being healthy is a revolutionary act - experience life · mindful eating, article 1 of 5 eating for...

Being Healthy Is a Revolutionary Act

Eating For Pleasure Approaching meals mindfully can enhance your digestion, satisfaction and metabolism. 1-2

Think Healthy The metabolic power of thought. 3-4

Eating, Simplified Learn how to turn in to your own senses and instincts about food. 5-6

Relax, Enjoy, Digest Discover why having a peaceful meal actually helps improve digestion and assimilate your food better. 7-8

Resetting the Family Table Make your family meal times nourish-ing once again. 9-10

Guide to MindfulEating

www.ExperienceLife.com

ExperienceLife.com July/August 2009 / 1

Mindful Eating, Article 1 of 5

Eating for PleasureApproaching meals mindfully isn’t just about upgrading your awareness – it can enhance your digestion, satisfaction and metabolism, too.

By Marc David

Nutritional psychologist Marc David, MA, says we don’t have enough vitamin P — pleasure, that is — in

our diets. And he’s not just talking about recreational enjoyment. The level of enjoy-ment we experience in eating our food has very real biochemical consequences that directly affect our metabolism and diges-tion, says David, founder of The Institute for the Psychology of Eating and the author of The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy and Weight Loss (Heal-ing Arts Press, 2005). “Half of nutrition is what you eat,” he explains, “but the other half is how you eat.”

In this, the first of a five-part series of interviews with David, we asked him to elaborate on the role that pleasure and appreciation play in creating a healthy rela-tionship with food.

Why is eating for pleasure so important? We are all programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. It’s the most primitive part of the human nervous system. So, when you eat, you are seeking the pleasure of food, and you are avoiding the pain of hunger. But here’s the trick: You can’t receive pleasure unless you are aware that you are engaging in it. So, if you’re eating food and you’re not paying attention — if you’re watching TV, talking too much, rushing or reading — you will potentially miss the experience of plea-

sure. And, if you do not get the pleasure that you seek, the brain often interprets that missed experience of pleasure as hun-ger. You’ll want more food, so then you’ll be wondering: Do I have a willpower problem? But there’s no willpower problem — the problem is we are not entirely there when we eat. We’re not getting the full experi-ence, and so we are left feeling hungry.

So, what we think of as overeating is actually about underappreciating? Yes, this thing we’ve called overeating is really a product of our culture, which has us moving too fast. And the faster you go, the less your brain and digestive physiology can actually experience what’s going on with food. It takes the brain about 20 minutes to realize when we’re full. This raises a simple but very important point: When it comes to properly registering both the nutrition and satisfaction inherent in the food we’re taking in, the body needs time and focus to figure out what’s going on. That’s just how we’re wired.

And the link between pleasure and your metabolism? Pleasure catalyzes a relaxation response, and the same switch in your brain that turns on relaxation — the parasympathetic nervous system — also turns on full, healthy digestion and assimilation. Conversely, the

same switch in your brain that turns on stress, anxiety and fear — the sympa-thetic nervous system — turns off digestion and assimilation. So, there is a direct bio-chemical connection between eating with pleasure and our digestion and long-term calorie-burning metabolism.You could be eating your favorite ice cream cone, but if you’re miserable and stressed-out and guilty while you’re eat-ing it, you are not receiving that pleasure. Also, you’re actually shifting yourself into a stress response, which will put you in a mild degree of digestive shutdown, which means you’re excreting nutrients and not absorb-ing them fully, and you’re increasing your output of cortisol and of insulin, which will signal your body to store fat.

How can we learn to eat with more pleasure and awareness? First and foremost, we need to slow down and notice, as well as savor and receive. The only way to eat with pleasure is to notice if there’s any pleasure to be had. So be atten-tive, take your time, and delight in your food. You may find you don’t actually enjoy certain foods as much as you think you do, or that it doesn’t take nearly as much to satisfy you. I once asked a client to slow down and really savor the Big Macs he felt compelled to eat daily, and when he started fully expe-riencing them — flavor, aroma, texture g

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— he found himself completely repulsed.

You recommend doing a “Forbidden Foods Inventory” of foods we love but feel we “shouldn’t” eat. Why? Doing an inventory of all the foods that give us pleasure allows us to play with our “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts.” And once you’ve got your list, you can figure out how to include those foods in moderation in a way that works for you.Let’s say pancakes are on your “Forbidden” list. You might decide that Sunday morning is when you’re going to have a couple pan-cakes and really enjoy them. Are you going to have unlimited pancakes seven days a week? That’s probably not the best thing for you. But conscious doses of pleasure throughout the day and the week put us in a place where we’re honoring our desires and at the same time nourishing our bodies in a thoughtful way.

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judgment: “I’m so terrible.” Acceptance of who we are, by itself, creates a relaxation response, which starts to interfere with the normal stress pattern. Acceptance is us breathing, relaxing, saying, “OK, I’m human.”

Once we start to accept ourselves, then the adjustment phase can begin. I find the most basic adjustment is to replace a negative thought with a positive one. That sounds so simplistic, and yet it’s one of the most powerful strategies for change.

We’ve been taught that if you want to get rid of a bad habit, you should attack it: Attack your junk-food habit. Attack your body weight. However, if we’re constantly in attack state, then we are in a stress state — a fight-or-flight state, which creates stress chemistry.

The opposite of that is simply to replace a bad habit with a positive one. So, I tell people who are addicted to sugar, “Don’t worry about cutting down on sugar; let’s start simply to include healthy foods in your diet.” We are not actually attacking the sugar habit; we are introducing all these healthy habits that naturally crowd out the negative ones. So, along the same lines, instead of attacking my negative thinking, I’m just introducing a positive thought and trying it on. It’s about loving yourself and having compassion for yourself instead of g

Why you eat might be just as important as what you eat, says nutritional psychologist

Marc David, MA. Our thoughts about eating literally shape our bodies’ chem-istry and metabolic power. “The most powerful chemicals that we experience are the ones we self-produce inside of our bodies,” says David. “Whenever we think a thought, positive or negative, we phone in a prescription to our inner pharmacy, and that pharmacy is always active, always powerful.” The key to producing chemicals that support rather than harm your vitality, he explains, is to practice inspired eating.

In writing about the influence of thought on our metabolism, you make a distinc-tion between motivation and inspiration in eating. What’s the difference?Motivation often comes from fear — “I’d better eat the right food because otherwise I’ll get sick or fat” — rather than a place of centeredness and balance. Motivation is like a single target, and if I don’t hit that target, I’m bad and I fail, whereas inspiration creates rejuvenation every step of the way. When we are inspired, we are not looking for a reward like simply looking good. I feel inspired to eat good food because it feels so good or because I know that if it is con-sciously, sustainably grown, I’m eating in a

way that’s consistent with my values.

How does our metabolism respond to thoughts, feelings and expectations?Basically, if the thinking behind my good actions is, “I’d better do this, otherwise I’ll be sick and fat and unattractive,” I am creat-ing the chemistry of stress, which invariably works against me and will create, generally speaking, the opposite physiology of what I’m looking for. Occasionally, we can moti-vate with stress and get stuff done on a short-term basis, but if my so-called healthy lifestyle is motivated by negative or stress-ful thoughts, I am producing excess insulin and excess cortisol, both of which signal the body to store fat and not build muscle.

So how do we identify metabolism-lowering thoughts and shift them in a healthier direction?I like to use a very simple formula called The Three A’s: awareness, acceptance and adjustment.

To change any negative habit, step one is to be aware that you even have that bad habit.

It’s important to witness yourself with-out judgment, which is the second step — acceptance. Sometimes people are aware that they have a chain-smoking habit, for example, but they immediately go into

Think HealthyWhat you need to know about the metabolic power of thought.

By Marc David

ExperienceLife.com 4


having the boot-camp attitude of “no pain, no gain” that is so pervasive.

How can we eat for better energy?Most nutritionists would give a laundry list of foods to eat, such as blueberries or coconut oil. Yes, food is important, but the food is not necessarily as important as the amount of food. If you eat too much food, your energy level starts to go down simply because the more food that is in the gut, the more metabolic energy — e.g., blood flow, oxygen — is needed to digest, metabolize and assimilate that food. If you want to have the greatest amount of physical and mental energy, notice the point at which you can walk away from a meal just maybe a tiny bit hungry but with more energy. Instead of eating to the point of fullness, eat to the point of being filled with energy.



Once you eat your meal, you might think you are done, but we can actually partici-pate in the digestive and nutritional process more than we realize. We often don’t make the connection between what we just ate and how we feel, but the body is going to give us feedback — 15 minutes after we eat and 30 minutes after we eat and so on. There’s a good chance that how you feel right now is related to what you ate then. By checking in during the day and listening for feedback, you can start to notice what happens when you eat certain foods. Like, “Hmm, when I eat breakfast cereal or a sweet breakfast bar, I end up craving sugar all morning long.”

Step five is what I call “releasing the meal.” There are a lot of people who carry guilt for having eaten food; they might dis-like their bodies or wish they weighed less or were shaped differently. But letting go of the meal means it’s over, it’s done. So what if you ate the chocolate cake? Instead of beating yourself up about it, simply let it go.

What are some easy ways to improve the way we eat?My core suggestion is to seek out and eat the highest-quality food you can find. To me, this is a way of simplifying good nutritional advice without getting mired in scientific jargon and trends. You increase g

“I have found that the best things in life are not only free but also simple. We often look for intricate ways to fix ourselves, and in doing so miss the obvious.” So says nutritional psychologist Marc David, MA, who believes that the simple act of giving attention to eating can heal even the most fraught relationship with food.

“Awareness cures,” says David. “When we are present to what we are doing, that’s where the action is — that’s when we’re living life.”

Here, David shares other thoughts on how to simplify and improve our relation-ship with food and eating:

You’re an advocate of a practice you call “Whole-Body Eating.” Can you break this down into some simple steps?The first step is consciously choosing to eat. So much of our eating is automatic — it’s noon, time to eat; everybody else is eating, time to eat; I’m sitting down to watch TV, time to eat. So many of us combine external stimuli with what we eat, and it’s often quite habitual. Wouldn’t it be interesting if every time we were eating, we were making a con-scious choice to eat — I’m hungry, and I’ve made a choice to eat. Making a conscious choice to eat starts to bring us into a more mature relationship with food.

Step two is asking your body what it

wants. Instead of trying to keep up with every nutritional trend, tune in to your own body’s intelligence about what to eat. I’m talking about the brain in your belly, the enteric nervous system, which is a separate, yet interconnected, nervous system that lives in the gut. In Japan, where they believe that their center of intelligence is in the midsection, when someone says, “I know,” they point to their belly.

Most of us pay attention to our gut intel-ligence only in extreme situations — e.g., when you are so full it hurts or when you are having hunger pangs. But what about all the thousands of nuances in between? By asking your body what to eat, you are tuning in to body intelligence that often lies below our conscious awareness because we’re just not trained to go there.

Step three is eating with awareness. If you’re going to eat, eat! What I’m talking about is no different than paying attention when you are having a conversation with somebody. When we’re not eating with awareness, the brain cannot fully register sensation and information: “Oh, that tasted good,” or, “Oh, I think I’m kind of full now.” Eating fast and without awareness doesn’t give the brain time to realize what’s going on — which can lead to overeating.

Step four is listening for feedback.

Eating, SimplifiedInstead of following complicated, unsatisfying diet regimens, tune in to your own senses and instincts.

By Marc David



pleasure and satisfaction in eating while simultaneously eating more nutritious foods.

For example, many people mistakenly end up thinking they “don’t like vegetables” because they’ve never really tasted them as they’re meant to taste. Most mass-market vegetables are grown in nutrient-deficient soil and shipped vast distances, so they tend to be tasteless. Then you have to add more and more flavors to get them to taste like something. That leads to cravings for artificiality and intense sweet or salty expe-riences, because we don’t get the subtle experiences or full range of natural sensa-tions that should be available in our food. If you get great, in-season, locally produced veggies to begin with, you’re going to have a more nutritious experience and wind up feeling more satisfied.

My favorite foods are really simple. To me, a good, ripe avocado — something I can cut open and eat right away or make into guacamole in about two minutes — gives me a sense of satisfaction that no processed or fussy food can.



ning and going directly to bed, however. That’s a very different situation.

You encourage people to focus on breathing in a relaxed manner while they eat. Why is that important?Every brain state has a corresponding brain-wave pattern and breath pattern, and if you want to achieve a certain brain state, adopt-ing the corresponding breathing pattern is the fastest way to do that. For example, if you are calm and relaxed but suddenly adopt the breathing pattern of a stress state (which is shallow, arrhythmic and infre-quent), you’ll soon start to feel more anx-ious. Conversely, if you are stressed and you adopt the breathing pattern of relaxation, which is regular and rhythmic and deep, you will send a signal to the brain that says, I am breathing like a relaxed person; I must be a relaxed person. It’s possible to change your brain state and body state easily, in less than a minute, just through the conscious use of breath.

You can facilitate the digestive pro-cess by making sure you’re breathing like a relaxed human being. Relaxed breathing encourages your parasympathetic nervous system to take over. It throws a switch in the brain that helps us relax and turns on our full digestive and calorie-burning capacity. g

Ever rushed through a meal and felt afterward as if the food just sat there, like a brick, in your stomach?

According to nutritional psychologist Marc David, MA, that effect occurs because when we eat under stress, we essentially shut down our digestive system. Make a point of eating in a state of relaxation, says David, and you’ll enhance not just your enjoyment, but your digestion and metab-olism too. “It is probably more important to relax and count our blessings,” he adds, “than it is to count our calories.”

Under stress, many people experience digestive trouble. Why? The stress response — that fight-or-flight response — is a brilliant evolutionary sur-vival mechanism. All your metabolic energy gets rerouted into survival function, mean-ing blood will reroute from your midsection and digestive organs to your arms and legs for quick fighting, or to your head for quick thinking and fleeing. But you don’t have to be battling a lion for this to happen. Faced with any kind of stress or perceived threat, your body will naturally shut down its diges-tive function; it figures you can deal with the digestive process later, when the threat is past. But as a result of the delay, you can experience all kinds of digestive distress.

You’ve noted that a relaxed state turns on digestion and nutrient assimilation. So, does it make sense to take a nap — a traditional siesta — after a big meal?It makes nutritional and metabolic sense on a number of levels, assuming you’re talking about a midday meal. In just about any culture where people traditionally have a siesta, they will probably also have their biggest meal at midday. When you eat your biggest meal, you want your fullest meta-bolic force available in the body. And your metabolic force relative to digestion and assimilation and calorie burning is highest between approximately 12 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. It’s just your body’s natural rhythm.

Interestingly, while noon to 1:30 p.m. are the peak hours for metabolism (and thus a great time to enjoy your most substantial meal), between approximately 2 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. we have a natural metabolic dip. These are the hours during which people in traditional cultures observe siesta (as opposed to in this country, where it’s the time we turn to our favorite stimulants: caf-feine and sugar). Siesta doesn’t necessarily involve napping — it can mean just relaxing and resting — but either way, it allows you to eat your biggest meal at midday, digest it more fully, and enjoy more energy and vitality all afternoon and evening. I do not recommend eating a big meal in the eve-

Relax, Enjoy, DigestHaving a peaceful meal isn’t just about set-ting a mood, it actually helps you digest and assimilate your food better.

By Marc David



People tend to hunch forward when they are eating fast or are stressed. Does sit-ting up straight create better results?Yes. In general, the ideal body posture for eating is upright with relaxed shoulders and feet flat on the floor. The body needs gravity to help it digest — it wants to know that food is moving down and not up. When the body is upright, you also have the best breathing capacity because your spine is erect, so your lungs will be most fully opera-tive and able to expand (as opposed to when you’re hunched over). That means you can take in more oxygen and digest your food more fully.

Also, research shows us that the more erect your spine, the more functional the brain’s going to be. So, if you sit up straight while you eat, you’ll tend to be more aware — and if you’re more aware of your meal, you’ll be better attuned to what and how much you’re eating, and also more able to digest it properly.



Plate” rule many parents instill in their kids?I don’t believe in it. It assumes you gave the kid the right amount of food in the first place. It also doesn’t make sense to me because it doesn’t teach body wisdom — that is, paying attention to satiety. It’s no different than going to a restaurant where they serve really big portions and having the waiter tell you, “You must clean your plate.”

Many kids who eat too fast are told “chew your food!” by their parents. Can you talk a little more about what you call the “psychobiology of chewing” and why exactly we need to chew?

Chewing is really discernment. Yes, it’s a physical act — you are chomping your food and making it smaller and smaller so you can digest it — but what you’re also doing is discerning, tasting what’s in there. The more we chew food, the more the body is able to discern, Oh, this is good for me, I want more. Or, Oh, this is enough. Chewing is noticing; it’s giving the body time to tap into body wisdom. We just have to be alert and not go into habit or habitual eating.

You’ve said that your favorite way to enjoy a meal is to be surrounded by fam-ily and friends — people you love. You’ve also written that we should dine with g

The biggest complaint nutritional psychologist Marc David, MA, hears from parents is that their kids won’t

eat vegetables. David, however, is more concerned about what they are eating: poor-quality fats and excess amounts of sugar and white flour. “If your family eats a low-quality diet, you’ll have a hard time getting your kids accustomed to foods like whole veggies and whole grains, and your entire family’s energy and immunity will suffer,” says David, author of The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy and Weight Loss (Healing Arts Press, 2005). The even bigger problem, says David, is how today’s families are eating: rushed, solo or in front of the TV. Here, he shares insights and advice:

What are ways families can eat better together?The most important thing is to schedule meals together. Often, everybody is moving in different directions, so it’s good to find at least one day a week when you can all have dinner as a family. Once you schedule it in, it becomes a commitment, something sacred that you can look forward to.

Another key is to get as many peo-ple involved in the cooking as possible. It becomes less about eating together and more about preparing together. Even kids

as young as 2 can be given something to do that they’re excited about and that keeps them occupied. And, you can set the stan-dard that this is something we do together.

Given the obesity epidemic that is affecting so many kids, how do parents best teach their children to eat healthy?

First and foremost, when kids are in the house, they can eat only what’s in the house. So, to any parent who complains that their kids drink soda all day long, I say: Don’t keep soda in the house.

Also, from a very young age on, kids model what their parents do, so if we want them to eat in a certain way, we have to set an example. Kids look at us and pick up all of our good habits and all of our bad habits. So, for example, if you’re a fast eater and don’t receive pleasure from your food, guess what your kids are going to do?

The next idea is what I call the “20 times rule”: A lot of foods you give to children maybe three or four times and they don’t like it, but if you give it to them about 20 times, there’s a point at which they start eating it. Look at you, look at me — there are foods we eat today that we didn’t eat 20 years ago. Why? Because we acquire tastes for food. It simply takes patience and persistence.

What do you think of the “Clean Your

Resetting the Family TableOur family mealtimes have become frenzied and stressful. Here’s how to make them nour-ishing once again – for body and soul.

By Marc David



people who nourish us emotionally and intellectually. What effect does dining this way have on our nutrition, digestion and well-being?When we are in community, we can relax, and the body digests and assimilates most efficiently when it’s relaxed. Food is, to a great degree, a communal activity; there’s something very deep and cellular about sharing a meal. We are social creatures, and anything that supports our true nature will support our true metabolism.

Marc David MA, is author of The Slow Down Diet (Healing Arts Press, 2005) and the founder of the Institute for the Psychol-ogy of Eating (www.psychologyofeating .com) in Boulder, Colo.

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