CONCORD, MA
-----So there we sat, 28 of us, on a recent summer
evening, munching ever so slowly on, and paying
exquisite attention to, the surprisingly complex
tastes and textures of gorp, that mixture of dried
fruit and nuts so popular with hikers.
“Notice whether
you’re already salivating,” prompted the workshop
instructor, Jean Fain, a psychotherapist and
teaching associate at Harvard Medical School, as we
held our chosen dried cranberries, cashews or
almonds in our fingers. “Slowly, very slowly, begin
to notice the taste, the texture. Allow yourself to
feel pleasure as you chew.”
I do, and am
struck by the difference between this tranquil,
Buddhist moment – my entire focus on one little
cranberry – and the way, half an hour earlier, I had
wolfed down my calzone in the car, barely tasting
it. The first cranberry gave me a burst of
sweetness, the second, a small blast of tanginess.
The cashew, unsalted, was boring. Who knew?
The point of
this workshop, Fain said, was to apply some of the
techniques of mindfulness meditation, like quieting
the mind by focusing on the breath, to the process
of eating and, ultimately, weight control.
The approach is
so unusual, and potentially such a useful weapon in
the war on obesity, that the National Institutes of
Health is spending $1.8 million over four years on
studies at three universities around the country.
Dr. David Heber,
director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition,
supports the idea, particularly for people for whom
certain foods are triggers for overeating.
Meditation, he said, also should be “linked to a
nutritional plan and an exercise plan.”
Philosophically
similar to the breezy book, “French Women Don’t Get
Fat” by Mireille Guiliano, who advocates focusing on
quality, not quantity, in food, the mindful eating
program does not involve will power, dieting,
counting calories or eschewing certain foods while
chewing endlessly on others.
It does involve
a very brief meditation to get “centered” before
eating and eating with full attention - both
“getting pleasure from food and noticing when you’ve
had enough,” said the originator of the program,
psychologist Jean Kristeller of Indiana State
University, who has studied meditation for decades.
Among other
things, mindful eating means not gorging
absent-mindedly while doing something else like
watching TV or chattering away, and learning to tell
when you feel full enough or that you’ve reached
“taste-specific satiety.”
This is the
phenomenon by which, after four or five bites, taste
buds lose their sensitivity to the chemicals in food
that make it taste good. It is taste specific
satiety that explains why the first bites of
chocolate taste better than later ones and why, when
you cannot manage another bite of steak, you have
plenty of enthusiasm for ice cream. Once you
recognize that you’re losing the pleasure of a
certain taste, it’s easier to stop eating it.
“Our culture is
so externalized that we don’t even realize what our
body signals are,” said clinical psychologist Ruth
Quillian-Wolever from the Duke Center for
Integrative Medicine. “When you teach people to be
quiet enough to see what’s going on inside, they can
get an incredible amount of satisfaction from a
small piece of chocolate.”
To be sure, the
published evidence in favor of mindful eating is
slim.
Kristeller did a
pilot study a few years ago of 18 obese women who
binged (loosely defined as feeling out of control
about eating and ingesting a huge amount of food in
one session). Her team found that, with meditation
and coaching on skills like distinguishing real
hunger from eating triggered by anger or boredom,
binging dropped from an average of four times a week
to one and a half. Participants also reported being
less pre-occupied with food.
Armed with a
first grant of $250,000 from the government,
Kristeller and Quillian-Wolever studied another 85
male and female obese bingers. They were randomly
assigned to the mindful eating program, no
intervention, or a control group, which got the same
amount of attention from teachers as the mindful
group and used material from Duke’s diet and fitness
center, but got no meditation training.
The data are
still-unpublished, but encouraging. Though neither
the mindful eating nor the control group, on
average, lost weight, both groups reduced binging
substantially, compared to the non-intervention
group. On standardized psychological tests, the
mindful eaters also reported feeling more in control
around food. Just as important, the mindfulness
program, even in people who lost no weight, was
linked to lower fasting blood sugar levels and less
insulin resistance, problems that often lead to
diabetes.
“So we know it
works to change eating patterns,” said
Quillian-Wolever. The next step is to figure out how
to translate this into weight loss.
This summer,
Kristeller, Quillian-Wolever and Dr. Michael Baime,
director of the Penn Stress Management Program at
the University of Pennsylvania will begin to enroll
about 225 obese people, some of them bingers, to see
whether mindful eating plus coaching on portion
control and other weight loss tactics results in
lasting weight loss. Baime also plans to use brain
scans see what, if anything, is changing in the
brains of people in the meditation group.
People can’t
sustain diets “if it’s just will power,” Baime said.
“Meditation does not require will power at all. It
requires awareness. If you actually listen to your
body better, you’ll know whether you’re really
hungry or not.”
As for me? After
the workshop, I must confess, I popped some
chocolate chip cookies in the oven and, while they
were baking, nibbled at the left-over raw dough. But
I was mindful – it was yummy!
Judy Foreman’s
column appears every other week. Past columns are
available on
www.myhealthsense.com.
