits of unawareness and addiction that weigh us down, sometimes both literally and metaphorically.

What we might characterize as a condition of endemic mindlessness in our society is something we can do something about and take personal responsibility for, as described so effectively in this book in regard to eating and to food in all its guises and manifestations. And who better to offer this path to greater sanity and balance than Jan Chozen Bays, who is a seasoned pediatrician specializing in childhood trauma, a long-time leader of mindful eating groups, and an exceptional mindfulness teacher steeped in an ancient and profound tradition of wisdom and compassion?

Mindfulness is all about paying attention, and the awareness and freedom that emerge from that present-moment gesture of profound relationality and consciousness. It is the antidote to addictive preoccupations and indeed, preoccupations of all kinds that carry us away from the actuality of the present moment. When we start to pay attention in an intentional and nonjudgmental way, as we do when we cultivate mindfulness, and thus

bring ourselves back into the present moment, we are tapping into very deep natural resources of strength, creativity, balance, and yes, wisdom—interior resources that we may never have realized we even possess. Nothing has to change. We don’t have to be any different or “better.” We don’t have to lose weight. We don’t have to fix any imbalances or strive for any ideals. All we have to do is pay attention to aspects of our lives that we may have  been  ignoring in  favor of  various  idealizations  that  have  unwittingly carried us further and further from our intrinsic wholeness (the root meaning of the words health, healing, and holy) that is already here, available to us in this very moment, and in any and every moment, a wholeness that is never not present.

This book emphasizes that, with practice, it is possible to have mindfulness become a reliable foundation for holding and healing one’s entire life. This optimistic perspective suggests that if  you commit yourself to engaging in this program of  bringing greater mindfulness to the whole process of eating, you are taking a major step to giving your life back to yourself, and in the process, freeing yourself from the imprisoning and deadening habits of unawareness, obsession, and addiction in regard to eating, body image, and even more, one’s own mind and body and its/their relationship to the world. This engagement has the potential to restore your intrinsic and original beauty, as you befriend yourself as you are. It is an invitation to balance of both mind and body, and to a deep interior satisfaction that goes by the name of happiness, or well-being.

In  the  Stress Reduction Clinic at  the  University of  Massachusetts, the  first formal meditation we usually engage in is to eat one raisin slowly and mindfully. With guidance, it can take up to five minutes or even longer. The clinic participants, for the most part medical patients, don’t expect meditation, or stress reduction for that matter, to be associated with  eating, and that  alone  is  a  useful  and cliché-dispelling message  that meditation  is  not  what  we  usually  think  it  is.  Actually,  anything  can  be  a  form  of meditation if we are present for our experience, which means if we are wholeheartedly aware. The impact of this strange and somewhat artificial exercise is driven home immediately, just in the seeing of the object we are about to take in, the smelling of it, the observing of how it actually gets to and then into the mouth, the chewing, the tasting, the changes as the raisin disintegrates, the impulse to swallow, the swallowing, the resting quietly for a moment in the aftermath of it all, all held in an exquisite awareness that seems to come effortlessly. People exclaim: “I don’t think I have ever tasted a raisin before.”  “This  is  amazing.”  “I  actually feel  full.”  “I  feel  warm.”  “I  feel  whole.”  “I  feel calm.”  “I feel peaceful.”  “I feel like a nervous wreck.”  “I hate raisins.” (There are a lot of different responses, and no right answers—just what people are experiencing.)

But just like Blake’s grain of sand and his wild flower, you can see the entire world in one raisin, hold the universe and all life in the palm of your hand, and then, of course, in your mouth too, as it soon becomes a source of nurturance on so many different levels, energy and matter and life itself enlivening and replenishing the body, the heart, and the mind. And in community no less, in this instance, since there may be thirty or more people in the room, all new to mindfulness, all newcomers to this eight-week clinical program we call MBSR, or mindfulness-based stress reduction. One raisin can teach you a lot.

You will find this raisin exercise, and many more, in this book. If you give yourself over wholeheartedly to the practices described here with a certain degree of discipline and commitment, yet leavened with kindness and gentleness so that you cut yourself enough slack not to force things to conform to some ideal, I am sure that you will be thanking yourself and Dr. Bays for recovering your life and for enjoying the blessings of food in ways that feel liberated and delighted.

—Jon Kabat-Zinn
Professor of Medicine Emeritus
University of Massachusetts Medical School
Stress Reduction Clinic
Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society
September 2008

Source: Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food by Jan Chozen Bays

What Is The Paleo Diet?

Cracking the Paleo Diet Code

Chapter 3 What Is The Paleo Diet?

I briefly mentioned what the Paleo diet was at the beginning of the book; otherwise all of my cavemen jokes would have been for naught. Here is the extended definition of the Paleo diet.

It can be argued that in the prehistoric period, people ate organic, naturally grown food. They hunted for free-ranging animal meat. They gathered wild fruits and vegetables. They supplemented their diets with fire-roasted nuts and seeds. They dug up roots. They drank mostly water. Because of this, they were in relatively good health.

Cavemen had to eat whatever they could find and exercised regularly. I guess if every time you walked out the front door there was something trying to eat you, then you probably stayed in shape. What I find most fascinating about the Paleo diet is that there were no carbohydrates in the form of pasta, etc.

And yet somehow those foods are the very things that we all believe we need for energy. We believe we need pasta, grains and processed carbs to keep our energy up. If that is the case, how was it the cavemen were able to have the energy to outrun predators and hunt for days at a time?

It wasn't until about the last 10,000 years that we deviated away from the healthy caveman diet, which is right around the time man discovered agriculture. For the 200,000 years before that, the cavemen had to chase down their food, defend their land, and survive many obstacles.

But one day, someone either figured out how, or were influenced, to start planting and growing their own food. Domesticating animals became the norm vs. having to go out every day and hunt one down. Now instead of having to go out and find food, you just stepped out into your backyard, grabbed a few potatoes and sent Ol' Bessy to the butcher, well you milked her first and then off she went.

As with anything we humans do, just having enough was n't enough. In the past 10,000 years we started mass producing food to the point that we throw away as much as we eat. Wasting food like this would have been unheard of in caveman times. I wouldn't want to guess how much of the animal they ate, but I am guessing anything that was edible. There wouldn't have been any kid in the caveman family pushing his roots away saying he didn't like them.

The parents would just say "then you can starve to death" and the kid most likely did, or he learned to eat what was available. The Paleo diet unfortunately became a thing only the cavemen did in history books. There just weren't enough of them left anymore to keep their diet mainstream.

Look at the food we eat now: It isn't what we were designed to eat, and our bodies are trying to let us that with more disease and obesity then the cavemen would have ever seen. How we eat is like a lion trying to live on watermelon or a cow only eating fish. It just isn't the right foods for what we are.

The Paleo diet is something that can change your life and potentially improve your health to the point that your daily aches and pains disappear. If you are still unsure about all of this, keep reading and you will see how easy it is to make this part of your lifestyle.

Don't let the caveman talk scare you away: While the Paleo diet seems restrictive, you are going to discover in Chapter 5 just how much food you have available to choose from.

Chapter 4 What To Expect When You Paleo It Up

Well if you have been beating your body up with a horrible nutritional assault you can expect to have a rough start. I never try to sugar coat the potential side effects when I am coaching a client. I don't want to scare them from trying, but I also want them to realize their bodies are going to be unhappy with the changes to start, but very thankful shortly after that.

Any change in diet, especially one from unhealthy to healthy, can result in some side effects. These do pass and sure beat the side effects of disease and death an unhealthy lifestyle can lead us to.

During the first month of transitioning to the Paleo lifestyle, people's reactions will be heavily varied. Some will lose a lot of weight, some get really grumpy, and many will experience a perceived lack of energy.

You are going to experience a natural detox that will not be the most pleasant. Once you stop consuming processed foods and the toxins they contain, your body will start the natural healing process. It will start to release the toxins in your system in the form of headaches, frequent bathroom breaks and may leave you feeling a bit lethargic, like a flu only in a healthy way.

This will also be a time when your cravings will be in full swing. The toxins that are leaving your body are highly addictive, and your body at this point still believes it needs them. It is really important that you stay as committed as possible during this phase, and most cravings will disappear after about two weeks.

As you transition, it is also important that you keep exercising. You might not feel like exercising but you would be missing out on a huge benefit in making the transition easier. Sweating! By getting out there and sweating you are going to get those toxins out that much faster. Do not be surprised if your sweat smells different.

I noticed when I detoxed with a lifestyle change that my sweat almost smelled metallic, which probably shows how many toxins were leaving my system. I also noticed the sweat made my skin itch, which it never did before. I was probably sweating out pure phosphoric acid due to the amount of pop I used to drink. It is crazy what our body goes through to get rid of all the crap we put into it, but it is a very necessary step.

If you struggle with moodiness, stabilization can be expected over time. If you don't believe that excess sugar in your diet doesn't affect your mood you would be wrong. If you don't believe me then try babysitting a bunch of kids and give them some extra sugar. They will go through all the emotions of alcohol consumption: All happy, then grumpy and end it with a crying fit most of the time. If you find you are moody in life right now, it could be due to excessive sugar.

One of the best things you can expect to happen after the side effects subside is feeling awful every time you choose to eat junk food. It is amazing what our body tells us once it is able to, and we are open to hearing. A body free of toxins and feeling great will take that junk food and make you regret it. You will become bloated, have intestinal discomfort and most likely have an unpleasant trip to the bathroom.

This happens because your body knows that the food you just ate is not good for you and tries to get rid of it. It used to do that for you, but as you continued to force that food in it eventually gave up. Your new normal was feeling slightly crappy all the time. You trained your body to love junk, and can train it to love healthy food once again.

Basically before you can feel great you are most likely going to feel really, really not great. The best thing about all this is that the side effects are only temporary, and soon you will feel much better than you have ever felt before.

Chapter 5 WTF Did A Caveman Eat

If you are still with me then it shows you know the Paleo diet can change your life. Now that you know what to expect in the transition to the Paleo diet, let's explore what a caveman actually ate.

I asked myself this exact question, because the thought of eating the bark off my backyard tree and digging up mysterious roots made me a bit nervous. I also couldn't remember the last time I had to chase down an animal to eat it; maybe in 91' but I was a lot younger back then.

I understood the whole premise of eating only what you could get off of the land but needed more clarification, as I am sure you do to. I mean really, was I stuck eating the berries on the trees I tell my kids not to eat, or was I going to have to start my own greenhouse in the backyard?

As I researched the Paleo diet I started to realize that the choices of whole natural foods are almost limitless. There really is no need to keep buying boxed processed items just to have variety. I have tried to create an extensive list of Paleo diet safe foods and beverages you can include in your daily meals.

As always, whenever possible ensure you choose organic and support your local farmers market. You should also take advantage of seasonal fruits and vegetables for increased variety. Always keep in mind the minimalist mindset you want to have in order to avoid over consumption. Just because you can buy an abundance of foods does not mean you need to.

Source: Cracking the Paleo Diet Code: Lose Weight Fast with Primal Eating & Intermittent Fasting by Wiggins, Darrin

Are organic foods healthier?

Eat Green

On average, a person consumes about 30 tons of food and 50 tons of beverages in a lifetime. With this, we probably also ingest many pounds of harmful substances. Many of the toxins that we can detect in our body tissues originate from our food. Here we can very successfully intervene: it has been extensively proven that organically cultivated food contains significantly fewer toxins than conventional nutrition.

The reason: organic cultivation prohibits the use of artificial chemicals such as insecticides (kills insects), fungicides (kills fungus), herbicides (kills weeds), phosphate fertilizer (contains extremely toxic uranium) and artificial nitrogen fertilizer (contains poisonous cadmium). Gene manipulated vegetable foods (GMO) that are of very high risk to the health are also banned in organic farming. The  quality of the  soil  is  also  significantly higher  due  to  the  amount of the  humus  producing earthworms and microorganisms that live within the earth. Organic farming also ensures that our drinking water is less polluted by residues of phosphate fertilizer and pesticides.

Next to their relatively low level of pollution, organic foods also present with an increased amount of health-promoting micronutrients. This is because the plants have to defend themselves against insects and pathogens (such as plant fungi) due to the absence of pesticides. They have to defend themselves  as  the  chemicals  aren’t doing it for  them. And  these  vegetable  antibodies  that are predominantly formed in organic foods are very beneficial to our health. As an example, you can take a large group of polyphenols that activate our “longevity genes” (sirtuin-genes) and in animal testing proved to increase the healthy lifespan by up to 150 %. The cancer-destroying salvestrols are also found in organic foods in higher amounts. The positive effects of real organic nutrition are only surpassed by products of permaculture and wild harvesting. It should be noted, however, that food that is given the organic certification of the European Union does not have the same high quality as those of renowned organic farming associations such as Naturland, Bioland or Demeter.

People often argue that the  world population cannot be  fed by organic food alone. A study published by the University of Michigan under the co-direction of Catherine Badgely in 2007 showed that after a worldwide switch to organic farming, the organically produced foods would have about 75 % more calories. The result would be an amount of food that could theoretically feed a world population of 12 billion people.

Does “organic” always mean healthy?

One thing needs to be clear: eating organic foods does not automatically mean that you will be healthier than “normal eaters”, because even if you buy organic and wild products but process them unwisely, then a high amount of harmful substances can be formed. For example, when you heat vegetable oil, highly toxic trans-fatty acids are formed (no matter if the oil is organic or not). Trans- fatty acids are structurally altered unsaturated fatty acids that you can’t really find in nature. They are said to be extremely hazardous to health, destroy blood vessels, make you tired and cause cancer. Trans-fatty acids are contained in most of the processed food we consume today.

Trans-fatty acids  are  predominantly contained  in conventional  refined  liquid  vegetable  oils, especially in those containing a high amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids (thistle oil, sunflower oil, soy oil, rape oil, corn germ oil, heated flaxseed oil) but also in the crust of whole-grain bread, linseed bread, whole-grain cookies, food pickled in sunflower oil (e.g. sardines, olives) or sunflower oil containing spreads. Trans-fatty acids are also found in margarine but also in roasted seeds or nuts (sesame, pumpkin seeds, sunflower, hemp, walnuts, almonds, macadamia, flaxseed). They are also found in some fish oils, fish conserves and in roasted fish.

Another poison produced in your kitchen is acrylamide. It is formed when you bake, roast or fry carbohydrates and is hence especially contained in the crust of whole-grain breads but also in potatoes, pies, chips, peanut doodles, rice cakes etc.

About 90 to 95 % of all processed foods that you can buy in stores are pretty much unhealthy – unfortunately even in organic and health-food shops. Not only conventional finished products but also those finished foods that are offered in organic supermarkets can contain a large amount of potentially harmful substances or may have been composed in an unhealthy manner. The aforementioned trans- fatty acids are also often detected in organic vegetarian spreads and pesto. They are also contained in most whole-grain breads, wheat germs or cookies as well as nut or nougat spreads. Furthermore they contain acrylamide that – as mentioned before – is predominantly in the crust of breads, cookies, chips, popcorn, rice cakes, corn bread and other baked goods, in roasted cereals and other similar products.

Some people believe that when eating organic food, they will have done something beneficial to their health. However, foods such as superfine flour and products thereof (such as spaghetti), or several types of sugar, are extremely harmful – no matter if produced conventionally or organically. Civilization diseases are just as much and as surely caused by organic sugar, pretzels, candy, dried fruits, ready cereal or cookies as by the respective conventional products. The blood sugar levels are also increased by these products in an equally strong manner. The unnatural blood sugar concentrations then result in the production of the harmful acrylamide by the body.

Source: Eat Green!: The Health Revolution On Your Plate Kindle Edition by Joachim Mutter (Author)