What Are You Hungry For? (17 page)

Eating snacks and fast food depends on the public obeying unconscious cues, and not just in the area of tastes. Becoming fixated on these foods happens when you aren’t even aware. To prove this to yourself, try a simple mind-body experiment. Close your eyes and see a lemon in your mind’s eye. Now mentally take a knife and cut the lemon in half. See a drop of lemon juice coming out. As you do, what happens? Almost everyone starts to salivate. Just the sight of a lemon is enough to bypass your higher brain. Junk food becomes addictive because you have memories of all the salty, sweet, and sour food that stimulated you in the past. The food industry counts on those memories to be triggered when you look at tempting pictures of juicy burgers, hear the crunch of potato chips in a TV commercial, or watch the expression of semiorgasmic delight when a model bites into a chocolate bar.

You must reclaim your right to be aware. If you don’t, an avalanche of suggestive selling will keep coaxing you to go blank. It doesn’t take many blank moments to lead to extra pounds. A child who has been goaded by Saturday morning TV to demand a meal at McDonald’s would consume 1,842 calories in a large combo meal. A Big Mac alone is 700 calories, more than half of what a small child needs per day. An unconscious craving for sweet, salty, fatty food is being reinforced, while at the same time the amount of calories in the combo meal is enough for a 175-pound adult male who ate nothing else that day. (In an eye-opening 2004 documentary,
Super Size Me,
filmmaker Morgan Spurlock gained nearly 25 pounds by existing entirely on McDonald’s meals for a month. As he put on the pounds, Spurlock found his health deteriorating as his cholesterol and blood pressure skyrocketed, while at the same time his libido crashed. Although a stunt,
Super Size Me
struck close to home for many, since
it was a fast-motion version of what millions of Americans are doing to their bodies.)

The policy shift to serve McDonald’s in schools as a cost-cutting measure is shameful, even more so when the same unhealthy stuff is sold in hospitals. The right to be aware is yours to take back. The solution is to eat mindfully.
Mindfulness
originated as a Buddhist term and now has become popular in the West. It means that you notice what you are doing, thinking, and feeling. I’ve found it useful to adapt the acronym SIFT, proposed by the innovative psychiatrist and writer Dr. Daniel Siegel. It covers the four things that the mind is aware of at any given moment:

S = Sensations

I = Images

F = Feelings

T = Thoughts

Right now, your awareness is focused on one of these mental events. A bodily sensation is present, carrying messages of comfort or discomfort. Or a picture in your mind is showing you an image, which will be pleasant or unpleasant. You could also be experiencing a feeling (mood, emotion), which will be positive or negative. Finally, your mind may be occupied by thinking, and like the preceding events, thoughts can be pleasant or unpleasant.

I’m emphasizing the pleasant/unpleasant duality, because when you blank out while eating, you are avoiding the unpleasant side of SIFT and trying to numb yourself instead. Going unconscious for a moment is the same as tuning out, and we’ve all learned to tune out things we don’t want to see, hear, feel, or think about.

When you decide to stop tuning out, you can be mindful instead. The enemies of mindfulness are well known:

Denial:
You refuse to look at the problem.

Distraction:
You find a diversion to take your mind off the problem.

Forgetfulness:
You don’t remember that the problem exists.

Numbness:
You can’t feel anything, so there must not be a problem.

One or more of these mechanisms takes over during unconscious eating. The inability to know when your stomach is full—one of the most common situations with overweight people—is a form of numbness. Going numb is never a solution, and even when someone acts oblivious to being obese, for example, there is another layer of the mind crying out for help and an even deeper layer where the solution exists. These deeper layers come to light simply by being mindful, because, rest assured, they want to be heard.

The things you tune out are still there. What you’ve deprived yourself of is the opportunity to make them better as connected to eating. Being mindful is effective in keeping the mind-body connection intact. The most basic kind of mindfulness is easy to attain and can be done at any time during your day.

Exercise:
How to Be Mindful

Find a room where you can be quiet and alone. Sit with your back straight and your feet planted apart on the floor. Put your hands on your knees and close your eyes. When you feel relaxed and ready, easily tune in to what is happening inside you. Let your awareness travel to each of the following areas.

Sensations: Notice how your body feels.

Images: Notice the fleeting images in your mind’s eye.

Feelings: Notice any emotions that come up. Sense your overall mood.

Thoughts: Watch the thoughts that come and go.

Take a minute for each area before you open your eyes. Don’t react to what you become aware of. Simply observe, without judgment and without trying to change anything. Being an observer is the same as getting out of the way, and when you get out of the way, you give the mind-body connection space to rest and readjust.

This exercise is an adaptation of the techniques that Dr. Siegel has employed with impressive effectiveness. His therapeutic mode is also mind-body relevant, specifically targeting each area of the brain by connecting it with discomfort, tightness, or numbness in the body. By being mindful of these symptoms, he can lead the patient to reactivate the specific area of the brain that has become underused or deficient. Attention is powerful in every way when you are aware of what you should focus on, and your body will tell you where to go. The exercise I’ve just recommended is quiet but not passive. You are waking up to reality “in here.”

I realize that people will get anxious about tuning in to painful memories, feelings, and sensations. When you’re overweight, just the thought of paying more attention to your body doesn’t sound appealing. But mindfulness isn’t about getting down on yourself, facing unpleasant truths, or entering into the blame game. It’s about the joy of being aware. So many of the best things in life slip by when you aren’t aware, and when you wake up, your whole experience of life is heightened. You find yourself accessing inner powers that were hidden from view. Creativity requires awareness. So does finding the solution to any problem.

Relating to how you eat, there are many steps in awareness that don’t involve any kind of painful adjustment, as follows:

Any action that brings your attention to the act of eating helps break the spell of going blank. This applies to what you’re putting into your mouth as well as behavioral habits like how quickly you eat. Look over the following list and begin to adopt each tip. Take them one at a time, beginning with the changes that would most benefit your eating habits. (Note: Several items are summarized from previous topics—they reappear in the light of being mindful.)

1. Eat only when you feel hungry. Notice and feel your hunger. This is the basis of conscious eating.

2. To encourage your full attention, always sit down when eating your meal in settled surroundings without distractions.

3. Start with a moderate portion of food, such as half a plate. When that’s finished, sit for a moment to see how hungry you may still feel. Drink a little water before taking more food.

4. Appreciate the taste of each bite by lingering over it, putting your attention on the flavor, and chewing a little more than you usually do. In other words, make taste an experience all its own.

5. Be aware that appetite is stoked by fatty, salty, and sweet tastes. Appetite is suppressed with bitter foods. Try sipping some club soda with a dash of Angostura bitters before you eat (bottled tonic water is bitter but contains too much sugar).

6. Remove the skin from chicken and the fat from all meat before you sit down to eat. In a restaurant, set these unwanted things aside on your bread plate or ask the waiter to remove them.

7. Eat at the slowest pace that feels comfortable. A moderate pace will promote optimal digestion. Don’t fill your fork or spoon until you’ve swallowed the bite you’re eating.

8. If you’re a fast eater, especially if you bolt your food while talking,
take small portions before you sit down. (You’re going so quickly that you will hardly notice how much is on the plate.)

9. If you know you are prone to impulsive eating that gets worse as the meal continues, tell the others at the table how much you intend to eat, then keep your word. (But don’t ask to be reminded. The point is to monitor your own eating, not to have others do it for you.)

10. In a restaurant, have your server immediately box the food you aren’t going to eat. Don’t leave it on the plate to be pecked at until it’s all gone.

11. If ordering dessert, ask for half of it to be put immediately into a take-home box. Give the box as a gift to someone else at the table.

12. Fill your stomach only two-thirds of the way to feeling full (the best gauge is to eat two-thirds of your normal filling portion). Send your plate away or get up from the table at that point. Notice that you can feel comfortable in leaving a small empty space in your stomach.

The Prison of Conditioning

When you stop blanking out, you can bring more awareness to how you eat. At the same time you are beginning to break free of your old conditioning. Nothing is more crucial. Finding more freedom opens up the real joy of awareness. Without knowing it, you have been living inside a prison that has no visible walls—the confines of your cell derive entirely from the habits and conditioning of your mind. You aren’t to blame for living within unnecessary limitations. But at the same time, only you hold the key to freedom. It, too, is invisible. The key is to shift from being unconscious to being aware.

I’ve been guiding you through that shift by showing you how to change your story. Here I’d like to outline the rewards of breaking out of your hidden limitations. Conditioning is different from going
blank—it’s how you’ve trained yourself to be. As an illustration, I can think of two patients who approached their weight problem differently. Cheryl has been carrying extra weight for as long as she can remember. When I asked her about her childhood, she didn’t open up about being teased or lectures from her mother or her deep disappointment that boys didn’t pay attention to her.

Even though she is 80 pounds overweight at age forty, and feeling miserable about it, Cheryl has put up lots of barriers. She never uses the word
fat,
but instead refers to herself as “a big woman.” If it is pointed out that she might be eating too much (which seems obvious), she instantly becomes defensive. She is a bundle of conditioned responses; there are thick walls around her that she can’t see. Even though she thinks about her weight constantly, no one is allowed to talk about it except other “big women.” She will accept no nutritional advice because she knows everything there is to know about her condition.

What it comes down to is the following excuse: “I’ve always been this way. This is just how I am.” If it weren’t for the fact that she has developed type 2 diabetes, she wouldn’t be seeing a doctor.

The other person I have in mind is Sean, also forty, an easygoing man who has worked his way up into management with a big construction company. Because he’s over six foot four and spends too much time sitting at the office or watching TV at home, Sean has back problems. Recently I noticed that he looked 20 pounds thinner than the last time we met. I asked him what he did to lose the weight. He shrugged.

“I had to,” he said. “The wife, she doesn’t like me being fat.”

But what did he actually do?

“I get bored sometimes and start snacking on chips and stuff in the evening, whatever’s lying around. That’s where I get my gut from. So I stopped.” He smiled. “And the wife’s happier now.”

Between these two people is a stark contrast—one lost weight
simply by being aware of where the problem came from and then changing it. Luckily, there was no serious compulsion or craving behind Sean’s overeating. Cheryl, however, is conditioned to eat compulsively. She even describes herself as addicted to food; she likes having a disorder more than facing what it takes to overcome it. For her, eating is “just who I am.” Sadly, fighting against her weight and losing the battle is also who she is.

Reality is whatever we perceive it to be. That’s how reality, in all its vastness, become personal. In your personal reality, if you perceive your body as ugly, it will never be your ally. If you perceive weight loss as basically “too hard,” it will stay that way. Ultimately, society has imposed secondhand beliefs that we perceive to be true. At best, they are somebody else’s truths. Most of the time, they are just bricks used to build thicker walls around the prison.