Mindfulness, Food, and Body Image
Update: 2018-09-05
Description
DOWNLOAD EPISODE > Mindfulness, Food & Body Image are the subject of todays Zen Leader Podcast. Lily Myers, psychotherapist and instructor at the Sarasota Mindful Institute talk about this popular subject. Intro:Welcome to The Zen Leaderwith Lara Jaye. Whether you’re a leader at home or in the boardroom, Lara provides the tools to help you get unstuck in different areas of your life. Now, here’s your host, Lara Jaye. Lara Jaye:Welcome to The Zen Leader. I’m your host, Lara Jaye, international best-selling author, speaker, and spiritual mentor. Through my coaching programs and radio show, I help you courageously transform your disconnected, unbalanced life into a joy-filled and meaningful one. Imagine living a life full of ease, vibrant health, thriving relationships, and purposeful work without sacrificing yourself to achieve it. Whether you’re a leader at home or in the boardroom, I help you navigate the ups and downs of life, giving you clarity, confidence, and connection you so desire. Let me ask you: Have you ever struggled with food or your body image? My guest today, a local psychotherapist, has a rich blend of professional experience and prior work as a hospice bereavement counselor, career counselor, corporate human relations trainer, Hatha Yoga teacher, and a meditation instructor. Her prominent aspect of her approach to individual therapy is integrating this mindfulness in psychotherapy. She helps her clients develop their inner resources to self-regulate their thoughts and feelings, as well as calm themselves and be less reactive to life’s circumstances. She helps you connect with your authentic self, experience peace and well-being. Learn how to reduce stress — who doesn’t need that? — and provide a safe and respectful approach to communicating with your own partner through mindfulness-based psychotherapy and Imago therapy. If you’ve ever battled with eating too much, too little, eating too fast, junk food, or eating to fill emotional needs, you are going to devour this next hour. Anyway, please welcome my amazing guest, Lily Myers. Lily, welcome to the studio. How are you today? Lily Myers: I am fine, Lara. Thank you very much. Lara: Good. I am so excited to have you here, finally. Yay! Lily: Yes. Yes, it’s so good to meet you, finally. Lara: Yes. Yes. Lily: Yeah. Lara: So, we are going to have a blast, coming up here over the next hour. Lily, you teach a very unique class at the Sarasota Mindfulness Institute and it’s about mindfulness food and body image. So many of us struggle with that. Tell me just a little bit about this class, to begin. Lily: Okay. It’s a 6-week class, meets weekly, 1.5 hours each time. We begin with mindful eating. That is really paying attention, really becoming aware of what is it that we’re eating, and I guess just everything about eating the food — it’s tasting the food — and that may sound like it’s obviously, but we don’t always taste our food. Sometimes we eat so fast that we’re not aware even of what we’re putting in our bodies. It’s really engaging all of the senses – tasting the food, smelling the food, looking at the food, really seeing it. Even hearing the food. Lara: How do I hear the food? I want to know. Lily: [LAUGHTER]Well, you hear the food if it’s crunchy. Some food is pretty silent. Lara: That’s true. You’re right. Crunchy. There you go. Lily: Yeah, crunchy. Like potato chips. Lara: Potato chips. So, it’s bringing these five senses in to something. Lily: That’s right. Well, bringing it all into awareness, but there’s also a sixth sense in Buddhist philosophy, which is the mind. The mind is actually the sixth sense. It’s also what we think about the food, too. Lara: What would be an example? What would I think about the food? Lily: Well, you might think “I really like this food,” or you might think “I’ve got to have more of it,” and that might override what the stomach is telling you, which is, “I’m full right now.” Lara: Or we can even… would “appreciation” also be another way to think about it? Lily: Absolutely. Absolutely. “I really appreciate this food because it is so tasty,” or “I appreciate it because it’s healthy for me and it’s so wonderful that I’m being able to nourish my body in this way.” Lara: It sounds so amazing and beautiful. Why does mindful eating… why is that even important? Why would I want to do this? Lily: I think you’d want to do it for several reasons: One is to have a healthier lifestyle, to really be able to make choices — conscious choices — about what am I eating and what am I putting in my body? You know that adage, “We are what we eat.” You know? It’s eating good quality food or maybe separating that out from other kinds of food. There is research that’s being done now that is coming out and saying people who eat mindfully, of course they eat slower, and when you eat slower, you get full. You have a sense of fullness faster, so you then tend to eat less. That’s another reason you might want to practice mindful eating – to eat less. And to also be able to say, “No,” if you know you’re already full. Lara: Wonderful. I do an experiment with my gals, when I do workshops on mindfulness, the mindfulness piece. I give everyone one M&M and we bring in all the senses, like you talked about. Lily: Yeah. Lara: And most… I don’t think any of them have ever just eaten one M&M and sucked on one M&M, and how long it takes to actually have it melt in your mouth. Lily: Mm-hmm. Lara: It feels amazing. The satisfaction factor of it is so, so amazing, because it lasts so much longer. Lily: Yes. I think the very first mindful eating that was done, or that became well-known, was when Jon Kabat-Zinn did it in the program he developed, which is really the program that all Mindful programs are based on – so, even the Mindful Eating program. His was called Mindfulness-Base Stress Reduction.In his very first class, he passes out raisins to people. So, you eat one raisin or maybe two raisins, but you don’t eat handfuls of them. Lara: And we’re used to eating handfuls. Lily: Exactly. Lara: It’s like dump all the M&Ms, dump the raisins, peanuts, and we shove them all in our mouth, and we go through drive-throughs fast, fast, fast. So, Jon uses raisins. Lily: Yes. Lara: You get that sweet and you get to taste all of it.</sp
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