Mind Your Food & Mindfulness and Eating

Mind Your Food

Food is a necessity for our life and eating is a quintessentially primal activity whose roots lie deep in our evolutionary past. The ingestion and digestion of food is a non-negotiable activity that is intimately weaved into the very rhythms of our daily lives.

 

Food has been articulated as a life-giving force in numerous traditions, from Ayurveda, Chinese medicine to coeval nutritional science. From a biological perspective, our bodies need the right type of food to function properly as diseases and compromised health conditions have been scientifically linked with malnutrition.

 

Furthermore, individuals suffering from diabetes, cholesterol, heart disease, obesity, neuro-endocrinological disorders, digestive issues, cancer, kidney and liver disease all need regulated diets. In such circumstances, paying attention to the act of eating invariably starts taking on more importance than simply filling one’s stomach with tasty bites and is central to our health and well-being.

 

 

Hunger: The drive to eat

Getting to know our subjective sense of hunger then becomes an important part in consciously eating. Understanding how we eat, when we eat and why we eat is necessary to correct our unstable relationship to food. Conventionally, hunger is understood as a physiological drive, signaled by a fall in blood sugar or a rumble in the stomach, indicating that the body is in need of nutrition. Yet, in a deeper sense, hunger is an existential state that drives one consciously and unconsciously to want to eat food and functions on multiple levels from biological to

emotional to spiritual.

 

 

Today, satisfying hunger in urban metropolitan areas has become increasingly easier due to the 24/7 accessibility we have to food. Over appreciating the value of the instant gratification good food provides us, our post-modern psyche has imbued food with a relevance that goes beyond physiological survival, making it a principle source of pleasure and comfort. We eat sugary, fatty, fried and salty foods not to fill our stomachs only, but to help us deal with stress and assuage other disturbing emotions such as depression, loneliness, boredom, anxiety and anger.

 

 

Mindless munching

We “feel bad” so we eat food to “feel good.” Eating, as the pursuit of comfort becomes a coping mechanism to face the numerous demands made on us on a daily basis. Behaviorally, this is more common than not. Have you ever sat in front the TV or in the cinema with a tub of popcorn or some other snack and have ploughed through the whole thing in the course of the film? Or been at a cocktail party sipping a drink and chatting with a friend while devouring bowls of nuts and chips?  Or polished off a whole bar of chocolate while sitting in front of your computer screen trying to reach work deadlines? In such instances we are not realizing how fast or how much we are eating. This is called mindless munching or the act of grinding down edibles with a mind contemplating everything but the food one is eating.

 

 

Conscious eating

An antidote to this would be to mindfully observe and understand our experience of hunger. By being “mindful,” one pays nonjudgmental attention to the moments when and why one wants to eat, the food one eats and the act of one’s mindfulness & eating. By being focused on how we feed ourselves, we can aid a more sophisticated self awareness of ourselves and our subliminal desires and drives that motivate us to eat as well enable a balanced relationship to food and body size.

 

The reasons why we over eat, starve, grow fat, become skinny or on a more severe note become anorexic, bulimic or obese have a lot to do with how we are psycho-emotionally processing our sense of self and the stresses we encounter. Hence it is very imperative to pay attention to the emotional states behind one’s eating habits and working with them if they are disturbed.

 

Guidelines to eating consciously:

Before eating do a baseline self-check on your hunger level. Ask yourself where do you feel the hunger? How hungry are you?

  

Involve all your senses when you eat i.e. see, smell, taste and feel the food you are eating.

 

 Serve yourself moderate helpings of food.

  

Really chew your food and break it down. Eat in a slow fashion to prevent over eating.

  

Don’t skip meals. Avoid all distractions when you are eating.

 

Eat an organic plant-based diet as much as possible for yours and the planet’s health.

 

 

Therapeutically work with yourself or with a mental health professional to reduce your stress, depression, anxiety, anger and boredom levels.

 

 

(Dr. Sonera Jhaveri is an Integral Psyche Therapist attached to Nanvati Group of Hospitals, in Mumbai, India.)

 

 

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Understanding the Different Types of Stress

What is Stress?

Stress is a ubiquitous and multilayered phenomenon that is an entrenched reality of our daily postmodern lives. In effect, the stress response has played a significant role in the evolution of our nervous system and was crucial for our survival on this planet.  As hunter gathers we experienced acute stress when there were life-threatening perils from the environment confronting us for e.g. a wild animal that crossed the path of our foraging ancestors. In such instances, the human body would mobilize itself defensively and activate the autonomic nervous system to a fight, flight or freeze response to meet the demands of the situation.

When an organism is stressed and in either fight of flight mode, there are profound alterations due to the enervation of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. Noticeable psychophysiological shifts take place such as an increase in the heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, muscle tension, sweat activity in conjunction with a cascade of neuro-endocrinological alterations.  The adrenal-hypothalamus- pituitary axis gets activated and there are rapid secretions of the stress hormone cortisol along with blood moving from the periphery of the body i.e. the limbs to the core i.e. to the heart and lungs.

These psychosomatic shifts allow the organism to speed up the action that needed to be taken, which in most cases was either confrontation or agitated escape. However, in freeze mode, which occurs in profound experiences of trauma, the parasympathetic nervous, system dominates and the body drops in pressure, temperature, and mobility simulating a corpse. From an evolutionary perspective, the freeze mode was useful as on occasion predators may loose interest if the prey is already dead.
According to one of the pioneers in stress research Hans Seyle, upto a certain point stress is beneficial as it helps us take effective action when facing challenging conditions and this can be understood as “eu-stress.” As such, the stress response to a particular point helps us become focused and efficient and enables us to get things done while simultaneously it protects us from negative consequences that might pertain to our survival.  Yet there is a certain threshold value to stress and beyond that stress starts becoming “di-stress” and it starts pathologically eroding and wearing and tearing down our cardiac-respiratory, immune, gastrointestinal and muscular-skeleton systems.

Stress becomes di-stress when the stress response is provoked chronically, which is, unfortunately the zeitgeist of our times.  Today acute stress is replaced by chronic stress, where a biological threat is now a psychological one.  We react to not finding a parking spot before an important meeting in the same way our ancestors reacted to encountering an avalanche near a mountain that might crush them. Our bodies have not caught up with the evolutionary shifts in our life style and so in a nutshell, our bodies are over reacting to the mundane pressures and irritants of every day living.

Due to a revolution in our material culture, life is now becoming faster and faster . . . we have faster computers, faster cars, faster communications and often our bodies lag behind and we have to whip ourselves to keep up our pace, to perform, to meet deadlines and to make money.  As a result, our default existential state is that of an incessant low-grade activation of the autonomic nervous system, which keeps the body and mind latently stressed.

In busy urban areas, especially, we are almost all the time normalized to being unconsciously stressed to the point that we do not realize that we are stressed. This psychologically predisposes us to depression, irritation, frustration, mood swings, and angry outbursts, all of which underscore psychoemotional disturbances. Simultaneously we are prone to worsening any pre-existing medical disorder and susceptible to creating the causes and circumstances for diseases to take root in our bodyminds, highlighting psychosomatic over drive. Diabetes, hypertension, colitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, eczema and ulcers are a few stress related conditions.

How Do We Know We Are Stressed?
Since stress is an integral part of our lives, learning how to identify when we are stressed and what to do about de-stressing ourselves becomes paramount for our psychophysiological health and well being. Stress is a polyvalent experience and has cognitive behaviour therapy, emotional, physiological and behavioral ramifications.

Below is a brief exegesis of some of the symptoms that manifest in us in relation to each category within which our stress response can be observed. It is important to recognize if any of these are being embodied in our own experience in order to assess how stressed one is and moreover, the ways in which we create stress for ourselves through our perceptions. Regarding a demand from the environment as either a threat or a challenge depends very much on our sense of  self esteem and feelings of being resourced and resilient.

Cognitive dimensions: ruminating repetitive thoughts that are automatic and pessimistic; negative interpretations of life events; and a predisposition to play the victim.
Emotional dimensions: feelings of anxiety, panic, irritability, agitation, frustration, jitteriness, anger, impatience, overwhelm, being out of control
Physical dimensions: changes in heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, muscle tension, sweat activity, body temperature, fatigue, migraines, stomach aches, palpitations
Behavioral dimensions: lack of exercise, eating excessively, indulging in unhealthy foods, smoking, drinking, abusing drugs, unnecessary shopping

Some Useful Guidelines to Regulate Stress:
      While we cannot prevent stress in our lives, we can definitely shift our emotional reactions to stress. In order to modify how we are oriented to overwhelming life events it is quintessential to make life style changes that allow us to slow down and relax. Some suggestions to safe guard ourselves from being chronically stressed are the following: 
1)   Mediation, yoga, tai chi, qui gong
2)   Physical exercise
3)   Spending time in nature
4)   Healthy nutrition
5)   Listening to music and appreciating the arts in general
6)   Meditation and yoga
7)   Enjoying conviviality with family and friends
8)   Going on holiday
9)   Sleeping a full eight hours
10)   Having a massage
11)   Adopting a pet such as dog, cat, hamster, even having an aquarium
12)   Working with a mental health professional to see your patterns of stress, how you perpetuate them and ultimately to dis-identify with them

 Contributed by: Sonera Jhaveri

Sonera is an integral psyche therapist who specializes in working with generalized anxiety disorders, depression and mood disorders, anger management, stress reduction, issues of low self esteem, eating disorders, marital discord, chemical dependency and addictions.