How Mindful Eating Helps with Yoyo Dieting and Diabetes
By Michelle May, M.D.
A dietitian once told me, “Many of my patients diagnosed with diabetes are my yoyo dieters all grown up!” While that may be an overstatement, receiving a diagnosis of prediabetes or diabetes doesn’t make it any easier to stick to a restrictive diet long term. Although fear can lead to drastic changes in diet and exercise at first, it’s not a sufficient motivator for sustainable change.
Mindful eating is an alternative to yoyo dieting and rigid diabetes self-management. According to The Center for Mindful Eating, “Mindful eating has the powerful potential to transform people’s relationship to food and eating, to improve overall health, body image, relationships, and self-esteem.”
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is simply awareness of the present moment. While that includes savoring your food as you eat, mindful eating is much more than that. By using the information available to you right now, you are able to make better self-care decisions. For example, mindful eating helps you:
- Use your natural signals of hunger and satiety to guide about when and how much to eat.
- Recognize environmental and emotional triggers for eating—without judgment.
- Choose foods that balance enjoyment and nourishment.
- Notice how your choices affect how you feel.
- Use all of your senses to explore and savor the experience of eating for optimal satisfaction.
- Discover physical activity that feels joyful and energizing.
With diabetes, mindful eating also encourages curiosity about the connections between eating, physical activity, medications, and blood glucose levels. Rather than just trying to adhere to some expert’s recommendations, you can tap into your “inner expert.”
Whether you have diabetes or just want to improve your eating, try this little experiment. The next time you notice that you want to eat something, pause. Tune into your body. What do you notice? Are there any physical symptoms of hunger—like hunger pangs, growling stomach, a dip in your energy level, or other signs that your body needs fuel? What else do you notice? Thirst? Fatique? Boredom? Stress? Cravings? Something else?
By pausing to become aware of what’s happening at the moment you feel like eating, you increase the information available to help you make the best decisions for yourself.
When you aren’t aware of what’s really going on, your brain has no choice but to react—meaning, that you’ll re-act out the past based on habit, like eating when you’re stressed—rather than responding to your true needs.
So does it work? Recent research by Mario Ciampolini in Italy has shown that teaching individuals to identify hunger signals before eating helped them:
- Improve insulin sensitivity
- Lower HbA1c and other cardiovascular risk factors
- Lower pre-meal blood glucose levels
- Decrease energy (calorie) intake
- Decrease BMI
- Lose more weight compared to a control group practicing dietary restraint
While mindful eating sounds pretty simple, it’s admittedly not that easy. It’s common to “check out” rather than notice physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions. For example, you may be distracted by television or the Internet, preoccupied with memories of the past or worries about the future, or unconsciously responding to triggers you learned years earlier—like cleaning your plate instead of stopping when you’ve had enough.
With mindfulness, every choice you make is an opportunity to experience and better understand why you do the things you do, and to choose differently next time if it will serve you better. Unlike restrictive eating which just seems to get harder and harder with time, mindful eating becomes more natural with practice. Before long, these mindfulness skills begin to positively affect your relationships, work, and other important aspects of your health and life too.
Your thoughts...
Are you a mindful eater? Do you listen to your body? Or do you eat on a set schedule?
Michelle May, M.D. is the author of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat, with Diabetes: A Mindful Eating Program for Thriving with Prediabetes or Diabetes – the first book to apply the ancient concept of mindful eating to the current issue of diabetes.
Comments
| firelantern - Apr 19, 2012 10:32 AM | New Comment |
A friend and I were talking just yesterday about our emotional links to food and how so many times we overeat simply because we're guided by our emotions. This is an excellent article as it provides some useful tips - which I guess I already know but I haven't really put into practice for so long. I want this to become second nature now, as I'm literally fed up of food being a crutch. I shall print this as a reminder. Big thanks!!
Thank you. Excellent article. Very useful.
Great article and very useful tips for a guide to healthy eating.
These two tips are related and have really helped me to develop better eating habits.
- Choose foods that balance enjoyment and nourishment.
- Notice how your choices affect how you feel.
If you really pay attention to how feel after you eat in terms of your energy level the few hours after you eat, then you can start to identify the foods that you should and shouldn't be eating.
Original Post by: coachtodGreat article and very useful tips for a guide to healthy eating.
These two tips are related and have really helped me to develop better eating habits.
- Choose foods that balance enjoyment and nourishment.
- Notice how your choices affect how you feel.
If you really pay attention to how feel after you eat in terms of your energy level the few hours after you eat, then you can start to identify the foods that you should and shouldn't be eating.
Agreed! Over the past ~10 days I've had a few foods that I haven't had for quite some time, and was amazed at how I felt after eating them!
I've always liked pineapple, but after having some, I found that I was still hungry. I've also significantly reduced the bread that I'm eating, and roll that I ate last week left me rather empty.
Very useful tips indeed. Many a times I have felt this kinda dissatisfation after eating something especially if the appetite was triggered by other factors mentioned in your article other than the real need for food.
I've bn a yoyo dieter in the past but now I feel its about time I see results through this practical way of watching what I eat. I believe with self discipline and commitment, I'm gonna be more consistent this time around.
Superior article! I can't believe how often I pop extra calories into my mouth just because a few crumbs or scraps are left on the table during cooking or family dining. I swear I must have been a a very chubby dog in some previous life.
Original Post by: beluomoSuperior article! I can't believe how often I pop extra calories into my mouth just because a few crumbs or scraps are left on the table during cooking or family dining. I swear I must have been a a very chubby dog in some previous life.
That'll be the two of us then!
This sounds exactly like the book "Intuitive Eating" by Evelyn Tribole. Learning to really tune into your body and understand if you are ACTUALLY hungry is a very difficult thing to do. I am working towards this goal, but by counting calories I still find it difficult because I associate food with a number, and not how full it is making me full. This often results in crazy binges because once I see my number go over my target all I think is "***k it!" and I eat and eat and eat until I'm TOO full! While this does not happen every day, or even every week for that matter, it is still my biggest struggle. I hope one day I can become a mindful eater instead of a "last supper" eater, but how can I do that if I continue to count my calories!?
Original Post by: clarabrundoThis sounds exactly like the book "Intuitive Eating" by Evelyn Tribole. Learning to really tune into your body and understand if you are ACTUALLY hungry is a very difficult thing to do. I am working towards this goal, but by counting calories I still find it difficult because I associate food with a number, and not how full it is making me full. This often results in crazy binges because once I see my number go over my target all I think is "***k it!" and I eat and eat and eat until I'm TOO full! While this does not happen every day, or even every week for that matter, it is still my biggest struggle. I hope one day I can become a mindful eater instead of a "last supper" eater, but how can I do that if I continue to count my calories!?
Well...I actually don't recommend calorie counting in my books and program (Am I Hungry?) and I know Evelyn doesn't either. I've been writing for Calorie Count for a couple of years and I've seen that many people here use this site for all the great articles and support, not to monitor their calories.
If you are drawn to mindful eating, experiment with using hunger and fullness to guide you for a few days instead. (You can find articles I've written on these topics by clicking on my name above.)
From a mindfulness perspective, calories are knowledge - they provide valuable information. Relearning to trust your inborn ability to eat when your hungry and stop when you're satisfied requires trust and experience.
Together, knowledge and experience equal wisdom - and that is what it takes to break free of the eat-repent-repeat cycle.
Only once i got sucked into the cycle of dieting did I start having a difficult relationship with food and start putting on weight. For me 'mindful' and 'conscious' eating is the only way to stop myself over-eating in forming good habits I can sustain. What I do find hard is to leave food on my plate. I have been brought up to finish everything and feel it is impolite not to do so. I have tried, but if I am enjoying the food I actually feel panicky when I am trying to leave something... I don't know if this is normal...
Only once i got sucked into the cycle of dieting did I start having a difficult relationship with food and start putting on weight. For me 'mindful' and 'conscious' eating is the only way to stop myself over-eating in forming good habits I can sustain. What I do find hard is to leave food on my plate. I have been brought up to finish everything and feel it is impolite not to do so. I have tried, but if I am enjoying the food I actually feel panicky when I am trying to leave something... I don't know if this is normal...
Original Post by: creaseygeOnly once i got sucked into the cycle of dieting did I start having a difficult relationship with food and start putting on weight. For me 'mindful' and 'conscious' eating is the only way to stop myself over-eating in forming good habits I can sustain. What I do find hard is to leave food on my plate. I have been brought up to finish everything and feel it is impolite not to do so. I have tried, but if I am enjoying the food I actually feel panicky when I am trying to leave something... I don't know if this is normal...
It is VERY common! Here are a few thoughts that may help you adjust to eating what your body needs instead of habitually cleaning your plate:
- If you're worried about food going to waste, remember that eating food your body doesn't need, is wasting it!
- YOU are now the boss of your body!
- When you've had enough, food doesn't taste as good anymore; if you keep eating, you are really just eating a memory!
- The food will taste good again when you're hungry again.
- Eating the right amount of food is not about being good, it's about feeling good.
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