Mindfulness for Binge Eating
With 10 Audio Guided Meditations
211 pages plus audio.
Available in paperback, audiobook & Kindle.
Overcome compulsive over-eating or binge eating.
Do you want to establish a more peaceful relationship with food and your body?
Are you sick and tired of fad diets?
Whether you over-eat occasionally or struggle with chronic emotional eating and food addictions, this book can help you. You need not know anything about mindfulness to benefit from the powerful but simple techniques explained in this book.
You will discover for yourself how much food and which types of foods are what your body needs. You will find out which foods you really do enjoy and that you can eat without guilt or worry.
The author has worked in specialist units and hospital settings with people with eating disorders and coached people with problem eating and body image issues on a one to one basis. This book is a valuable synthesis of personal and professional experience.
If you want to free yourself from the misery of over-eating, guilt and shame, you need this book.
Click the link below for prices in your local currency and order this book today.
Read a sample from "Mindfulness for Binge Eating" now.
Are there ‘good foods’ and ‘bad foods’?
There is a lot of confusion around food. Which is the best eating style? However, we are all individuals. Ideally, the foods you choose to eat are based on your tastes, ethical considerations, levels of activity, age, build genes, height, sex, location, and even the season.
No one eating style fits all people. Instead, focus mindfully on your preferences and what feels nourishing and safe for you. Eating foods that make you feel good in the longer term. If you lose control with ice-cream and end up feeling sick and unwell, this is a self-defeating and unkind act towards yourself. Re-educate yourself to be gentle and compassionate. Rather than beat yourself up, find an alternative activity to eating ice-cream. An activity that is nurturing and enjoyable. We will look at this mindfulness strategy in more detail next week on Day 4.
Many people say they overeat because they love food. The first few bites of a cake or chocolate are always the best. When we overeat, the food loses its taste. We begin to feel uncomfortable, both physically and emotionally. If we love food, then let’s just focus on the first few bites and savour it. Practise doing this in a ‘safe’ environment for you. By that I mean eat foods you crave when they are more controlled, for example, buy one cake with your coffee if you go out with a friend or order one dessert, perhaps to share with your partner when out for a meal. If you know you will lose control with that family-sized tub of ice cream, when at home on your own, then avoid this situation.
You may have a history of diets and restrictive eating, designating some foods as ‘bad’ and others as ‘good’. This thinking is too binary. No doubt there are foods that you don’t feel you have control around. Or foods that make you feel unwell.
As we have seen, certain foods are highly palatable and trigger brain chemicals such as dopamine. The chemical composition of these foods drives you to eat more and more, losing any sense of satiety or fullness until you feel over-stuffed and nauseous. These are usually highly processed foods with a list of strange-sounding ingredients that sound like the elements of a science experiment.
In his book The Pleasure Trap, Dr Doug Lisle refers to these foods as ‘magic food’. This ‘magic food’ is designed to get us to eat more and more of it. Food scientists call the addictive perfect balance of fat, sugar, and salt the ‘bliss point’. Sadly, this ‘bliss’ is short-lived and becomes ever more elusive as you eat more and more to experiences the pleasure once gained from these highly palatable foods. Like any other drug, tolerance levels build and it takes more and more of the substance to get the same feelings.
This is a very personal reaction. You need to work out for yourself the foods that rob you have a sense of peace or control. By being mindful of how you feel around a range of foods you can work out which foods are safe for you to have in your environment and which foods you feel you lack control over. This does not make any food good or bad per se.
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