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Posted on 05/28/2009 @ 4:23 PM
By Michelle May, M.D. Angela recently shared this amazing insight and I asked her permission to share it with you. I hope it will help you see your eating from an entirely different perspective! I’ve noticed that sometimes when I am feeling resentful about something, I reach for food as a sort of compensation for having had to put up with the source of the resentment. Once I realized this particular trigger, it struck me as totally absurd! If someone offered me food under those terms, I would NEVER accept it. Just imagine someone saying, "Listen, I've decided to treat you unfairly on this issue, but I'm happy to buy off your bad feelings with this plate of goodies." I can think of several impolite responses that I might choose…but there's no way I’d accept food in return for being taken advantage of! I would be offended that someone would even make such an offer. And yet, that's precisely what I'm doing each time I feel resentment and reach for food to soothe myself. Now that I realize what I am really doing, I’m going to be more careful to avoid such situations and when necessary, assert my right to fair treatment. I know that I have better coping skills than eating, if I just remember to use them. The next time you find yourself reaching for food to soothe a hurt, an insult, or an injustice, ask yourself, if this person offered me food to make up for it, would I take it? Need Inspiration? Watch our NEW Eat What You Love video book trailer. Take just 82 seconds to watch our new Eat What You Love video. If you feel inspired, take 60 seconds to forward the link to all of your friends!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI37UlVhAAg
Eat Mindfully. Live Vibrantly!
Michelle May, M.D.
Posted on 04/14/2009 @ 5:55 PM
By Michelle May, M.D. Have you ever said, “I have a gut feeling…” or “My stomach is tied in knots!”? There was a time when I wasn’t aware of my instincts—or didn’t trust them. Take eating for example: I usually led with my head. If I was off my diet, I thought about food all the time. I’d walk to the break room at work or open my refrigerator to see if there was anything good to eat. Then I’d eat standing up or plop down with the whole package, with no awareness whatsoever about what I was physically or emotionally feeling. If I was on my diet, I thought about food all the time. I’d think about what I was going to eat for each meal and snack and filter everything through my mental calculator: How many calories (or points) was it? How many minutes on the treadmill would it take to burn it off? Still, there was no awareness about what I was physically or emotionally feeling. Many of us keep ourselves too busy, distracted, and disconnected to hear our hunger and fullness signals, much less all of the other valuable information available to us. Many diet and health “experts” lead us to believe that those signals cannot be trusted anyway. Our own personal experiences with overeating fuel that distrust, though ironically, overeating is merely a symptom of our disconnection from our true physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. BODY WISDOM As a physician, I’m tempted to explain this physiologically. After all, the gastrointestinal tract has 100 million neurons and 95% of the body’s neurotransmitter, serotonin. But a journey that began by learning to recognize hunger and fullness has taught me to trust my gut instincts in all things. The amazing results cannot be explained by biology alone. Whether you call it your instinct, intuition, spirit, inner voice, body wisdom, a knowing, listening to your heart, or some other descriptor, it is a powerful and reliable source of information that you can learn to listen to and trust. In Am I Hungry?® books and workshops, we introduce the practice of listening with a Mind-Body Scan. We use it first to help you identify hunger and fullness, then to become more aware of other signals your body is trying to send you. I won’t go into the details here but the essence of the mind-body scan is to get quiet, breathe, and focus your attention. While listening to that inner voice can be challenging, trusting its wisdom is the more difficult part. We want to control, second-guess, and overanalyze the possible outcomes. While there’s something to be said for checking in with your head, I’ve gradually learned that when the two don’t agree, my gut is usually right. THE BODY, MIND, HEART, AND SPIRIT CONNECTION Let me share just a few of the many non-food related examples from my own life that demonstrate how my inner wisdom has served me. Perhaps you can think of similar situations from your own life. Self-preservation: I had just entered my hotel room when there was a knock at the door. I looked through the peep hole to see a maintenance man who said he was there to fix a hole in the wall. I looked around the room to substantiate his request and identified a small defect in the wallpaper. Something told me to ask him to come back later. He left but I still felt uneasy. I called the maintenance manager and asked them to wait on the repair until I checked out the following day. He couldn’t find a work order for my room and when I described the man’s uniform, he said it didn’t belong to that hotel. Congruence: I was recently asked to participate on a committee that had been working on a childhood obesity initiative for several months. During my first conference call, I began to “feel” uneasy. I didn’t agree with the good food-bad food approach they had taken and I sensed resistance when I said so. It was clearly too late to have an impact on the direction they were headed and though I told myself I should stick it out, I could already feel the drain on my time, energy, and spirit. After the call, I took a few deep breaths and decided to trust my insticts to withdraw. I immediately felt better and inspired to share a more positive, less restrictive message. Clarity: Last month many of you participated in a poll on my new blog at http://www.eatwhatyoulovelovewhatyoueat.com/ to help me select the cover of my next book, Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat: How to Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle. Your feedback was insightful and frankly, a bit surprising. The majority of you selected a cover with a beautiful heart-shaped ring of cherries. Others felt the cover with the single piece of heart-shaped chocolate was more compelling. I wanted to honor the vote but my spirit keeps insisting that the people who need this book will be drawn to the chcolate, a symbol of the freedom and joy that comes from eating fearlessly and mindfully. While chocolate is unexpected on a book in the diet and self-help section of bookstores, I sense that this cover will tug at the hearts of those who have a painful love-hate relationship with food and are ready to be healed. PRACTICE LISTENING TO YOUR INNER WISDOM Whenever you find yourself unsure, struggling, or depleted, take a few moments to be fully present to all of the information that is available to you. Get quiet and listen to your body, mind, heart, and spirit. You’ll feel more decisive, centered, and peaceful. Trust what you hear and act on it. Eat Mindfully. Live Vibrantly!
Michelle May, M.D. P.S. Need a gentle reminder to tune-in? Our beautiful, handcrafted bracelets are a beautiful reminder to ask the simple but powerful question, Am I hungry? whenever you feel like eating: http://amihungry.com/bracelets.shtml.
Posted on 03/20/2009 @ 2:54 PM
By Michelle May, M.D. I've been calling myself a recovered yo-yo dieter for years. Now I'm on a campaign to rid the world not just of the concept, but the phrase "yo-yo dieting." The term yo-yo dieting is perfectly descriptive of the old paradigm of weight management--but it is completely outdated in terms of what I know works. Here's my issue with this metaphor: a yo-yo is either up or down. You're either tightly wound up around rules and restriction, or you're unraveling toward the bottom again. I call this the Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle. My Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle You see, when I was overeating due to triggers like boredom or stress, I craved more of certain foods like chocolate or chips. Eating helped temporarily, but the temporary distraction or pleasure acted like an engine, driving my overeating, because the boredom or stress always came back (imagine that!). When I went on a diet to regain control and stop myself from overeating, the boredom and stress didn't go away.
Instead of chocolate and chips, I ate the foods that were allowed on my diet. When I felt stressed, I still "binged"
on vegetable soup or light popcorn. Eventually, I'd feel deprived, hungry, or worn out by all the time and energy it took to follow the rules. So I'd cheat, feel guilty, give up, and go back to eating my favorite foods in response to the triggers I hadn't dealt with in the first place. I always blamed the chocolate or the chips, but it was never really about the food. In this addictive pattern of yo-yo dieting, I moved from one extreme to the other, feeling powerless to change without understanding why. I was either up and down over the course of weeks or months, sometimes in the same day, or even in the same meal. Most mornings I'd start out with good intentions but quickly lose control. Think of a Pendulum Instead Even if you decide you don't want to spend the rest of your life in one of these two extremes, there's no real in-between with a yo-yo. It can only be up or down. Ironically, even the common advice to "follow a healthy lifestyle" usually means exercise and watch what you eat--not terribly helpful if you've been trying unsuccessfully to do that for years. Instead of a yo-yo, now I prefer to think of a pendulum.
Think about how a pendulum works. While still conjuring up images of extremes, as a pendulum loses energy, it finds a gentle arc somewhere in the middle. In terms of your eating, rather than expending so much of your energy trying to stay in control (dieting) or spinning out of control (bingeing), there is a gentler arc in the middle where you are in charge: * You have the freedom and flexibility to eat the foods you love, without feeling guilty.
* You fearlessly choose a variety of foods that nourish and nurture you.
* You love what you eat, savoring every morsel mindfully.
* You are able to sustain an intuitive balance that allows you to reach and maintain a healthier weight without obsession and deprivation. You were born with the natural ability to effortlessly manage your weight this way. When you finally stop wasting so much of your energy on overeating and restrictive dieting, you'll naturally settle into a more comfortable, centered space, freeing up your energy for more enjoyable, productive, and fulfilling activities. The goal is not to stop dead in the middle, but to make mindful choices as each situation arises. Finding the Middle Wherever there are extremes in your life, there are opportunities for you to seek balance and moderation. Could you benefit from more work-life balance? Do you yo-yo exercise? Could you allow yourself to be a less-than-perfect parent so you can focus on your relationship instead of raising a perfect child? Where else in your life could you let go of the need to do it perfectly or not at all? A pendulum's gentle arc requires much less energy to maintain, freeing you up to live a more fulfilling and vibrant life. Eat Mindfully. Live Vibrantly!
Michelle May, M.D. P.S. If you'd like to know more about working with us to discover a more balanced, pleasurable relationship with food, please visit http://www.amihungry.com/weight-management-programs.shtml.
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