The Self-Compassion Diet by Jean Fain LICSW MSW

Author:Jean Fain, LICSW, MSW
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Health & Fitness/Diets
ISBN: Self-Compassion Diet
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

GOOD CANDIDATE

What characterizes a good candidate for mindfulness training? First and foremost, the human condition. Membership in the human race comes with lifetimes of suffering, as the Buddhist teachings explain, and mindfulness reliably relieves, if not stops, the suffering. Better candidates for mindful-eating training are not only all too aware of suffering, but a major source of their suffering has become the human need for food. Candidates don’t struggle with the same eating problems, but they all share a genuine interest in feeding themselves with less compulsion and more ease. Good candidates are people with weight-related health problems (high blood pressure, joint problems, diabetes, heart disease), everyday eating disturbances (yo-yo dieting, emotional eating, compulsive overeating), or diagnosable eating disorders (bulimia, binge-eating disorder, and bulimarexia—alternating cycles of bulimia and anorexia). Even dieters who have succeeded in reaching a healthy weight but feel they have failed to meet societal beauty standards have something to gain.

Like May, a forty-two-year-old professor who was well acquainted with feeling ravenous, but a stranger to mild and moderate hunger. Before a short course of mindful-eating therapy, this extreme dieter, who once trained for a marathon on 600 calories a day, used to chastise herself for eating muffins midmorning. “I had no idea I was hungry,” May exclaimed after learning to recognize lesser degrees of hunger. Getting to know her hunger didn’t happen overnight, but proved an essential early step to preventing that impulsive, no-foods-barred state she described as “hide the dogs and small children.” Once she could recognize the physiological signals of hunger, the next important step was allowing herself to heed the signals and feed herself over the course of the day. Developing a healthy respect for hunger and its alter ego, fullness, took time, but it also took off 32 pounds in thirty-two weeks.

People with eating disorders, as well as those with eating problems that fall short of diagnosable disorders, have found mindful eating invaluable. Whether they binge many times a day or just once a year, people who binge are pained by their inability to stop eating, not by starting to eat too often. To stop binging, they need to learn what May learned—to recognize and respond to fullness cues. Mindful eating teaches binge eaters how to do just that. The same judgment-free awareness could be literally lifesaving for anorexics, whose recovery depends on their ability to start and finish a meal despite an acute sensitivity and negative reaction to feeling full. Existing programs cater to overeaters, not undereaters. Currently, if you’re interested in mindful eating and suffer from anorexia or another eating problem involving calorie restriction, individual psychotherapy is your best and only training option.

Mindful eating has much to offer patients of bariatric surgery (gastric bypass, lap-band, and so forth). To increase the surgery’s short- and long-term effectiveness, more hospitals are offering lessons in mindfulness as part of patient education. The surgery itself, patients say, heightens awareness of stomach satiety, but that awareness isn’t enough to inhibit unhealthy eating habits or binge eating, which plagues a significant number of surgery candidates and can lead to post-surgical failures.

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