Mindful Eating as Food for Thought
Jennifer May for The New York Times
Diners wait until everyone is seated at the Blue Cliff Monastery. More Photos »
By JEFF GORDINIER
Published: February 7, 2012
Dr. Lilian Cheung of Harvard's School of Public Health is a proponent of mindful eating. More Photos »
Now comes the hard part. Put the fork down. This could be a lot more
challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and
another immediately beckons. You’re hungry.
Today’s experiment in eating, however, involves becoming aware of that
reflexive urge to plow through your meal like Cookie Monster on a
shortbread bender. Resist it. Leave the fork on the table. Chew slowly.
Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam.
Continue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you’ll experience
the third-eye-opening pleasures and frustrations of a practice known as
mindful eating.
The concept has roots in Buddhist teachings. Just as there are forms of
meditation that involve sitting, breathing, standing and walking, many
Buddhist teachers encourage their students to meditate with food,
expanding consciousness by paying close attention to the sensation and
purpose of each morsel. In one common exercise, a student is given three
raisins, or a tangerine, to spend 10 or 20 minutes gazing at, musing
on, holding and patiently masticating.
Lately, though, such experiments of the mouth and mind have begun to
seep into a secular arena, from the Harvard School of Public Health to
the California campus of Google. In the eyes of some experts, what seems
like the simplest of acts — eating slowly and genuinely relishing each
bite — could be the remedy for a fast-paced Paula Deen Nation in which
an endless parade of new diets never seems to slow a stampede toward
obesity.
Mindful eating is not a diet, or about giving up anything at all. It’s
about experiencing food more intensely — especially the pleasure of it.
You can eat a cheeseburger mindfully, if you wish. You might enjoy it a
lot more. Or you might decide, halfway through, that your body has had
enough. Or that it really needs some salad.
“This is anti-diet,” said Dr. Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher in Oregon and the author of “Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food.” “I think the fundamental problem is that we go unconscious when we eat.”
The last few years have brought a spate of books, blogs and videos about hyper-conscious eating. A Harvard nutritionist, Dr. Lilian Cheung,
has devoted herself to studying its benefits, and is passionately
encouraging corporations and health care providers to try it.
At the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, Prof. Brian Wansink, the author of “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,”
has conducted scores of experiments on the psychological factors that
lead to our bottomless bingeing. A mindful lunch hour recently became
part of the schedule at Google, and self-help gurus like Oprah Winfrey and Kathy Freston have become cheerleaders for the practice.
With the annual chow-downs of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Super Bowl
Sunday behind us, and Lent coming, it’s worth pondering whether mindful
eating is something that the mainstream ought to be, well, more mindful
of. Could a discipline pioneered by Buddhist monks and nuns help teach
us how to get healthy, relieve stress and shed many of the neuroses that
we’ve come to associate with food?
Dr. Cheung is convinced that it can. Last week, she met with team members at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and asked them to spend quality time with a chocolate-covered almond.
“The rhythm of life is becoming faster and faster, so we really don’t
have the same awareness and the same ability to check into ourselves,”
said Dr. Cheung, who, with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, co-wrote “Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life.”
“That’s why mindful eating is becoming more important. We need to be
coming back to ourselves and saying: ‘Does my body need this? Why am I
eating this? Is it just because I’m so sad and stressed out?’ Read More