MINDFUL EATING: 7 WAYS IT CAN HELP YOU TO LOSE WEIGHT FOREVER

By George Shears Retired Psychologist and Wellness Consultant

Mindful Eating7 Ways it Can Help You to Lose Weight Forever

By George Shears

Introduction
My name is George Shears. I want to thank youand also congratulate youfor your interest in learning more about Mindful Eatinga unique, highly realistic, and very healthy new approach for losing weight permanently. Im a retired psychologist and wellness consultant with a very long-standing personal and professional interest in promoting optimal health through healthy nutrition. Of key importance to this special report, I also have over thirty years of experience in practicing an ancient form of meditation called mindfulness, which basically involves being fully and deeply aware of ones moment-to-moment experience, without reacting automatically to it. This simple, but challenging, discipline has many powerful and highly practical applications, one of which is what I call Mindful Eating.

What is Mindfulness?
In order to understand fully the power and importance of mindfulnessand, thus, of Mindful Eating--its necessary, first of all, to recognize that most of us are predominantly creatures of habit. Not only do we ACT habitually and automatically most of the time, but we also tend to think and perceive in this limited mode.

Whether were aware of it or notmost of us spend a large proportion of our socalled waking moments caught up in some form of automatic thinking, which is actually more like being asleep than being fully awake. As a psychotherapist, I can also tell you for sure that this is a basic root cause of depression, anxiety disorders, and garden-variety stress. It also leads us to behave in many ways that are highly unskillful and which cause us a huge amount of unnecessary suffering. Mindfulness, by definition, is the complete opposite of running on automatic. Its basically a way of being fully present to, and perceiving clearly, what is actually happening in each moment, without getting caught up in thoughts, opinions, judgments or beliefs ABOUT what were experiencing and without reacting to that experience automatically. Dr. Daniel Siegel, in his recent book, The Mindful Brain, captures part of this essence of mindfulness in a clever acronymYODA (the name of the wise old Jedi Master from Star Wars). The letters of this acronym stand for You Observe and De-couple Automaticity.

The Potential Power of Mindfulness

By applying this simple process consistently, deep and often profound insights tend to develop graduallyor sometimes quite suddenly. These epiphanies, in turn, commonly lead to major personal lifestyle changes that develop without any involvement of what is commonly called will power or trying to force oneself to change; rather, this transformation typically occurs quite spontaneously as a result of simply perceiving reality more clearly, instead of through our usual automatic filters. Its basically a very powerful means of changing our behavior by first changing our mind. Heres a specific example of how this occurred for a woman who participated in one of my eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction courses a few years ago. She suffered from intense and very debilitating panic attacks. As is typical with this type of anxiety disorder, she strongly believed whenever she was having a panic attack that she was about to die. Her immediate automatic reaction, then, was to try to stop or control the attack, often by desperately fleeing the situation that she was in. This often caused her intense embarrassment and also led to her becoming increasingly unwilling to participate in social activities. This strategy of trying to avoid and control her panic attacks (which, incidentally, is virtually universal among people with this disorder) invariably made the panic attacks more intense, resulting in a classic vicious circle. In keeping with the basic mindfulness prescription, I guided and supported her in simply observing, moment to moment, all of the details of her panic experience without trying to stop or change it in any way whatever. As Im sure you can readily understand, this was diametrically opposite to what she instinctively wanted to do. Being strongly motivated to get free of these attacks, however, she applied

this simple prescription as diligently and persistently as possible as she participated in the course. At the end of one of our silent group mindfulness practice sessions late in the course, she jubilantly shared how she had just successfully sat through a very intense attack. With the kind of excitement that might be expected from someone who had just won the lottery, she exclaimed loudly and joyfully, I CAN BE SCARED! This simple but powerful personal discovery turned out to be a dramatic turning point for her. Although she continued to have intermittent panic attacks after this initial watershed experience, she reported that they gradually became less intense, didnt last as long and that she was increasingly able to tolerate them. I have no doubt that this personal transformative change resulted completely from her newly acquired skill of simply observing all of the sensory details of these attacks mindfully while they ran their natural course. One of my mindfulness teachers, Shinzen Young, likes to refer to this process as watching it to death. This basic process can be applied in burning out, so to speak, virtually any unskillful automatic pattern, including a wide variety of addictions and compulsions. Very importantly, compulsive eating falls into this category. With this as background, I would like to focus more specifically now on Mindful Eating and its important benefits.

A Broad Definition of Mindful Eating

Mindful Eating, defined in the broadest sense, entails developing full awareness of all aspects of eating, including the following three general components or levels: Level 1: Being fully present to all of the sensory qualities of the food we eat, including all of the tastes, textures, colors, temperature and aromas, along with all of the other bodily effects we experience in eating. Level 2: Becoming as fully aware as possible concerning the origins and quality of all the foods we eat. Level 3: Becoming similarly aware of how our consumption of particular foods affects other people and animals, as well as our planetary environment. Other presentations of Mindful Eating that Im aware of focus only on Level 1. I strongly believe, however, that in keeping with the spirit of mindfulness as practiced traditionally down through the centuries, Levels 2 and 3 are of equal importance. Since this report is focused specifically on the application of Mindful Eating to weight loss, I will not address its application at Levels 2 and 3. In the

comprehensive overview provided in my E-book on Mindful Eating, however, all three levels are covered in detail.

7 Major Benefits of Mindful Eating

Before getting into a detailed description of the multiple advantages of Mindful Eating, I would like to give a brief summary of seven of them here: 1. Mindful Eating provides a way to eat much less while enjoying it much more. 2. Eating slowly and mindfully contributes to healthy digestion and stress reduction. 3. It entails no intrinsic food restrictions and thus does not contribute to feelings of deprivation that commonly sabotage diets of all kinds. 4. It provides a powerful way to overcome compulsive eating and other eating disorders. 5. Its highly natural and does not depend on will power, which is notoriously ineffective. 6. Its application intrinsically increases ones overall awareness and ability to live in the present to a significantly greater degree. 7. It entails no extra cost for special diet foods or supplementsand, actually as a result of eating significantly less food, it may even save you money.

Mindful Eating--A Highly Realistic Weight Loss Solution for the Wise
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results has frequently been set forth as the definition of insanity. Although this may be a bit over-stated, it does nevertheless highlight an exceedingly common human foible one that seems particularly prevalent in regard to losing weight. In spite of massive evidence that diets and dieting dont work andeven worse typically result in greater weight gain in the long run, they continue to be pursued avidly and repetitively by vast numbers of people. Its not surprising then that research consistently indicates that only about 10% of people who lose weight are successful in keeping it off for two years or more. Most methods of weight lossnatural and otherwisecontinue to leave out what is perhaps the single most important factor in achieving truly healthy and long-lasting weight lossnamely, how to eat much less without feeling deprived. Regardless of how healthy, natural, and well-balanced ones diet may be, weight gain will still inevitably occur if average total caloric intake exceeds the total calories burned. Although this truism is recognized almost universally, it continues to present what is perhaps the greatest challenge to successful weight loss and long-term maintenance of that loss. To date, the most common healthy ways of overcoming this challenge have consisted in exercise programs, building increased muscle mass, and low

glycemic food plans that aim to lessen hunger by stabilizing blood sugar levels. Some natural appetite suppressants could be included on this short list as well. Mindful Eating provides an ideally effective alternative solution to this huge challengeone that most people have never considered, or most likely have never even heard of. Although we are all endowed with the capacity to be mindful, most of usas Ive already pointed out--spend the vast majority of our waking moments being relatively mindless,that is, acting automatically while simultaneously being lost in thought or in some other activity. Consider, for example, how many times you have driven for miles over a familiar route with little or no conscious awareness of the passing scenery. In this common driving trance, its not uncommon to miss a turn that deviates from the habitual route. More to the point, when it comes to eating, how many times have you automatically consumed a bucket of buttered popcorn, a bag of potato chips, or large amounts of some other high calorie snack food, while your attention was riveted to a movie, a TV program, or while you were engrossed in a captivating social interaction. These are all common examples of what could be called an eating trance, for which mindfulness is an ideal antidote. Not surprisingly, this is also how most of us eat most of the time. That is, instead of staying focused fully and continuously on all of the varied, rich, and ever-changing sensations associated with the food were eating, we are prone to engage simultaneously in various forms of multi-tasking such as reading, watching TV, talking, or just being caught up in endless forms of thinking. By contrast, Mindful Eating consists, quite simply, in maintaining full, continuous awareness of all aspects of eating. Very importantly, this includes full awareness of the rich array of ever-changing visual, olfactory, auditory, textural and gustatory sensations associated with the food being consumed. The richest and most subtle flavors of most foods can be savored fully only by chewing them thoroughly with full, continuous awareness. Mindful eating, then, entails relating to food in a very full, one-pointed and leisurely way. Not uncommonly, the time taken in eating just a few bites mindfully is greater than the duration of a full meal for most people. An inevitable result of this marked slowing down is that the appestats in the brain that signal satiety are activated by a much reduced total intake of food (and calories) from what occurs through normal eating. By applying this simple strategy consistently over time, then, the bottom line result is the consumption of far fewer calories than we would otherwise take in. Anyone who applies this simple

strategy consistently over time will tend gradually to lose weight, if all other factors are equal This natural weight loss solution has other major advantages as well. First, it places absolutely no restrictions on the particular foods you eat. In Mindful Eating, the emphasis is not on WHAT you eat, but on HOW, specifically, you eat it. By definition, Mindful Eating does not include any prescriptions or shoulds of any kind. This removes the common feeling of being deprived that often sabotages other weight loss strategies. People who eat mindfully commonly discover that they gain far greater enjoyment and satisfaction from markedly smaller portions of their favorite calorie-laden foods than when they eat them mindlessly. Interestingly, however, even if you were to add Mindful Eating to a very strict diet plan, its highly likely that you would derive much greater satisfaction from the limited number of foods you could eat than if you consumed them in the usual way. You might be quite surprised, for example, at the degree of enjoyment you can derive from eating even a raw carrot or a stalk of celery with full mindful awareness. I see this is as a very strong argument for adding Mindful Eating to any other weight loss program you may be following, whether it be Weight Watchers, TOPS, Jenny Craig, NutriSystem, MediFast, EasySlimRX, or any number of others. Secondly, since Mindful Eating entails thorough chewing of all the food you eat, its a very healthy aid to complete digestion. The same can be said for the intrinsic relaxation and stress reduction that accompanies all forms of mindfulness. On this note, incidentally, Mindful Eating fits in beautifully with the rapidly growing Slow Food movement, which was started in Italy in 1986 specifically to combat fast food. It also aims to preserve the cultural cuisine, plants, seeds, domestic animals, and farming within specific eco-regions. Further, Mindful Eating also offers a possible alternative way to understand what has been called the French paradoxthe fact that the French suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease in spite of eating a diet thats quite rich in saturated fats. Although this has been attributed hypothetically to their greater consumption of red wine, it may also be related, in part at least, to their greater emphasis on dining slowly and leisurely and to the legendary French emphasis on savoring and enjoying food to the max. Speaking of paradox, I should point out that Mindful Eating is also paradoxical in one important respect. That is--as strange as it may seem at first--it does not entail striving to attain any particular end result. Its important to understand in this

regard that the effectiveness of mindfulness and, more specifically, of Mindful Eating consists entirely in the transformative power of awareness itself. In this regard, mindfulness is often referred to as non-doing to distinguish it from our various intentional schemes and strategies for trying to attain particular goals. So the practice of mindfulness is somewhat similar to what is referred to in 12-step groups as turning it over to my higher power. With regard to this last point and as a final example of just how powerful increased awareness can be, it has led me to become a vegetarian after being an avid meat eater for over 70 years. This transformation came about very gradually and actually somewhat surprisingly as a result of my applying Mindful Eating at Levels 2 and 3, as described above. It occurred, more specifically, as I became increasingly aware of the following basic facts: 1) Epidemiological research has demonstrated overwhelmingly that eating meat contributes markedly to all major forms of chronic degenerative disease. (This is documented most impressively in T. Colin Campbells recent book, The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health.) 2) Consuming meat also contributes to an incredible degree of cruelty that is inflicted on the animals from which it is derived. 3) Meat production accounts for a whopping 18% of the total greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere each yearmore than is contributed annually by all forms of transportation. Through this process of gradually increasing awareness, I reached what effectively was a tipping point, where the choice to become a vegetarianor, actually, a vegansuddenly became obvious to me. And, interestingly, by mindfully enjoying a wide variety of new tastes, Ive made this personal lifestyle change with remarkably little difficulty or feelings of deprivation.

A Taste of Mindfulness
Mindfulness and Mindful Eating are intrinsically experiential; consequently any attempt to define and describe them didactically is incomplete at best. Ive learned in teaching mindfulness to others that most people dont really understand it clearly until after they have a fair amount of guided experiential practice.

In the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program that I taught in a large hospital over a five-year period before I retired, many of the participants reported that it was only in the last couple of weeks of the course that mindfulness finally really clicked for them. In their evaluations at the end of the course, however, the vast majority of them reported that they were finding this new skill very helpful in coping with a wide range of extremely challenging illnesses, most of which entailed chronic emotional and/or physical pain. These results are quite similar to those reported by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who originally developed the MBSR program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, MA in the 1980s. After trying out a number of different prototypes for the program, he finally settled on the eight-week format. This decision resulted from his observation that eight weeks was the minimal period of time that participants needed to build an adequate foundation for their ongoing mindfulness practice. Although the basic skills required for Mindful Eating are much simpler and less demanding than those acquired by students in the MBSR, I personally believe that its ideal to establish a firm foundation in the MBSR program in order to have optimal success in a specific application, such as Mindful Eating. It is for this reason, that I have included a self-guided MBSR training module in my E-book on Mindful Eating. This module includes a set of clear practice guidelines and a complete set of audios that are used in the regular MBSR program. I also intend to provide an optional follow-up program that will enable interested persons to participate in an ongoing program of coaching, support and guidance. As the final part of this special report, Id like to invite you to participate in a brief experiential component. This consists of guidance provided in a short audio Ive created that I call A Taste of Mindfulness. Before listening to this audio, I encourage you to structure your environment so that you wont be interrupted or distracted for a period of about five minutes. Also, I invite you to have available a single raisin, or a small morsel of a favorite food, such as a piece of chocolate, a strawberry, a small bite of dessert, etc. Whenever youve prepared yourself in this way, I invite you to click on this link and

follow the guidance as mindfully as possible. . . http://www.audioacrobat.com/play/Whq5cT84

Summary and Conclusions

A strong argument can be made, then, that Mindful Eating may well be the ultimate realistic strategy for achieving weight loss thats both natural and long-lasting. Here again is a summary of its main benefits: 1. Mindful Eating provides a way to eat much less while enjoying it much more. 2. Eating slowly and mindfully contributes to healthy digestion and stress reduction. 3. It entails no intrinsic food restrictions and thus does not contribute to feelings of deprivation that commonly sabotage diets of all kinds. 4. It provides a powerful way to overcome compulsive eating and other eating disorders. 5. Its highly natural and does not depend on will power, which is notoriously ineffective. 6. Its application intrinsically increases ones overall awareness and ability to live in the present to a significantly greater degree. 7. It entails no extra cost for special diet foods or supplementsand, actually as a result of eating significantly less food, it may even save you money.

The Next Step

So. . . you may be thinking, whats the catch or downside? Actually, from my somewhat biased point of view, there is none; in fact, as I see it, Mindful Eating is remarkable in simultaneously offering multiple solutions to several different problems with no significant disadvantages or any kind. This is not to say, however, that Mindful Eating is easy; as a matter of fact, although its basically very simple, it can be fairly challenging at first. On the basis of my considerable experience in teaching mindfulness to others, Ive concluded that most people who wish to learn how to apply it in their lives are likely to need a fair amount of coaching, guidance, and supportat least in the early stages of their development. For this reason, I have created a program in Mindful Eating that is specifically designed to provide the didactic and experiential instruction you will need to get started, as well as offering the option of ongoing supportive services for as long as you feel a need for them.

Very sadly, a large majority of people who want to lose weight are looking for a quick fix. Let me stress as strongly as I can that THERE ARE NO QUICK FIXES that really work over the long term. In keeping with the wisdom of the famous Aesops fable about the Tortoise and the Hare, Mindful Eating is definitely The Way of the Tortoise. An apt motto for Mindful Eating might be something like, Slow and Easy Wins the Race. So if youre ready to give up the seductive illusion of the quick fix and invest in a highly realistic and effective weight loss solution, I strongly encourage you to take the next step by ordering my complete E-book on Mindful Eating. Its title is:

Mindful Eating A New Eco-Friendly Pathway to Permanent Weight Loss and Optimal Health