This is the book that started it all for me, and the one that I have recommended to countless clients over the years.
As I’ve been working on some material for an upcoming class, I’ve been inspired to re-write the eating guidelines. Different ideas about this have been floating on the edge of my consciousness for awhile, and during a wide-awake period in the middle of the night, they sprung almost fully formed.
First off, they’re not guidelines anymore, they’re practices. ”Guidelines” was meant to be a softer word than rules, but in most cases, it didn’t get interpreted that way. It still carried all the judgement about good/bad/right/wrong that any diet does. And it’s hard to break the Diet Mentality when those kinds of thoughts are dominating.
Whether we call them guidelines or rules, there’s something about those words that makes the result primary, and the process secondary: “if I follow these guidelines, then I’ll have the result I want, and I’ll be happy.”
We engage in practices in order to transform and balance our lives, and the results follow organically. We’re never done with practice, because as we continue to practice, our experience deepens and becomes richer, expansive, nourishing.
So, here we go:
Guideline: Eat what you want to eat.
Practice: Eat what nourishes and delights you.
While someone who has been restricting for a long while may need to go through a short period of eating whatever they want, the real shift comes when we learn that eating wholesome, delicious foods is a nurturing, healing choice. This doesn’t mean that we never indulge in foods that are more delightful than nourishing (Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food – yum!), but it’s always a conscious choice. My favorite quote about this comes from Evelyn Tribole: ”Nothing’s forbidden; everything counts.”
Guideline: Eat and enjoy each bite consciously.
Practice: S-a-a-a-a-vor your food.
The various hints around the guideline have to do with eating while sitting down, eating without distractions, etc. They’re more about what not to do then what to do. One of the challenges, personally, is I can be not doing all those distracting things, and my mind still wanders away with whatever thought happened to hijack it. Aside from that, the guideline is still about the mind, whereas the practice is about engaging as many bodily senses as you can to fully experience the meal.
Guideline: Stop eating when you’re no longer hungry.
Practice: Know when enough is enough.
This starts to point to some of the conditioned patterns and beliefs that are deconstructed as part of living these practices; accepting that if you’re eating past the point where your hunger is sated, there’s something else going on here. So, the practice is not to just stop eating when you’re no longer hungry, but to get curious about the whole topic of what’s enough.
Guideline: Eat only when you’re hungry.
Practice: Eat to fuel your body.
Of the four practices, I’m less sure about the wording of this one. What I’m getting at here is the balance between the hunger signals from the body, and what nutritional science tells us is optimal. In most cases, I’m more likely to side with what my body is telling me. A counter-example is that I’m rarely hungry in the morning, not feeling the first pangs for 2-3 hours. However, I’m willing to concede that my body needs fuel (and protein, in particular) sooner than that.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about these practices.
Several years ago, the fitness center that I belonged to held a Maintain, Don’t Gain challenge. We weighed in a day or two before Thanksgiving and then again, after New Year’s. We won a t-shirt if our ending weight was the same or less than the beginning weight.
