Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (20 page)

Mindfulness at the Table

How many of the calories you consume every week are because you're actually hungry? Or because you've determined that a food item helps you meet your fitness goals?

On the other hand, how many of your weekly calories do you take in because you're in the grip of emotional triggers that compel you to eat? How much of the food and drink that you take in over the course of a week vanishes into your belly without your awareness because you're distracted?

When you eat mindfully, you improve your ability to eat out of
need,
rather than because of a fleeting
want
. If unhealthy eating habits have led you to become overweight, mindfulness may help break this relationship.

In 2014, researchers collected 21 earlier studies to review how mindfulness activities affect people's obesity-related eating behaviors, such as:

Emotional eating

Binge eating

External eating (eating because food looks or smells so good, even if your body doesn't need it). This can be a major factor in obesity, because we're surrounded by food that's been carefully manufactured to appeal to us.

The majority of the studies that focused on each of these types of eating found that mindfulness led to improvements. The authors concluded:

The outcomes from the reviewed studies provide evidence to support the use of (mindfulness exercises) for obesity-related eating behaviours. . . . Given the extent of the obesity epidemic, novel approaches to support weight loss are needed. (Mindfulness exercises) are poised to complement obesity prevention and treatment efforts.

Jenny Taitz, PsyD, the psychologist who focuses on managing emotions and mindful eating—whom you met in
Chapter 3
—guides patients through eating very slowly so they taste each bite. If you ever eat, for example, a single Twinkie over 10 minutes, nibbling one morsel at a time and focusing the full power of your mind on absorbing every flavor and aroma, you probably won't crave a second one.

During the 6-week
Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight
program, whenever you're eating, that's all I want you to do. If the TV is blaring, you're playing a game on your phone, or you're eating while driving, you're not paying attention
to your food. Refueling your body is an important moment. I'd like you to be mindful so you can be aware of what you're eating.

Take note of what the food tastes like. If you've eaten a thousand hamburgers in your life, you probably won't pay much attention to the 1001st. So take an extra moment to be mindful of
this
one. Prepare it with care, and perhaps add some herbs and spices or a marinade to the meat. What subtle flavors do you pick up? What smells are you noticing? What enjoyable details of this burger-eating experience would you have completely missed if you weren't paying attention?

When you eat, do it in a place that supports this kind of mindfulness. During the first week of the program, you'll declutter and reorganize your kitchen and dining room to reduce distractions and give new purpose to these spaces. The first step, before you do anything else, will be to decide on a vision of how you want to use these rooms and how you want them to support your health. I encourage you to make your kitchen and dining room the places where you prepare and consume most of the food you eat, rather than eating in a recliner or hunched over a living room end table.

On the flip side, these rooms should primarily be used for cooking and eating, rather than for storing stacks of mail or serving as your home office. When you walk into these uncluttered spaces that are organized with intention, you'll know you're there to refuel your body and nourish your family.

I'll introduce a brief daily exercise early in the program that will help you develop eating mindfulness. I encourage you to try the following mindfulness activities, too, either during the program or after you move on to long-term maintenance.

Check your emotions.
When you realize you'd like a treat, assess the emotions you're feeling, Dr. Taitz advises. (Consult the
questionnair
e for a list of emotions often linked to eating.) Rate the emotion on a scale of 1 to 10. Also rate your sense of hunger, again from 1 to 10. If your emotion is at an 8 and your hunger is at a 2, reconsider whether you truly need that snack or if you're simply eating as a way to cope with the emotion.

Savor a treat.
In her greed-reduction classes, Diana Winston often has her students unwrap one Hershey's Kiss, then do an “eating meditation.” “What they're encouraged to do is first think about all the conditions that led to this chocolate being here. They think about the farmers who grew the cocoa beans and the sugar. They reflect on the plants, animals, and elements of nature such as soil and rain. Then I have them eat it very, very slowly, paying close attention to the impulses that are happening. Usually when we eat things we like,
we shove it into our mouth without paying attention. In this exercise, you only have one Hershey's Kiss. You can't eat more. So you have to take it slowly and savor it.”

Not only does this exercise teach you to get more satisfaction from less, it reminds you that a
lot
of work and resources go into the food you eat and the material goods you buy. So purchase (or eat) something only if you really need it. And if you buy it, put it to good use.

Mindfulness and Your Happiness

Becoming more mindful may also reduce some of your burden of depression and anxiety. A recent review of meditation programs published in
JAMA Internal Medicine
found some evidence supporting this practice. The authors included 47 earlier studies that involved more than 3,500 participants. They found “moderate” evidence that mindfulness meditation programs can improve anxiety and depression for up to 6 months.

In their book
Fully Present
, Dr. Smalley and Diana Winston discuss an approach, abbreviated RAIN, for using mindfulness to work through your emotions. It stands for:

Recognition.
When you're upset, take a moment to observe your emotions and label them. Simply putting a label on how you feel can help you start to feel calmer and more in control.

Acceptance.
Instead of judging yourself for having these emotions, simply accept that you have them: “Yep, I'm mad. But I'm not going to be ashamed of myself or feel guilty that I've once again lost my patience.” That doesn't mean you should
act
on your anger or other negative emotion. Just let it pass along on its own, like the thoughts that crowd into your mind while you're practicing mindfulness meditation.

Investigation.
Often emotions cause sensations in the body: Your face gets flushed, your pulse races, you feel dizzy or dazed. By learning to recognize their physical signs, you can get a better understanding of how your emotions affect you.

Non-identification.
With this final step, you distance yourself from your emotions. Your feelings of sadness, frustration, or fear aren't something you deliberately ordered. You didn't
ask
for them to happen. They're simply things
that are passing through your mind. One way to think about it is to say “I have anger,” rather than “I feel angry,” the authors write. These thoughts are just something that you have temporarily. They don't affect who you are. They certainly aren't
you
.

By the time I work with people to bring order to their homes, they're generally unhappy with themselves. They feel like they've done something wrong by letting their homes get so messy. Also, though it's not the main topic of our conversation, if they're overweight, they're often disappointed in themselves for letting their bodies get out of control. As a result, they often have a negative outlook on their physical attractiveness, their self-control, and even their value. They talk to themselves as if they deserve the harshest of criticism.

I heard hints of this self-talk in some of the feedback I got from the test panel. Before they started the program, they rated their self-esteem and self-confidence on a scale of 1 to 10. Their responses ranged from 2 to 9, but on average, they came in at 6.7. That suggests they didn't feel too good about themselves in general.

Although on the whole they stayed enthusiastic and had great success, at times during the program some of the participants were pretty hard on themselves. They didn't feel they were decluttering “fast enough.” They were upset that they weren't doing their mindfulness exercises. They felt that they'd tackled too many changes at once. If they didn't finish their tasks for the week, they took it out on themselves.

People often try to motivate themselves through unforgiving self-criticism, says Kristin Neff, PhD, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of
Self-Compassion.
But being hard on yourself doesn't move you toward the changes you want. It discourages you and slows down your progress. It can also be bad for your physical and mental health, she says. “All the research shows that self-criticism, while it comes from a caring place, raises your cortisol levels,” she explains. (Cortisol is a “stress hormone” that harms your body if it stays elevated over the long term.)

Even if it's only you being hard on yourself, part of your brain will react as if someone else is physically attacking you. Your fight-or-flight mechanism will kick in, your heart rate may rise, and you may feel jittery and queasy. But since you can't flee yourself, there's nowhere safe to retreat. “You become anxious and depressed,” Dr. Neff says, “and both of those are highly linked to self-criticism. It kind of undermines your faith in yourself. It's like pulling the rug out from underneath you, and it ends up making it harder to be motivated to make a change.”

Dr. Neff told me that it's possible to be aware that you need to make changes to your weight or your home, yet do it in a way that doesn't involve criticizing yourself. “You want to be happy, you want to feel better in your body, you want to have a more peaceful environment,” she says. “You're much more likely to change for those reasons than change because you call yourself a fat, lazy slob! You absolutely can change, and the research shows that self-compassion is a more effective motivator than self-criticism. It makes you less afraid of failure, because it's safe to fail, which allows you to learn from your failures and mistakes.”

Because it's so important that you motivate yourself through kindness rather than harsh words, I'd like to make two requests as you jump into the program:

Focus on the positive.
Be happy with the results you obtain over the next 6 weeks, rather than focusing on the ways you think you fall short. The test panelists enjoyed incredible results. But they didn't all reach their goal weight. They didn't all completely declutter their homes. I feel confident, however, that they picked up the tools and the motivation to keep moving in the right direction in the weeks, months, and years to come. If they're kind to themselves, they'll be more likely to stay engaged in those changes. I believe that's true for you, too.