If you're looking for sound nutritional advice and coaching on developing great healthy eating habits, we are well equipped to help. Also, we have had for decades of experience working with eating problems such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and binge eating.
One way that we have found to help people have a positive relationship with food is mindful eating. We see mindful eating as a metaphor for mindful living.
This Mindful Choice is about your relationship to food, and more importantly, your relationship to your life. If you speed mindlessly through your meals, there is a good chance you’re speeding mindlessly through your life. If your eating is more about cravings and habits rather than real hunger awareness and conscious choices, we’re betting that large areas of your life are lived on autopilot.
Why bother eating mindfully? Apart from the need to avoid overeating and unwanted weight gain, the practice of mindful eating constitutes a powerful arena for practicing stress-relieving and healthful mindfulness skills.
It turns out that practicing slowing down with awareness is a keystone habit that has far-reaching influence over other areas of life. Since we all eat, with most of us eating mindlessly, we have a perfect opportunity to regularly practice living in the NOW. Also, since eating is the most basic voluntary human activity, choosing to appreciate and savor your food seems to be a natural way to practice slowing down to savor and appreciate your life.
Think about it. How fast do you eat? How aware are you of your eating? Virtually all of us eat mindlessly some of the time. Some of us are mindless eaters virtually all of the time. How about you?
If you’re like most people, you’ve loaded your fork for the next bite before you finished chewing and swallowing the previous bite. Again the metaphor – are you living life one bite ahead?
You may not think it’s important, and you may not think the way you eat has much to do with the quality of your life. You may be wrong.
See Chapter 7.