Mindful Eating

On the same day that The New York Times published a front-page story about the latest trends in multi-tasking (think multiple computer screens), the newspaper also ran an article about the benefits of something that is almost exactly the opposite of multi-tasking: mindful eating.

Based in Buddhism, mindful eating is the practice of attending closely to how the senses are engaged when one has a meal. When one mindfully eats, one is focusing on nothing but the food. There’s no reading the newspaper, no watching TV -- not even any conversation at the table.

Mindfulness offers a take on food different from the more common view of “good” and “bad” foods. Instead of avoiding a certain food because it’s “bad” to eat too much of it, you slow down the experience of eating the food. You savor it, think about it -- try to really taste it. Mindful eating is a surprisingly challenging thing to do, since we have so many distractions at mealtimes and we’re so used to using food itself to distract ourselves from what we’re feeling, both emotionally and physically. Mindful eating is widely used in treating people with eating disorders because so much of that disordered behavior is about consuming food, not tasting it.

Mindful eating is a difficult practice to master; even the experts quoted can’t do it all the time. But even thinking about the concept and trying it can help us. Compare the difference between really looking, smelling and tasting a piece of chocolate and then just popping it into your mouth without paying attention. It can be a completely different and more pleasurable experience when you taste the chocolatey taste and feel the melting texture of the chocolate. You may find that you feel satisfied with less, and enjoy what you have eaten more.

Athletes and Disordered Eating

Knowing when we have taken a healthy behavior too far can be hard to judge. In the March issue of Runner’s World, Caleb Daniloff writes about how his attention to nutrition, while training for his first marathon, drifted into bad eating habits. Believing that losing weight would help him train better and run faster, he ended up restricting his eating, drastically cutting calories, becoming preoccupied with his weight and body, and avoiding foods that he formerly ate with abandon. He caught himself before developing a full-fledged eating disorder, but the article describes several elite athletes who didn’t.

Disordered eating — that is, eating behavior that doesn’t meet the medical definition of an eating disorder, but can be injurious nonetheless — is widespread. Three-fourths of American women between 25 and 45 display some disordered eating, according to a study cited in Daniloff’s article.

How do you know whether your eating is disordered? The most common sign, according to Leslie Bonci, a nutritionist quoted in the story, is this: “Food choices become about what not to eat.”

The article includes some common food rules people adopt that can signal disordered eating. The magazine’s list of danger signs is directed at athletes, but it’s useful for everyone. Here’s a paraphrase:

1. Eating energy bars as meals rather than eating real foods.
2. Avoiding fat, or carbs, or a particular basic food group.
3. Rigidly scheduling mealtimes rather than eating according to feeling hungry.
4. Logging calories precisely.
5. Avoiding eating with others if it doesn’t fit with your food rules.
6. Skipping fuel on long runs.

When you’ve taken all the pleasure out of food for yourself — when food rules take precedence over friends and family, when it’s all about what you’re taking away from yourself, rather than what you’re giving to yourself — you’ve crossed over from moderation to disordered behavior. Athletes and non-athletes alike would benefit from shifting their focus from food as an obstacle to weight loss to food as a means of fueling and replenishing one’s body.

The Fat Trap

Just in time for New Year’s and New Year’s resolutions, Tara Parker-Pope has written a sobering article about weight and weight loss. In "The Fat Trap," published in the January 1 issue of The New York Times Magazine, she describes research on the difficulty of maintaining weight loss. Some key points: the body can go into “defense” mode to defend a higher weight, which is why lost weight can be so hard to maintain. In addition, weight loss is much more than simply a matter of willpower -- people lose and gain weight differently, based on body type, genetics and biology.

From the viewpoint of an individual wanting to lose weight, the article is discouraging, because it details how much work it takes to maintain significant weight loss (including daily exercise and careful monitoring of diet). The article, however, also strongly makes the case that being overweight or failing to lose weight is not a personal failing, but a result of a complex interplay of factors, some of which are beyond a person’s control. As Parker-Pope writes:

It is true that people who are overweight, including myself, get that way because they eat too many calories relative to what their bodies need. But a number of biological and genetic factors can play a role in determining exactly how much food is too much for any given individual. Clearly, weight loss is an intense struggle, one in which we are not fighting simply hunger or cravings for sweets, but our own bodies.

In my practice, I have found that many of my clients with weight-related issues.have harshly judged themselves for their inability to lose weight, or have been harshly judged by others. We are far too comfortable criticizing others’ weight or making value judgments about it. I hope this article contributes to more acceptance of different weights and sizes.

Can you be too fat to be President?

There’s a new wrinkle in the 2012 presidential race: The idea that you can be too fat to be president.

The issue has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks alongside discussion that New Jersey governor Chris Christie could be a viable candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. As speculation grows that he could enter the race, pundits are writing about his weight, and asserting that Christie is too fat to be president.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni did his best Sunday to challenge the weight prejudice directed against Christie (who doesn’t talk about how much he weighs, but has referred to his long-running “struggle” with his weight).

We treat weight as if it is simply a matter of willpower, and equate thinness with virtue and weight with gluttony and slothfulness. Despite all the evidence that weight is much more complex than simple willpower, and is affected by many factors, including genetics, we continue to denigrate the overweight and to value thinness above all else. We act as if being thin is a sign of self-control, and being fat is a sign of no self-discipline. Bruni -- a former food critic for the Times and the author of Born Round, an excellent memoir revolving around eating -- writes that his thinness in college didn’t reflect self-control: “It reflected bulimia and laxatives,” he says.

Ironically, this focus on Christie’s weight occurred during the first Weight Stigma Awareness Week, an effort by the Binge Eating Disorder Association to make people aware of the stigma and discrimination that the overweight face. It’s a reminder of the importance of not making judgments about behavior based on weight.

Therapists in Therapy?

Is being in therapy a mark of personal defect? Or is it an indicator of strength? Dr. Steven Reidbord, a California psychiatrist, explores this question in a recent blog post on Psychologytoday.com. Reidbord describes a patient who asked him whether he had been in therapy himself. Behind that question was the patient’s feeling that if his doctor had been in therapy it would mark him as deficient, since the patient himself felt deficient because he was in therapy with Reidbord.

Many people share this feeling. They believe that they must be defective if they are in treatment and can’t just deal with their problems on their own. If they are coming to therapy twice a week, instead of once, well then they must be twice as defective. I think about it the opposite way. Why struggle alone with something when you can get help with it and possibly master it? Dr. Reidbord writes that chefs go to restaurants where meals are cooked by other chefs. Lawyers often have their own lawyers. What is the problem with shrinks having their own shrinks?

I myself often compare the person who believes it’s better to solve a problem on his or her own to an injured runner who feels a sharp pain in his ankle but believes that no sports medicine specialist can help him. He continues to run or devises his own cure for the injury, figuring out a way to work around the problem. Often, though, he’ll end up re-injuring himself. And when he finally does go to the doctor, the problem is worse. I feel the same way about psychological pain that I do about a sports injury: Rather than suffer alone, I think it’s better to seek help in reducing pain and suffering. And it makes sense to me that a psychotherapist who feels that therapy helps his patients would recognize its value in his own life.

I found Dr. Reidbord’s words refreshing as he tries to destigmatize therapy and mental illness. Does acknowledging that there is a behavior or emotion that is troubling you and that you need help managing mean you’re defective? Hardly. It means you’re human.

Roots of Depression

If you’re looking for the roots of depression, you may have to look further back in the past than you might think.

That’s an interesting takeaway from a recent study of 100 people who experienced depressive episodes as adults. As reported in The Atlantic, researchers found among those adults, people who had undergone trauma early in their lives were less resilient than people who had not. The people who had suffered early trauma (such as the loss of a parent) were more vulnerable to depression following later events involving interpersonal loss. And when they fell into depression as an adults, those episodes tended to be triggered by events that were less severe than those inducing depression in adults who hadn’t been hit by trauma in their youth.

The Atlantic reported these results as if one should be surprised that people’s lives as adults are affected by their early experiences. But in fact, researchers and practicing psychologists have long known about the importance of a person’s early experience in understanding their adult emotional life. Putting it bluntly, you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out that our childhood leaves an imprint on how we behave when we’re grown up. When people experience loss as children, the experience is often overwhelming; they commonly haven’t yet developed the emotional strength to overcome it. When another crisis comes along years later, it can be like having a new wound before the old one has entirely healed; people are more vulnerable to the next injury. Moreover, they may rely on whatever imperfect or faulty coping mechanisms they used as children -- behaviors that are no more effective than they were the first time around.

And yet, many people who experienced major emotional setbacks as children berate themselves, if, as adults, they are tipped into a depressive episode by a minor problem. They blame themselves for their emotional weakness. Their difficulties can be exacerbated by psychotherapists who minimize the significance of their past; while some psychologists (myself included) consider the past to be an important element (but by no means the only factor) in understanding people’s present behavior, others see little value in exploring the past. Perhaps more research like this will increase awareness about the past’s importance, enabling people to use it to address present-day issues more effectively.

Craving Fatty Foods

A recent study at the University of California, Irvine may shed light on how deeply humans are attached to fatty foods.

In the study, reports The New York Times, rats that were given diets high in fat had an immediate reaction in their gut: They began producing chemicals similar to those produced by marijuana use, creating for the rats a further craving for additional fatty foods. When the rats were injected with a drug that blocked absorption of the marijuana-related chemicals, however, the animals lost their interest in fatty foods.

The experiment — which also found that rats didn’t have such a chemically triggered craving for sugar or protein — suggests that people, too, have a strong biological attraction to fatty foods. A similar chemical reaction in humans may affect how easily we can moderate our desire for, and consumption of, fatty foods.

We don’t know whether humans have exactly the same reaction to fat, but the experiment does encourage thinking about how people may be susceptible to eating certain kinds of food and why they might feel deprived by giving it up. The experiment also makes one wonder about the degree to which people might have different biologically based cravings for fatty foods. It’s very easy to judge other people on the basis of willpower, telling yourself that you can restrain your eating, so why can’t they? It’s equally easy to beat yourself up for finding it hard to change eating habits. Perhaps further research along the lines of this experiment will encourage a little less judgment of people’s character based on their weight and their eating habits.