You don’t need to completely eliminate emotional eating. You can learn to use food more effectively to feel better occasionally without relying on it to fix all your feelings. Deciding to have a treat may be the most viable option you have in certain situations.
Linda Craighead, The Appetite Awareness Workbook
Here’s a question that’s on my clinical mind a lot: “What do my clients want and how do I help them get what they want?” This very question, as I see it, is at the core of humanistic harm reduction (HHR). When my client presents with concerns about “emotional eating,” I ask myself the same question. When you get in the habit of asking yourself this question, the answer becomes rather self-evident. What my emotional eating clients want is obvious: They want to eat when they feel bad and they want to feel in control (both during and after emotional eating). But they have come to believe that eating to cope and feeling in control are somehow mutually exclusive. Not so! We can help our clients have exactly what they want. Yes, they can eat to cope and, yes, they can feel in control (both during and after the emotional eating episode). How? With the help of mindful emotional eating (MEE). Mindful emotional eating satisfies two self-regulation fantasies: To eat and to feel in control. Mindful emotional eating allows your client to pursue change without sacrificing what they want. To clarify, this book is not about emotional eating. It’s about mindful emotional eating. The book is not about how to stop emotional eating but about how to eat emotionally in moderation, more effectively, and without self-judgment and self-loathing.
Mindful Emotional Eating (MEE) has been nearly a taboo both in self-help and clinical literature on emotional eating. I first wrote about mindful emotional eating in Eating the Moment (New Harbinger, 2008) and have had a chance to pilot this material clinically in my practice and through a series of workshops for mental health professionals. My experience reveals that while the idea of mindful emotional eating makes a lot of sense to my clients, surprisingly, the mental health professionals often bristle with objections, barricading behind the all-or-nothing belief that any emotional eating is self-destructive and to be avoided at all costs. These clinicians say that they are afraid to “enable” their clients. By that they mean that they don’t want to “join in” or “to collude” in the “clearly self-destructive” behavior of emotional eating. Not so: emotional eating is not self-destructive. Emotional eating is self-care. Dare to “enable” your client’s self-care.
A humanistic clinician operates on the following two assumptions:
• He/she takes it as a given that we are always pursuing wellbeing; I call this “motivational innocence.”
• He/she takes it as a given that we are always doing our coping best (even if it doesn’t seem so to an uninformed mind of an observer). I call this “ordinary perfection.”
With this in mind, a humanistic clinician doesn’t believe in self-destructive behavior. All behavior is seen as a motivationally innocent attempt at self-regulation, i.e. as homeostatic. A humanistic clinician’s role is not to uninstall the coping that already works somewhat but to help upgrade clients’ coping software, to help clients optimize their coping.
Self-destructiveness is a psychological myth. The method proposed in this program is a direct challenge to the all-too-common clinical position that pathologizes emotional eating and offers emotional eaters nothing more than a psychological diet of abstinence from emotional eating. More than ever before, I am convinced that as a culture and a civilization we have to begin to re-integrate emotional eating back into our eating lives. It is high time that we take emotional eating out of the closet of self-care and “legalize” it – psychologically, clinically, and culturally.
In thinking about how we, as an eating culture, conceptualize emotional eating I envision a broken down family van on the side of the road. Inside of it is the back-and-forth bickering between parents and children, between superegos and ids – with the former telling the latter to “Stop it.” and the latter saying to the former “But I wanna.”
You, the clinical reader, and you, the client, know exactly what you want. We all have been stuck like this before, when stressed or overwhelmed. We all have gotten past a challenging moment with a pacifier of food in our mouth. And that didn’t kill us, did it? We’ve all gotten unstuck with a scoop of ice cream or a few squares of a chocolate bar or a serving or two of mashed potatoes. Yes, we’ve all had this kind of emotional eating in moderation. But we’ve all also overdone it too. I am yet to meet someone who hasn’t yet binged once. We all have gotten stuck in mindless emotional overeating (on a Sunday night before the work week, after a failed date, etc.) and couldn’t get unstuck until we stuffed ourselves. It was in those kinds of moments that we stopped trusting ourselves and really got stuck, got stuck in the fantasy of abstinence, in the dream of “never doing this again.”
You or your client don’t really need a tow truck. You need a jumpstart – a bit of craving control know-how, some self-acceptance, some awareness and someone to show some clinical faith in your ability to indulge in moderation.
The clinical field of eating disorders has been stuck in a perfectionistic, purist, puritanical mindset on the issue of emotional eating: “Emotional eating is bad. We must end it. It’s self-destructive.” We have been fussing around this issue, trying to get it out of the ditch of our unrealistic expectations, trying to fix it every which way but mostly to no avail. Other psychological and behavioral issues, other bodies of clinical and self-help literature have long passed us by on this freeway to wellbeing and treatment outcomes. Even the field of addiction, from which we, the field of emotional eating, have borrowed the misguided paradigm of abstinence, has long moved on by, evolving from its own all-or-nothing dogma to a more humanistic, moderation-focused discourse. But we, the emotional eaters and our clinical entourage, are still in the ditch, by the side of the road, sitting on the empty tires of not allowing ourselves to feed our chronic emptiness, drained from the years of stoic self-denial and ever unwilling to trust ourselves to find balanced self-care.
We know what we want: We want to be able to eat to cope, to eat for emotional reasons – now and then. We know why we want that, because it feels intuitive and because it works – it does help us feel better and does help us get unstuck emotionally in a pinch. We just don’t know how to use this strategy without abusing it and we don’t have the cultural permission to use it without feeling like we are doing something wrong. We are waiting for someone to let us, to trust us, to show faith in our ability to know moderation, to help us learn how to do it without overdoing it. We are in a dire need for a jumpstart, for a paradigm-shift, for a pattern-break, for something new to try. This someone will have to be you, yourself – you, the clinician, and you, the emotional overeater.
This book is that jumpstart. What is a jumpstart? A jumpstart, whether it’s of the roadside-assistance kind or the clinical kind along the road of life, brings energy to an impasse. It helps you get unstuck and gets you going again. The jumpstart that you’ll find in this book is a brief, problem-focused intervention to help you break through a clinical impasse (see Part I). I won’t keep you tied down on the side of the road for too long: Four sessions and some juice for your clinical batteries, and you’ll be back on the road in no time. The rest (Part II) is optional.
But before you move on, let me be crystal clear: The goal of this program is nothing less than to learn to leverage more coping per calorie, to help you and/or your clients to learn to become effective, mindful emotional eaters, and to finally re-integrate emotional eating back into our inevitably emotional lives – with unconditional self-acceptance instead of that toxic heartburn of shame and guilt that has been eating at us for years whenever we would turn to food for some self-directed TLC.
There are two main parts to this book: Part I deals with short-term management of emotional overeating and Part II takes a longer clinical perspective on working with the issue. Whereas Part I could be conceptualized as a tool-belt, Part II is a toolbox. Part I is a 4-session long, rapid-fire, humanistic, experiential, mindfulness-powered clinical protocol for helping a mindless emotional eater become a mindful emotional eater. Part I consists of a psycho-educational component that is designed to help your client shift from self-loathing to self-acceptance. The idea here is to help your client rethink emotional eating so as to rethink what to do about emotional eating. The rest of Part I has to do with highly practical, no-nonsense craving control training, emotional self-regulation training and training in the so-called choice awareness – an awareness-building and habit-modification change-hygiene factor. The meaning of all this will become clear as you read on. Part I is “third wave” psychology – it is a primarily post-cognitive, highly experiential, mindfulness-powered approach to working with this population.
In Part I, you will learn the architecture of a mindful emotional eating meal, which is:
Course 1: Emptying Your Mind
Course 2: Waking Up Your Mind
Course 3: Keeping Your Mind Awake
Course 4: Never Minding Your Mind/Letting Your Mind
There is another way to express this mindful emotional eating algorithm through a metaphor of “connection”:
Course 1: Connecting to Your Body
(through relaxation)
Course 2: Connecting to Your Mind
(through choice awareness & pattern breaks)
Course 3: Connecting to Reality/World-at-Large
(through process-focused mindful eating)
Course 4: Reconnecting to Your Bodymind
(through satiety/fullness awareness)
Part II offers a series of long-term interventions designed to help your client make a kind of existential correction from self-loathing and self-doubt to effective self-care and unconditional self-acceptance. Furthermore, Part II offers you and your clients an opportunity to develop a self-referenced sense of identity which serves to immunize the mind against various ego wounds that might provoke a relapse into mindless emotional eating. Part II ends with a brief review of the Eastern know-how of emptying your illusory sense of self so as to feel existentially full.
Part III is devoted to emotion-specific applications of MEE. Consider these to be an advanced form of mindful emotional eating only to be tried when the basics are behaviorally and attitudinally well in place. In closing, I call on you, the reader, to open your mind; you might as well since you already opened this book. I’ll see you on the other end of this process of clinical self-improvement.