Over the holiday period I read this article on the Cooking Light website. It gave five steps recommended by Martha Beck, author of The Four Day Win.
I’ve always been intrigued with the concept of eating mindfully without counting calories, points, fat percentages, or keeping a food journal while still having success with weight loss.
Beck recommends (among other things) breathing correctly to keep your brain focused, being continually thankful for all you have, not assigning foods to the “bad” or “good” category, recognizing and learning to handle those situations which send you for your trigger foods, and enjoying the food that you eat.
I think the book is wonderful in many ways, but I’m not certain that mindful eating can be the first step in weight loss for many people.
I’m only speaking from personal experience, and from the experience of working with many, many people over the years.
In my experience, people who have struggled with their weight for a long time often have a warped perception of what their body is telling them, and many of them may find mindful eating hard to follow because they do not have a good grasp on what healthy eating looks like.
That was my case. Although I had “only” been obese for 10 years, I had lost sight of what it felt like to feed my body healthy foods, how to visualize what a true portion looked like, and wasn’t able to trust that my body was telling me the right things.
For me, it took more of a scheduled, planned out strategy to successfully lose weight. When I tried to lose weight by paying attention to what my body was telling me, I found that I couldn’t really rely on my body because my body still craved and desired massive amounts of fatty, salty and sugary foods.
Over time, I became more certain that my body actually knew what was good for it, and could begin to trust that my mind would follow. However, even then, I found that having some benchmarks for food consumption to be a benefit for me.
As many of you know, I chose to make certain that my fat consumption remaining in the healthy range of about 30 percent, I watched portions, and exercised faithfully. This helped me stay focused, while still allowing me to eat a lot of different foods.
I feel like eating mindfully can go hand in hand with using a healthy program that gives you enough parameters to retrain your mind and give you success at weight loss at the same time.
What do you think? Is it just one or the other, or can both co-exist for a solid weight loss plan that works for most people? Diane
If you missed my post on the Attune food blog where I talk about real change, I’d love it if you took a look!
I am not sure. It might work for some, but I also know that many people who have lost a significant amount of weight over the years would still have a hard time transitioning to such a concept because their bodies and minds are still really “out of shape” when it comes to healthy eating. It’s most likely something that needs to be trained.
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It is interesting that our minds really can become “out of shape.” I love that term Diandra. It does take a lot of training, and I am not sure that everyone can become permanently trained to mindfully eat in the proper quantities.
For me- I would not have been able to lose my weight with mindful eating. I needed a structured plan. I needed to learn new habits. I needed support. It is always in the back of my mind that one day I will be able to maintain my weight with mindful eating- I am just not there yet.
I don’t know if others would be able to do it or not. I know everyone is different and people have to find a plan that works for them that they are willing to stick with.
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I’m with you Jill. Anytime I tried to “do my own thing” with no structure, I completely failed. It wasn’t until I structured my plan that I had success. Every person is different, and that’s why there is no one way to get to a healthy weight.
I needed/need a very specific plan to lose weight. A general just listen to your body approach would have me gaining weight not losing it or like I did all last year plateaued at a certain weight I couldn’t get below due to eating too many calories to lose weight. Now that I am in weight loss mode I am following a very specific plan with a specific number of calories to be eaten daily and when I don’t go over that number my weight goes down.
You are not alone Susan – In my experience, most people seem to need some kind of structure. I often wonder if people who say they “eat mindfully” to lose weight in actuality are following some kind of structure that internally works for them.
I don’t think, in this instance, it’s a good idea to suggest there is a right or wrong. This is a profoundly gray area. I also think it’s semantical; that “mindful” is a matter of interpretation. By the very definition of the word, if one is eating a structured protocol, with the aim of losing fat, bettering their life, thus bettering how they contribute to their family, community, job, etc., then that IS mindful eating. In my opinion, what you did was/is mindful.
It is a grey area, which is why it is so interesting to me. What worked for me may work for a lot of people, but certainly not everyone. Good point about everything we do being mindful – it can be a positive approach designed to better ourselves, or a mindful approach that causes use to trip down a path we may not like. Even when I was eating 3,500 to 4,000 calories a day, I was mindful of what I was doing. Too bad I couldn’t change that for 10 years.
I am currently losing weight somewhat easily by following a plan of a certain number of carb servings per day, and keeping sugar grams low. I don’t have to record anywhere, as I consider myself “mindful” of the numbers, so can just keep an approximate mental tally throughout the day. In time, I expect it to become habit so it would be just practicing mindful eating through proper training of my mind and body. So, my answer to your question is that I think that a plan and mindfulness need to coexist for a while and possibly permanently depending on the person.
That’s great that you can keep those numbers in your head enough to lose and be mindful of where you are in your daily eating plan. I think that will help you when you get into the maintenance mode!
From what I read about intuitive eating, it is pretty much the exact opposite of any traditional plan. The anti-plan, if you will. It makes sense, in theory. But for me, it requires me to trust my body and listen to my body and I don’t trust it to not tell me to eat only bagels and no veggies!!
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That anti-plan! I am like you, my body still wants to have peanut M&M’s for breakfast even though my mind knows that I shouldn’t do that. Fortunately, my mind generally wins – although it can be a struggle.
Totally agree with you on this one! The combination is the best way to go!
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Thanks Amy!
I have learned that either/or thinking tends to shut me down and that both/and thinking is expansive and full of possibility. That said, it really truly is about each individual finding out what works and also defining the word “works.” What “works” for me may not “work” for you. For example, I could go on a restrictive diet, count calories, create a strict schedule for my workouts and lose weight, but in the end, I know it wouldn’t “work” because this type of “plan” makes me crazy and miserable and I’d find it unsustainable. I’d miss a workout, see a gain on the scale and feel like a failure. That doesn’t “work” for me. Also? My being happy a certain weight/size/level of fitness/health may not make someone else happy…they might find their happiness in a different combination. It’s all so variable.
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It is very variable, and the discussion about it may help people understand why their plan isn’t working. If counting makes them crazy, it’s time to try something different! Thanks for sharing your experiences Karen.
I think I feel as you do Diane. Perhaps we were born with the ability and potential to eat intuitively, but decades of disordered foods and eating will not be reversed so easily. In the beginning having a concrete practical plan will work much better for the vast majority of people on this voyage even if that doesn’t sell as many diet books.
You are right as usual Dr. J – I often think of small children. They typically eat to fullness, and stop when they are done. Now we can teach them to overeat, but that’s another post.
Yes, I love it when they stop eating in the middle of a cookie because they’ve had enough!
Me too! Or they say, “I don’t want any ice cream. I want to go play.” Who does that?!!
I still strive for mindful eating. I did a combination to lose weight (40 lbs) about 3 years ago. For 6 months my eating was structured by removing most processed foods and aligning my tastebuds to it. No HFCS, no trans fat, no preservatives. After I had overhauled what I was putting in as fuel. I started cutting back. This is where the mindfulness came into play. I played with the amounts to find the smallest amount that I could eat of a certain things and not be hungry for 2 hours. I never really counted calories though I checked if I was adding a new food to my repertoire. It worked well but within parameters. I still kept amounts small. I have been using mindfulness more for maintenance and it is pretty good. Though my tastebuds still say that cookies are delicious and we should have more. So sometimes, I have to take the upper hand.
Good for you!! That’s a wonderful testimony to how it can work. And I think your last sentence is the most important – even though you mainly use mindfulness, you also know when to put your will toward staying at a healthy weight.
I tried the intuitive eating/mindful eating thing too. It doesn’t work for me. As a reformed obese person, my “intuition” is to eat too much. I need to count my calories and be accountable to myself!
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It’s great that you found what works for you. It obviously works well as you have lost over 100 pounds!
I actually do better using mindful eating over counting, weighing, and logging. I don’t want to do those things for life they make me insane and feed my “all or nothing” mentality about being “good” or “bad”. I feel like I’m walking a tightrope when I’m doing it well and a total failure when I go over even by 50 calories. For me, eating like I’m at my goal weight helps me to lose and feel like a normal healthy person. That being said, ther e is discipline involved. I don’t just order one kid’s burger instead of three, I choose a salad and pack lunches for the car that are low-fat and full of fiber. Fruit is a snack now because the thin me wouldn’t choose chips anyway. I am much more calm and less manic doing this but yes, I do see the value of recalibrating when there is a stall or a gain and I know the other approaches work really well for some.
That was a lot of what I did at first too, but a little more structured. I didn’t count calories, but knew how many calories I should eat if I weighed a certain amount. If I kept my eating at about that level when I was losing weight, the maintenance part was easy because I was already used to eating at that level. And you are right – there is discipline required, both with intuitive eating and more structured programs.
Saying one can overcome obesity with mindful eating sounds to me like saying you can overcome insomnia by falling asleep. It’s not how you GET cured, it’s how you know you ARE cured.
Great observation Janis. Maybe it’s like trying to put the cart before the horse?
I am with Roy.. to me mindful eating is part of my whole eating plan with portion control & calories & all that I do similar to you Diane. I just make sure I know what is going my bod both portion & calorie wise BUT I am also mindful when I eat to pay attention to it all…..
As for strictly intuitive & not using anything else – I am not so sure about that but to each their own & if it works for them fine. I think for a lot of people, if they don’t know the portions & all the rest, the weight loss may be harder….
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To each their own is correct, and education and understanding of what healthy eating looks like can go a long way toward being able to mindfully eat and maintain a healthy weight.
Ooooh, that’s a tough one! I am always fascinated by the intuitive, mindles eating concepts and I’d love that to work for me, but even at a healthy weight I never had healthy portions – I have been an “eyes bigger than my stomach” overeater since childhood, and have had such practice ignoring hunger ans satiety cues, even when they WERE accurate, that I’m too hesitant to go with that alone.
That said, I am working on the concepts, but I am not sure I will ever be able to do them aside from calorie counting. I know what a portion looks like for most foods, but I need a daily tally to keep me from overeating. It’s like glasses for my stomach. Even if my weight is corrected, the underlying behaviors I have struggled with for life are not. They are much improved, and I may measure less vigorously as I settle into permanent maintenance, but I doubt I’ll be able to quit tracking without issues.
The only caveat I can see if that if I continue my daily weighing (which I intend to), so long as I am staying in my four pound maintenance window I can track less and less, but if I notice weight swings when I am not being very careful with what I am eating, I think simplicity might be just continuing what I know works. I’ll let you know when I get there, right?
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iPad typo – mindles was supposed to be “mindful”!
Taryl´s last fabulous musings ..Day 25 – stall bust confirmed!
Understand the typos!! Once I was in maintenance, I had to decide what that “happy weight range” was for me. Frequent weighing and regular exercise were the other two things that helped me. I think that a lot of folks feel nervous about hitting maintenance, but having a plan as you do can really take away some of the uncertainty and fear.
A very interesting post and lots of thoughtful comments. I agree there is a lot of room to interpret what is meant by mindful eating. I don’t know that too many would succeed in weight loss without a more “planned” approach to meals, but I’m sure some could do it. And once you’re in the groove of losing weight, you are aware of what foods and what meals keep you satisfied while still making progress, so whether going on autopilot and rotating a set group of the same meals is considered mindful or intuitive I don’t know. I do know that I was able to maintain my weight loss for a three month period by mindful eating. I had very slowly lost 25 pounds by limiting carbs and avoiding white carbs – and then went to India for three months while my husband was there on business. I was terribly worried about gaining weight since I ate almost all my meals in restaurants, and Indian food is nearly impossible to eat without eating rice or bread – it’s just too spicy and the protein servings are moderate. Plus salads and vegetables are hard to find in restaurants. But it was okay, I ate a little less than I could have most of the time and kept active, mostly by walking. And I came home with only a 3 pound gain, much to my relief. So maintenance, yes, I think can be intutive or mindful – weight loss I’m not so sure.
You bring up an excellent distinction. Maintenance is a different animal than weight loss. I’ve seen very few people actually lose weight through just eating mindfully, but lots of people use mindful eating for maintenance. Of course those people also have developed healthy habits that they bring with them into maintenance.
I think intuitive eating is a great goal, but I know that personally, it would not have worked for me at my biggest. I needed a very structured plan (things were off-limits, portions were measured carefully) to help me learn what a normal, healthy meal looked like. I had no food intuition, and that’s how I ended up 23 and 345 pounds. I didn’t know what hunger felt like, and a serving was always “when there’s nothing left.” Now, as I am down 150 pounds and preparing for maintenance, I am exploring intuitive eating, and I can see both the merits and the issues with it. But again, I needed the preparation of learning about healthy eating habits before I could implement the skills without measuring cups or spoons.
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I too had very little food intuition as I had lived for so many years by eating whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and in the quantities I wanted. It took years to really get it solidified in my mind. Congratulations on your weight loss. Maintenance is the reward for all your hard work!!
I definitely think your body can adjust to what you eat. I don’t eat fast food, fried food, anything too processed or too high in sugar and my body really doesn’t want that stuff (except high sugar on occasion). Through years of healthy eating my body actually craves hearty whole wheat, vegetables, salads, and fresh food. I think anyone can make this happen if they stick with it. The body totally adapts.
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You are a great example of how healthy eating for a long time makes the cravings and “interest” in junky food fade over time. Thanks for sharing Marie!
I think eating mindfully and a healthy program can compliment each other well. That being said, some may need more of one than the other. The body quickly adapts to diet changes, but to succeed the mind has to adapt too and this is all about forming new habits. Once in place, mindful eating on it’s own can work wonders in maintaining a healthy diet.
Eating smaller portions and making food substitutions is a good way to lose weight. There are also a large number of natural hunger suppressants that you can include in your diet. Whatever you choose to do losing weight requires effort and determination.
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I have to admit that I am afraid to eat mindfully (without writing stuff down or counting calories). Though I am sure, as I get further along, I will be able to do it effortlessly.
Great post Diane!
~Kellie
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I don’t know about effortlessly – but it certainly does get easier with time!
As you go on your journey, you may find that you are able to journal or count calories on a less frequent basis, which means that you are learning to eat mindfully and still stay at a healthy weight.
I agree with what others have said. I couldn’t use a mindful eating approach while I was losing weight – I had to track ever single day for the scale to move down. But now that I’m maintaining and have a good idea of what healthy eating looks like for me, I use a combination of mindful eating and tracking. I weigh in every morning but when I start to see the scale creep up I return to tracking.
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I didn’t track when I was losing weight, but I do feel that because I had dieted unsuccessfully for so many years, I had a really good handle on calorie contents in foods. That probably helped me along.
I can’t do mindful eating and agree with you that I have a warped perception in regard to food as well. Wish I could do mindful eating.
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I couldn’t do it either. That’s okay though – we can still lose weight and maintain a healthy weight by following a sound program. Maybe mindful eating is overrated!
If you are over weight and have been “trying” to lose I just don’t see how mindfully eating is helpfull… If you knew how to do this wouldn’t you? Whenever I go back to writing in my journal I am AMAZING by how much I eat and how quickly it adds up. I think it takes practice to eat mindfully and overweight people are definitely out of practice!
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How did I miss this post? I consider myself a mindful eater, but it took a LOT of training, wrt portion size, healthy food choices, and emotional reactionariness to get this way. I don’t measure or count, but I do plan meals, or at least have pre-made stuff around to eat, and convenient healthy snacks and fruit, which helps a whole lot. If the scale climbs, I change my mindfulness just a bit, and eat a bit smaller portions, or less frequently. As many here have said, if we were eating mindfully, we wouldn’t have gotten obese, and there’s a lot of work to be done between eating ad libitum and comfortable weight maintenance.
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Thanks, Diane!
Your journey amazes me. I became a registered dietitian to try to help people live healthier lives. I’ve ended up on the other end of the spectrum, working with people with disease-related malnutrition, and actually having to encourage them to eat MORE calories!
Anyway, when I do work with people trying to lose weight, I think the most important thing I can do is listen. No prejudgment. I know, and they may know too, what healthy eating “is”. My job isn’t to preach but to help them find a way to get there.
I think you & others like you are the real experts on this topic. What I know in theories, you know in practice …. 14 years of it!!
How interesting to think about retraining your body to know what healthy eating feels like. I worry that not everyone has the patience to do it though. I still encounter plenty of people looking for a quick fix.