Making Peace with Food

Is it time for you to make peace with food, call a truce and try to work toward a new relationship?

“Food is not the enemy or your best friend,” says local psychotherapist and mindful eating instructor Nicole Christina. Her co-presenter in an upcoming mindful eating workshop, Pauline Cecere—who, like Christina, is a licensed clinical social worker—agrees.

“Mindless eating seems to be more the rule than the exception in our fast-paced culture,” she says.

You and food have been in a relationship for years, and most likely the same scenario plays over and over. You may find yourself making excuses for unhealthy choices and reaching for food to solve emotional frustrations and personal issues. But when relationships become habits, they are hard to break, even if they are clearly not good for us.

Learning and practicing mindfulness, a form of non-judgmental moment-bymoment awareness, can help you choose the right path and stay on it. Mindful eating is a great place to start gaining control of out-of-control patterns, which are easy to fall into in our overly stimulating, hyper-connected society.

“Mindfulness can bring conscious awareness to just where we are and what we are doing,” says Cecere. “When practicing mindful eating, we begin to address those very primal issues around survival and nurture. We can begin to be aware of ways we are addressing emotional issues with food and just how unsatisfactory it is to do so.”

If you think that you and food are on an unhealthy course, check your numbers. BMI, cholesterol, glucose or blood pressure screenings can prompt you and your doctor to talk about the need for healthy eating habits. It is easy to find ourselves binging on ice cream, chowing down a food machine “lunch” and soda at our desks, telling ourselves we’re going to do better, then slipping once more and feeling defeated or defiant.

Christina puts it this way: “In our culture, people can become anxious around food. They don’t know what to eat. If you’re eating mindfully, you don’t eat a whole bag of Cheetos.”

Mindless eating and yo-yo dieting may be pulling apart your relationship with food, causing anxiety at breakfast, lunch and dinner, before social engagements and when you reach for snacks. Sometimes we are hungry; other times we could just be bored, depressed, lonely or trying to fit into a social situation.

With practice, mindfulness cultivates the possibility of freeing yourself of reactive, habitual patterns of thinking, feeling and acting. Mindfulness promotes balance, choice and wisdom.

“Mindful eating really teaches you to trust yourself,” says Christina. “People are constantly looking to experts. With mindful eating, you can listen to your body and know what you need.”

“We can have faith in our {own} knowing, beyond what we can learn from reading or hearing ideas from someone else,” adds Cecere.

In her experience, Cecere says, people come to mindful eating programs because they tried many ways of getting a healthy body or body weight and found they didn’t work; realize that they are using food as a refuge to deal with emotional issues that food can’t satisfy; suffer from bulimia, anorexia or binge eating and exercising; had surgery for obesity and want to sustain weight loss and be healthy; want a better relationship with food; or desire to extend a practice of mindfulness to eating.

We can call a truce to our tumultuous relationship with food and learn to live on a mindful path that benefits our waistline and health markers, lessens anxiety and depression, raises self-esteem and encourages overall well-being. Mindful eating can transform the way you think and feel about eating, creating a compassionate self-care model for healthy living.

How do people benefit from mindful eating programs?

“Most people lose weight and have a better relationship with food,” says Cristina. “It gives you the energy that allows you to do more interesting things. It can also lessen stress; less cortical is released into the bloodstream, making it less likely to hold onto weight. And there are no side effects like pharmaceuticals.”

She says recent studies suggest that people who practice meditation may live longer and look younger as they age.

If all that isn’t enough, she adds, “Mindfulness offers an extraordinary and powerful ripple effect on how you look at the world, providing richness and calmness, a feeling that it’s going to be OK. We all need that.” o