30 Days of Mindful Eating – Author Interview

This post is part of a series of posts on mindful eating. The Introduction contains links to the entire series.

If you’ve been following this series, you know I used the book Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food by Jan Chozen Bays, MD as my guide. Jan is an expert in mindful eating. Besides writing the book, she is a pediatrician and meditation teacher who has taught mindful eating for more than twenty years.

Jan kindly agreed to an interview with me about mindful eating. My questions and her answers are below.

Roger: In your twenty years of teaching mindful eating, what’s the most interesting thing you learned?

Jan: I was amazed to find out how many people have had experiences of starving. For example, one man broke down in the workshop and said that when he was a teenager, he and his father and brother had been evicted and were living in their car. They were always hungry, and had to eat out of dumpsters. Once they were caught. He cried as he told us that it was a very humiliating experience, especially  for a teen, and he never tells anyone about it. He related it to some of his eating and hoarding habits.

The mindful eating exercise I like best is tongue practice (last track on the CD in the back of the book). It is always interesting to me, even though I’ve been doing it for 20 years. It shows that anything you attend to carefully will open up and reveal an entire universe.

Roger: Do you think mindless eating is at the root of most eating disorders? Are there other important causes of eating disorders?

Jan: It’s multifactorial. We tend to like one-cause one-solution problems, but most problems are complex. Besides mindless eating, other issues are the increase to HUGE of what we call “normal” portion sizes, our desire to eat cheap food rather than good food, the hidden and dense calories in junk food, even in  “health food”,  the easy availability of snack foods in the ubiquitous vending  machines and all night mini marts,  lack of exercise (our local folks say when they were kids they burned about 2,000 calories a day just doing farm chores), and drinking  soda or Mc shakes instead of  plain water or real juice.  In fact, if people who drink sodas, fake juice and shakes just made a change to drinking plain water they’d probably lose 10 pounds or more in a year (and save some good money).

Roger: I know from your book that Americans have been mindlessly eating for over 200 years. You also discuss that more recently we feel compelled to have snacks and beverages instantly available. Is mindless eating getting worse?

Jan: I think so. In Colonial times we may have eaten fast, but at least we ate real food. When I was a child, we had three meals a day and that was it. Maybe an apple after school. We never thought of opening the fridge or cupboards and scrounging around for something to eat. There were no snack pack foods in lunch boxes, and no food vending machines anywhere, certainly not in schools.

Roger: I  recently found the following research on mindful eating and eating disorders: a study at Duke University found mindfulness helps reduce binge eating in obese people. Are you aware of other research?

Jan: Yes. There’s another study by Jean Kristeller at Indiana State University with the same results. She’s funded by NIH to do more research with Mindfulness Based Eating programs (MB-Eat) . If you talk to people who binge about their experiences, they say that they go unconscious when they binge. If they have some measure of awareness, they’ll tell you that they eat in order to go unconscious, to get relief from painful emotions and thoughts. Sadly, after the binge, the painful emotions and thoughts only increase.

Roger: What’s the single most important thing people can do to foster mindful eating?

Jan: Eat without doing anything else, at least once a day, and pay full attention to your food and your body as you do it.

Roger: Do people who practice mindful eating naturally gravitate towards healthier foods?

Jan: They seem to, because they are paying attention to the messages their body is sending them about what it needs.

A good example is our instinctive desire for chicken soup or orange juice when we’re sick. The body that has the flu says, loud and clear, no CANDY!

Roger: My mind is often distracted when I eat. What can I do?

Jan: When you are eating mindfully, don’t expect a continuous experience of perfectly focused attention. As during any meditation, the mind does wander. It loves to wander! That fact is the source of one of the most interesting questions in the world (to me). Why does the mind not want to just be present? So mindful eating consists of lots and lots of returnings, returning to the present, returning to what the body is actually doing. Mindfully eating, wander off into the future, return to mindful eating, wander off into the past, notice, return to mindful eating. Etc.

I don’t think we ever get perfect at it. We just keep learning. That’s the fun. How dull if we were all perfect.

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Tags: Diet, Mindful Eating, Mindfulness