The Women's Health Body Clock Diet by Laura Cipullo

Author:Laura Cipullo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2015-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

10

Skill Builder:

Mindfulness, Meditation, and Compassion

PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR CRUSHING THE CORTISOL MONSTER

By now I hope you’re convinced that reducing stress in your life is critically important for stabilizing and maintaining your body clock and thereby losing weight. When stress happens, your body’s cells react with a surge of adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol tells your body to replenish energy, so you crave energy-dense foods, and it also encourages your body to store fat. It’s a double whammy to be avoided.

But in our modern world, stress is unavoidable. Since stress isn’t going to evaporate anytime soon, you need to learn effective ways to ease stress or reduce its damaging effects on your body. This skills chapter will show you how to use self-compassion, mindfulness, and meditation to decrease cortisol and increase feel-good chemicals such as oxytocin that soothe and calm.

MINDFULNESS AND SELF-COMPASSION

You have already been practicing mindfulness by writing down your thoughts and feelings in your Body Clock Diet mindful meal log. The exercise forces you to become more aware of when and why you’re eating, which is an important step in identifying emotional hunger and behavioral hunger and ultimately reducing “mindless” calorie consumption. Mindfulness is an effective tool against compulsive habits like binge eating because it interrupts automatic behaviors. It enables you to see and understand your actions without judging them to short-circuit the process that connects stress with comfort eating. In a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers tracked the eating patterns of 140 binge eaters and found that using mindfulness-based interventions reduced bingeing episodes from four times to only once per week.

Practicing mindfulness also can help you become better at another key stress buster: self-compassion. What often happens when you eat an extra slice of chocolate cake or you notice a roll of fat bulging out of your shirt as you pass by a mirror? Many women default to judging themselves harshly and criticizing themselves. It’s a self-inflicted attack that becomes a real threat. The body automatically acts to defend itself against the attack by releasing excess cortisol. Researchers studying these processes have concluded that criticism and shame are among the most powerful triggers of the cortisol stress response. And as you already know, cortisol can upset your body clock. This is the very reason why you need to be kind to yourself.

Kristin Neff, PhD, a self-compassion researcher and author, says there are three core components to learning self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Here’s how to put them into practice.

1.Treat yourself with kindness. Here’s a terrific way to be kind to yourself that I learned from one of my clients: When you notice self-criticism creeping in, talk to yourself (in your internal dialogue) the same way you would speak to a child—compassionately.

2.Identify how you’re similar to others. Recognize that you aren’t the only one in this world who is suffering. Suffering and personal inadequacy are part of the human experience. As Neff says, “To be human is to be imperfect.” This is the one commonality we all share.

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