Could a Buddhist diet deflate your Buddha belly?

January 8, 2016 Ashley 0 Comments

What do you do while you eat?

Run off to your next errand? Do a few bills? Watch bootleg documentaries?

Captain a four wheeled metal death trap?

(I liked the genre I found this under: “Driving accessories for idiots”.)

Chances are, almost none’a your just said, “I focus solely on savoring the flavor of my sustenance.”

And, don’t worry. I’m often among you autopilot style consumers, too.

Problem is, we’re so accustomed to being stimulated, that it’s tough to quit multitasking when it’s time to dine. Also, dining itself has become a bit of a drug or reward we offer ourselves in this culture. Even I, healthy as I eat, am guilty of this. By the time supper hour arrives, it almost feels like a punishment to just sit there and focus on what’s traversing my tongue. While in silence. Without watching Adventure Time. However, science says that you, me, and that lady trying to ingest a vat of ramen with chopsticks while piloting a minivan are all suffering a great loss. Not only with the world of deliciousness we’re missing via broken focus – but also on those somatic cues we use to know when we’re full enough to stop. All of that’s significantly diminished when our attention’s split. The result? Mindless eating induced weight gain.

The fix?

Mindfully eating, says Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD.

Homeboy is a long time meditation teacher who’s managed to help mitigate a litany of maladies in people via mindfulness meditation alone – cardiovascular disease, depression, chronic pain, and cancer just being some of them. So it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that we can also use it to do things like stymie emotional and thoughtless nomming. And, sure enough, he’s managed to do that as well. Derived from the Buddhist concept called mindfulness, all this means is being completely cognizant of what’s transpiring both inside and outside of you from moment to moment. Now, while I think I remember American Sniper dude (yes, we did just go from inner peace to firearms) calling this “situational awareness”, remember that you’re also meant to be aware of what your brain’s doing too. The “inside” mindfulness is just as relevant, if not more so. Why? ’cause becoming aware of answers to things like, “Am I going for seconds because the last episode of House of Cards was a real cliffhanger and I tend to confuse ravenousness with nervousness?” is super important. Especially when you decide how to answer the follow up questions. (“What effect will having this second portion I get every night and that I’ve decided I don’t actually need… have on me? And those size 4 jeans I finally fit in?”)

In fact, in the lab, they implemented a bit of mindfulness… and the dietary disparity was staggering:

Participants in the intervention group lost significantly more weight (P =.03), had lower average daily caloric (P =.002) and fat intake (P =.001), had increased diet related self-efficacy (P =.02), and had fewer barriers to weight management when eating out (P =.001).

(Note, these were chubby middle aged ladies who ate out a few times a week, too.)

So, that’s great. But how do you do it?

Well, the idea’s to recruit all those five senses you’d usually be spreading out in different directions like errant tentacles ingesting variant stimuli. Yes, for the entire time you eat. That means that instead of reading or watching Vines play on loop, you focus on your food. The hue of it. The aroma. The flavor. The mouthfeel. (God, I loathe that word. But I keep using it to see if I can desensitize myself to it the way we desensitize ourselves to the taste of our victuals.) Then, you’ve gotta take… your… time. This bit’s tough for me – the chewing slowly thing. Unless I’m sick and everything tastes awful and hurts on my throat, you can pretty much predict that I’mma wolf down my dinner like some phagocytic micro-creature. The idea, however, is that when you slow down both your thoughts and nosh pace, you can moderate portion control far, far better. And the results (if you can make portly, post-menopausal ladies lose weight, that’s as good a litmus test as any for me) certainly don’t lie.

Thus, despite how impossibly hard this seems, I’m totally gonna give it a try.

Starting… tomorrow.

(Seeing as I’ve been eating dinner the entire time I was writing this.)