The Four Levels of a Mindfulness Approach to Food Fixation
Like a multi-story building, there are several levels or “floors” of our human experience that an effective approach to food fixation should consist of. These four floors of our “building of mindfulness” are the body (the foundation), our eating behaviors (the ground floor), our thought patterns and underlying beliefs (second floor) and our emotions (the penthouse).
A food fixation can only take hold in our lack of awareness – or even dissociation – from one or more of these four levels: body, eating behaviors, thoughts, and/or emotions. Yet 99% of weight and diet programs don’t even begin to address one – let alone all four – of these levels.
A food fixation can only take hold in our lack of awareness of – or even dissociation from – one or more levels of our inner experience: body, eating behaviors, thoughts, and/or emotions.
The Mindfulness Approach to Freedom from Food Fixation
Mindfulness of the Body – The Foundation
“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” –James Joyce
Like the fictional Mr. Duffy, many of us live a “short distance” from our bodies.
Because of this fact, the body is the ideal doorway to a mindfulness approach to food fixation. Deepening our awareness of the body helps us get back in touch with our natural hunger and satiety cues. We learn to eat when we’re truly hungry and stop when we’ve had enough.
Deeper mindfulness of the body lets us experience – physically and viscerally – what it feels like to overeat, or to eat the “wrong” foods. Awareness of the body’s sensory feedback naturally changes our habits in the direction of health and moderation.
Mindfulness of the body is also a powerful stress reducer. Stress, all by itself, can lead us to an unhealthy relationship with food. But flooding the body with mindfulness is profoundly relaxing and healing (most bodies are crying out for this kind of awareness). It could even be said that mindfulness is the polar opposite of stress. As mindfulness reduces our stress and anxiety, tendencies to “stress eat” diminish.
Finally, mindfulness of the body also gets us more in touch with its needs for exercise, which instead of feeling like an obligation, starts to become a natural desire.3
Mindful Eating – The Ground Floor
Building on Mindfulness of the Body, we can next become mindful of our eating habits (such as eating too fast), as well as the rich and enjoyable sensory experience of food that we may have missed through lack of awareness.
Mindful eating helps us better appreciate our food, and help us enjoy our food more, while eating less. For example, we may have a food craving, but mindfulness allows us to satisfy the craving with less food, because mindfulness helps us to enjoy it more.
Mindful eating may also help us recognize that certain foods are not actually that pleasing to us. Mindfully eating potato chips (not to pick on potato chips), rather than mindlessly gulping them as we may usually do, may help us realize that greasy potato chips aren’t actually that appealing as a food. Such direct experiential insights, courtesy of mindfulness, lead to natural and easy changes in our dietary choices and habits.
3 New evidence also suggests that mindfulness increases the likelihood that intentions to exercise will actually lead to exercise. It also indicates that mindfulness contributes to better exercise outcomes (see Appendix.)
The Mindfulness Approach to Freedom from Food Fixation
Most important and fundamentally, mindful eating leads us towards a place in which the food the body needs, and the food the mind wants, are aligned. This distinction between what we need and what we desire is the distinction between hunger and appetite. As a standard nutrition textbook says, “Hunger and appetite both encourage eating – with a distinction. Hunger is physiological (an inborn instinct), whereas appetite is psychological (a learned response to food).”4
What this means is that hunger is a need that comes from the body. Appetite is a want that comes from the mind.
As we begin to reconcile this inner split between hunger and appetite, we discover that what we want is more frequently what we also need. Bodily hunger and mental appetite reunite into a single healthy desire.
So ultimately, mindful eating means eating the food you want, but with a twist. As our mindfulness grows, the food we want becomes more aligned with the food our body actually needs.
Mindfulness of Thoughts – The Middle Floor
Building upon the foundation of the body, and the “ground floor” of mindful eating, we can build the “middle floor” of our mindfulness by becoming mindful of our thoughts. We may not be aware just how powerfully thoughts influence our behavior. Nearly all of our actions – and most fixated or addictive behavior – is preceded by thought-intentions of which we are not fully aware. Cultivating awareness of these thought-intentions is an essential aspect of attaining liberation from unwanted fixations.
Both the quantity and quality of our thoughts have the amazing power to influence our body, emotions, and resulting behavior. As we practice mindfulness, we discover that compulsive and incessant thinking is correlated with bodily tension and stress. And as noted above, bodily stress is intimately correlated with food fixation.
4 Whitney, Eleanor, and Rolfes, Sharon. (2010). Understanding Nutrition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
The Mindfulness Approach to Freedom from Food Fixation
Mindfulness fundamentally changes your relationship to food and your body, and provides the foundation for healthy weight management that was missing from other programs and approaches. But mindfulness also offers many other benefits. The following list includes benefits for which there is strong evidence, and others for which preliminary research is promising.
Area/Concern and its Benefit
aging
Delay in age-related decline
anger
Reduction in anger (improved anger management)
anxiety
Reduction of anxiety, both acute and chronic
blood pressure
Reduction in blood pressure
cancer
Improved quality of life during cancer treatment
cholesterol
Reduction of cholesterol levels
chronic fatigue
Improvement in chronic fatigue syndrome
cognitive function
Enhanced cognitive function
concentration
Improved concentration
creativity
Enhanced creativity
depression
Reduction in symptoms of depression
emotional distress
Decreases in emotional distress
empathy
Increased empathy
heart
Lowered heart rate
immune function
Enhanced immune function
intelligence
Increases in intelligence, school grades and learning ability
lifespan
Increase in lifespan
marriage
Increased marital satisfaction
memory
Improvement in short-term and long-term memory
migraine
Improvement in migraine symptoms
mood
Enhanced mood
OCD
Reduction of symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
pain
Improvement in chronic pain conditions
PTSD
Reduction of symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
pregnancy
Reduced complications from pregnancy
psychological issues
Improvement in treatment of psychological conditions
quality of life
Enhanced quality of life
self-acceptance
Increased self-acceptance
sleep disorders
Improvement in sleep disorders
stress
Overall stress reduction
substance abuse
Reduction of substance abuse
tension
Reduced muscle tension
weight
Enhanced weight management
The Mindfulness Approach to Freedom from Food Fixation
The quality or content of our thoughts also adds to our stress. While positive thoughts have the power to improve our mood or create pleasurable feelings, negative thoughts create emotional stress. Cognitive-behavioral psychology has conclusively demonstrated that chronic negative thinking is most often the cause of mood disorders such as depression.
Thoughts affect our behavior, because thought nearly always precedes action. If we are not mindful of our thoughts, then even seemingly innocuous thoughts, such as “I want some chocolate,” may lead to unconscious, recurrent, and/or addictive behaviors.
Fortunately, cultivating mindfulness of thoughts can reduce our predilection for nonstop thinking, correspondingly reducing our stress and the effects of that stress on our eating.
Most important, mindfulness provides a liberating “gap” between a thought like “I need some chocolate” and the action that typically follows. We discover, perhaps for the first time, that we have a choice. We may still decide to act on the thought, but we now have the freedom not to. In mindfully recognizing thoughts before automatically acting on them, we discover the incomparable freedom of being able, perhaps for the first time in our lives, to consciously choose our behaviors.
Mindfulness of Emotions
For most people who suffer from a food fixation, the benefits of being mindful of one’s emotions is obvious. It’s estimated that over 75% of unconscious or compulsive eating is actually “emotional eating.”
Nearly everyone (whether struggling with a food fixation or not) occasionally uses food to manage uncomfortable or “dark” emotions. Certain types or quantities of food actually have the power to temporarily change our brain chemistry, and thus our emotional states. Whether sugar, chocolate, fat, or carbs – or simply by bingeing – food has the remarkable ability to change or mask our moods and emotions. This is the reality underlying the classic joke, “Inside me there’s a thin person struggling to get out. But I can usually sedate her with four or five cupcakes.”
Fortunately, while it’s possible to become habituated or even addicted to changing our brain chemistry with food, mindfulness can lead us towards liberation from this pattern. As with body and thoughts, mindfulness is a fundamentally different way of being with our emotions. Mindfulness of emotions is a vast improvement over management of emotions. As we cultivate mindfulness of our emotions, we can gradually yet steadfastly liberate ourselves from emotional eating patterns.5
Will Mindfulness Work For Me?
When we consider a new program or approach to eating, or to anything, we may wonder, “Will this really work for me? Can I really change this time?”
Relatively few people ever lastingly change their behavior in the direction of health and freedom. Why? Because, as you have learned in this report, authentic and lasting change requires awareness on all levels of our experience – body, behavior, thoughts, and emotions. Yet most dieting approaches don’t address any of these levels of our experience.
The other reason that few people change is that most of us have become too entranced by our society’s obsession with the painless (but ineffective) “quick fix.” The “quick fix”
5 There is not space in this brief report for an in-depth description of how this works. Briefly, however, eating to manage an emotion happens only in the wake of a preceding (usually totally unconscious) event – our strongly identifying with that emotion. In essence, emotions are like clouds – they come and go in our inner experience (if we allow them to). But without mindfulness, we often strongly identify with an emotion (when we think, “I am angry,” or “I am bored”). In doing so, we actually cause ourselves to experience a great deal of unnecessary suffering. Because mindfulness gradually releases the identification with emotions that is the foundation of our emotional suffering, the roots of emotional eating are literally disabled, and our eating behaviors naturally shift in the direction of health and freedom.
A mindfulness approach to food fixation is grounded in the following principles:
1.Focused on the root causes of fixation, rather than the results (increased body weight, etc.)
2.Focused on the four levels of inner experience that influence eating – body, eating behaviors, thoughts, and emotions
3.Not rules-based or deprivation-oriented; instead, oriented towards discovering within one’s personal experience what food, and how much food, one’s body really needs
4.Helps us to be cognizant of our tendencies to overlook effective long-term solutions in favor of painless “quick fixes”
is part of our culture of instant gratification. Perhaps because of the miracles of technology, and the pace of our lives, we expect instantaneous results and solutions to any problem, and may resist the idea (if only unconsciously) that we need to invest something of ourselves in order to change.
There are certainly problems for which a quick solution works. But as just about anyone who has struggled with it knows, eating isn’t one of them. If “quick fixes” like the latest fad diet really worked, then we wouldn’t be constantly on the lookout for the next one.
Like weeds, protracted problems involving eating require ongoing maintenance, or better, an approach that goes to their roots. Tearing the tops off weeds only guarantees that they’ll grow back tomorrow. Digging their roots out takes care of them once and for all.
Conclusion
The only real block to authentic, lasting, and healthy change in our lack of awareness. When we choose to take the path of awareness, real, fundamental, and lasting change is not only possible, it must happen.
The poet Robert Frost wrote, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” The path of eating and living with awareness – mindfulness – is still, for most people, the one “less travelled by.” If you decide to take it, see if it doesn’t make all the difference.
Built on the principles discussed in this report, The Mindfulness Diet™ program goes to the root of troubles related to eating behaviors, dietary choices, and body weight concerns. The Mindfulness Diet™ is a comprehensive, easy-to-understand, self-paced program that you can practice from the comfort of your home. Additional features and
support, including a user forum and Mindfulness Diet Software™, will be available soon.
To learn more about The Mindfulness Diet™ program, or to get started right now, visit: www.MindfulnessDiet.com.
If “quick fixes” like the latest fad diet actually worked, then we wouldn’t be constantly on the lookout for the next one.
Research on mindfulness dates back more than 30 years, and research on related mind-body disciplines even further back, to the 1930’s. Research on mindfulness in general, and mindful eating in particular, is continuing at an accelerating pace. The following is a summary of some of the most recent mindfulness and mindful eating-related research studies.
A 2005 study confirmed growing evidence that mindfulness training can lead to excellent improvements in binge eating symptoms.6
In 2006, a study indicated that mindfulness may be associated with better exercise outcomes.7 Another study reported that an 8-week mindfulness program led to a 32% overall reduction in stress symptoms, and a 56% reduction in total mood disturbance.8 A 2006 review of mindfulness-based approaches to eating disorders reported that each of the approaches “provides individuals with a heightened ability to simply observe feelings, behaviors and experiences, to disengage automatic and often dysfunctional reactivity, and then to allow themselves to work with and develop wiser and more balanced relationships with their selves, their eating, and their bodies.”9
In 2007, a new study reported that increases in mindfulness predicted decreases in the reported number of binges, and that more awareness of satiety cues was correlated with a reduction in the number of binges. Participants found that allowing the body to self-regulate (eating when hungry and stopping when full) was more satisfying than the diet-binge cycle that they were used to, and reported being pleasantly surprised by not gaining weight.10 Another study in 2007 reported on a link between mindfulness and exercise, saying that “intentions predicted physical activity among mindful individuals and not among less-mindful individuals.”11 Another article that year reported that mindfulness “provides a new dimension to assist in educating for a healthy body-mind unity.”12
In 2008, it was reported that a study of an obese individual that included physical exercise, a food awareness program, mindful eating, and a mindfulness procedure as a self-control strategy, helped that individual to reduce his weight from 315 pounds to 171 pounds, increased his physical activity, helped him to eat healthy foods and stop eating rapidly, and substantially reduced his serious medical
6 Baer, R., et al. (2005) Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy applied to binge eating: A case study. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 12:3, 351-358.
7 Ulmer, Christi S. (2006) Mindfulness as a moderator of coping response and the abstinence violation effect: A test of the role of mindfulness in the relapse prevention model for exercise. Dissertation Abstracts International, 68/3, 174.
8 Minor, H., et al. (2006) Evaluation of a Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction Program for Caregivers of Children with Chronic Conditions. Soc Work Health Care, 43:1, 91-109.
9 Baer, R. (Ed.) (2006) Mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions: Conceptualization, application, and empirical support. San Diego, CA: Elsevier.
10 Kristeller, J.L., et al. (2007) Mindfulness meditation: a treatment of binge eating disorder. In The Relevance of Wisdom Traditions in Contemporary Society: the Challenge to Psychology. Eburon.
11 Chatzisarantis, N., et al. (2007) Mindfulness and the intention-behavior relationship within the theory of planned behavior. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(5), 663-76.
12 Lu, C., et al. (2007) Mindfulness: A new dimension in physical education. Future directions of research on teaching and teacher education in physical education conference. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
risk factors.13 Also in that year, another study reported that a mindfulness-based group intervention led to improvement in binge eating symptoms, depressive symptomatology, and emotion regulation skills and increased motivation to change maladaptive eating behavior.14 Another interesting study in 2008 reported that higher levels of mindfulness led to a “merging of action and awareness,” clear goals, improved concentration, and greater attentional control and emotional control.15
A 2009 study reported on mindfulness and weight loss showed that, particularly in those who applied the principles and practices of mindfulness consistently, there were greater increases in physical activity and significantly greater reductions in Body Mass Index.16
Another study reported that mindfulness is helpful for weight management and that “a growing body of literature … suggests mind-body strategies support and enhance a multi-modal weight loss program that focuses on lifestyle changes of diet, exercise, reduced stress, and mindful living.”17 A 2009 study reported preliminary support for the role of acceptance (allowing) and mindfulness in improving the quality of life of obese individuals while simultaneously augmenting their weight control efforts.18
In 2010, a new study suggested that mindfulness could lead to more flexible emotional regulation and an enhanced ability to detach from negative states.19 Another study reported that mindfulness-based strategies can effectively reduce food cravings in an overweight and obese adult population, and that this may be due to “prevention of goal frustration, disengagement of obsessive thinking and reduction of automatic relations between urge and reaction.”20 Another report reported that mindfulness training led to awareness of eating behaviors faster for the mindfulness group than a control group, and concluded that “mindful eating may be an effective approach towards dietary change.”21
Finally, another new study reported that disordered eating-related thinking was positively associated with poor psychological health, and inversely related to mindfulness. Mindfulness, which was “also inversely related to general psychological ill-health and emotional distress, was found to partially mediate the relations between disordered eating-related cognitions and the two predicted variables.”22
13 Singh N.N., et al. (2008) A mindfulness-based health wellness program for managing morbid obesity. Clinical Case Studies, 7:4, 327-339.
14 Leaheya, T.M., et al. (2008) A cognitive-behavioral mindfulness group therapy intervention for the treatment of binge eating in bariatric surgery patients. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 15:4, 364-375.
15 Kee, Y.H., et al. (2008) Relationships between mindfulness, flow dispositions and mental skills adoption: A cluster analytic approach. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 9:4, 393-411.
16 Tapper, K., et al. (2009). Exploratory randomised controlled trial of a mindfulness-based weight loss intervention for women. Appetite, 52:2, 396-404.
17 Koithan, M. (2009) Mind-body solutions for obesity. Journal of Nursing Practice, 5:7, 536–537.
18 Lillis, J., et al. (2009) Teaching Acceptance and Mindfulness to Improve the Lives of the Obese: A Preliminary Test of a Theoretical Model. Ann. Behavioral Medicine, 37, 58-69.
19Chiesa, A., et al. (2010). Functional neural correlates of mindfulness meditations in comparison with psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy and placebo effect. Is there a link? Acta Neuropsychiatrica, 22:3, 104–117.
20Hugo, J.E.M., et al. (2010). Coping with food cravings. Investigating the potential of a mindfulness-based intervention. Appetite, 55:1, 160-163.
21Sopko, C. (2010). Evaluating a mindfulness intervention as an aid for dietary change. The Ohio State University. Department of Human Nutrition Honors Thesis.
22Masuda, A., et al. (2010). Mindfulness mediates the relation between disordered eating-related cognitions and psychological distress. Eating Behaviors, in press, corrected proof.
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