January 17, 2017

In my previous blog, “You’re the queen, it’s your call”, I touched on the subject of making peace with your body, unconditional love, and self-acceptance.  Let’s say you are finally getting the message and are ready to become your own best friend.  But you’re stuck with a few unwanted kilos and a very negative self-image.  So how do you lose weight if strict diets and exhausting exercise plans are not the answer?  And how on earth do you change a lifetime of negative thinking?

Here I would like to introduce the concept of mindful eating:

What exactly is mindfulness? In Act Made Simple, Russ Harris explains it:

“Mindfulness means paying attention with flexibility, openness, and curiosity.

• Firstly, mindfulness is an awareness process, not a thinking process. It involves bringing awareness or paying attention to your experience in this moment as opposed to being ‘caught up’ in your thoughts.
• Secondly, mindfulness involves a particular attitude; one of openness and curiosity.  Even if your experience in this moment is difficult, painful or unpleasant, you can be open and curious about it instead of merging, running from or fighting with it.
• Thirdly, mindfulness involves flexibility of attention; the ability to consciously direct, broaden or focus your attention on different aspects of your experience.”

The current ‘mannequin challenge’ comes in handy when describing mindfulness.  Stop for a moment and freeze time right where you are.  Imagine you are the photographer walking around, filming the frozen situation around you.  While you are the ‘photographer’ you are in the position of the ‘observer’.  You have stepped out of your thinking mind and are becoming aware of what is going on.  Take a good look at everything that is happening around you, the people, their thoughts, emotions and actions; don’t get involved and don’t fight with what is happening or try to run away.  Notice and name everything you see.  The situation you are filming can also be inside your mind; imagine walking around inside your brain, having a look at all the thoughts, emotions, feelings, beliefs and memories currently affecting you.  To help with mindful eating, focus your ‘camera’ on your tummy, check in with it and feel if you’re really hungry or just peckish, bored or frustrated.

Noticing and naming what is going on, helps us to be objective and neutralize the effects our thoughts and feelings are having on us.  Because we are ‘standing outside’ of these thoughts and feelings, we can work with them like the director of a movie set.  We can see how our thoughts, feelings, beliefs and memories are like actors in a movie, working together to make up the story of our lives.  Like a movie director we then have the power to take control, to instruct the actors on how we want them to act to help us tell the story we have in mind.  And just like the director, we can choose if we want to take advice from the people around us, and how much we allow them to control the outcome of our story.

One of the characters most of us have to deal with is the ‘inner critic’.  Stepping into the director’s position helps us to identify and then challenge the opinions of the inner critic.  Rather than starting a fight with this part of ourselves that we won’t ever win, and calling it ‘bad’ and ‘negative’, it is much more helpful to listen to it, thank it for its opinion and then ask it kindly to step aside so we can get on with making our movie.  Not becoming aware of this critic may lead to a life where we make a movie according to the inner critic’s story, rather than the beautiful, unique story we are aching to tell.

Freezing time and becoming a director of our movie, can thus help us take control of our eating habits and lifestyle choices.  Awareness of our hunger and cravings help us to stop and think before we eat.  It gives us a moment to choose the story we want to tell, do we want to keep on eating mindlessly or do we want to construct a new story where we eat mindfully, move with joy and live creatively, using all our talents and gifts.

Look out for my next blog with 13 Surprising facts on mindful eating.