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.

It helped me stay focused on what was important to me during that holiday season, and I think I even lost a couple pounds.  That experience inspired my new Maintain Dont Gain program , which begins on Sunday.

Instead of all the sacrifice, all the doing without, all the dessert skipping, gone in a month-long blur of holiday parties, family gatherings and festive food frenzies, this year do something different: no dieting, no depressing sacrifices, just common sense, motivation and fun.

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.

What are you noticing as you bring awareness to your eating patterns?

Recently, I was reminded of the classic “journalistic” questions: who?  what? where? when? how? and thought that they make an interesting structure for noticing characteristics of your relationship with food.

Who? How does who you are eating with impact your eating behavior?  Do you choose different foods or amounts when you are eating with others?  Do you  collude with friends around eating certain foods?  Or not eating certain foods?  No judgments here.  Just notice.

What? How do you characterize different food choices: good, bad, healthy, unhealthy, decadent, virtuous.  And what is your feeling response when you eat those different foods.  No judgments here.  Just notice.

Where? How does your location impact your choices, your awareness?  Do you choose certain foods when you are eating out?  Different foods at home?  In the car? No judgments here.  Just notice.

When? When do you eat?  What are the cues?  Do you have ritual foods for certain times of day?  The same breakfast?  Snacks?  Are there particular times of the day when you tend to crave certain things?  No judgments here.  Just notice.

How? How fast, how slow?  In front of the computer, in front of the television, with a good book?  With gusto?  With guilt?  No judgments here.  Just notice.

A familiar story  the impulse is there, the intention is there, the desire is there… so what happens? 

This time, it wasn’t so much about slipping back into habitual eating patterns – I was eating and enjoying meals mostly consciously, and I wasn’t blogging about it.  I thought about blogging about it. Out on my walks, out driving around, I composed little bits of blog posts.  And they never quite made it into print.

Instead of hanging out in self-judgement, or maybe worse, trying to figure out the why of it all, I simply begin again.

I eat and enjoy each bite consciously.

Today, on a holiday.  Now, in the middle of the day.  I simply begin again.

I’ve written before about the Diets Don’t Work practices that I’ve used to lose over fifty pounds and keep it off for eight years.  They form the core of the Conscious Eating Discover journey.

A primary tool for the journey is the food journal.  I know, I know.  It brings back all the memories of tracking and counting and calories and fat grams  and points that we want to leave behind. 

This will be different.  Think of it as a travel journal to jot down what you’re noticing, what you’re learning, what you’re discovering.  If you have a regular journaling practice, you can incorporate it there.  If not, you can use any notebook or scrap of paper you have handy.

We start this first week with the third practice:

I eat and enjoy each bite consciously.

What comes to mind when you read those words?  Say them aloud.  What feelings or sensations do you notice?  Say it aloud in front of a mirror?  How is that different?

Last year I wrote about the inaugural Holy Body Day.   This year, there’s a facebook page.  I considered joining my friend and colleague, Susan Freeman, in her QiCoach Spring Detox… but it wasn’t feeling more like a “good idea” than inspired action.

I love the comment left by Kathy Loh, of Full Moon Path, on last year’s post, referencing Joseph Cambell’s idea that the mind is all about doing, while the body is about experiencing.  The Presence of Body tag line, Lusty Lives Whatever the Size, is all about experiencing all the juiciness there is to experience in this lifetime.

I’ve been playing/exploring/ discovering in the realm of conscious eating since I read The Psychologist’s Eat-Anything Diet  by Leonard and Lillian Pearson (now out-of-print) in 1974, shortly after several weeks on the original Atkins program which I ended with a fruit binge in the height of summer.  Who could resist?

As part of my Countdown to 60! project, I’ve been feeling a hunger for deepening my experience of conscious eating, to see where the boundaries of the familiar territory are, and to explore beyond them.  I invite you to join me.  We start tomorrow.

A year ago I took a Blog Triage class to spif up my blog.  One of the assignments was to set up some Google Alerts on relevant key words/phrases.  I completed the assignment and set up my mail tool so they would go directly to their own folder and not clog up my inbox.  And promptly forgot all about them until some of them came up in a mail search yesterday.  Wow!  There’s some interesting stuff out there!   I could go to a place of what I might have missed; instead I remember one of my current mantras, a quote from The Matrix: 

“Hello, Neo.  You’re right on time.”

Gather.com has some posts about the Lane Bryant Ad that FOX and ABC have refused to air because it is deemed too racy.  I especially like the comments that there is more cleavage weekly on “Dancing With The Stars”.

Cleavage seems to be a popular topic this week.  In response to a quote from a n Iranian prayer leader that the increasing incidence of earthquakes is caused by women dressing immodestly, Jen McCreight suggested Boobquake.  The idea is for women to wear their most cleavage-revealing  outfit on April 26th to disprove the assertion.   The original suggestion may have been a little tongue-in-cheek, but the Facebook event has almost 162,000 attending and another 51,000 as  “maybe”s.  I think I’ll probably dress in my usual Boulder casual, but it made me think.

Finally, in perhaps the most disturbing story, Us Magazine resports that Jillian Michaels, one of the trainers on the Biggest Loser,  wants to adopt a child because “I can’t handle doing that [pregnancy] to my body”.   Ironically, this story appears under a “Healthy Lifestyle” heading.   Hmmmm….

A favorite place to stop and ponder on my favorite trail in Boulder

I was walking on this path a few days ago enjoying a beautiful spring day (unlike today which has dawned gray and snowy.  alas!) – feeling the burst of spring energy in a happy-go-lucky mood.  Feeling the surge of “I want more of this!”  More of this happy-to-be-alive-and-walking-this-path feeling.

It led to the question of what inspires me to action?  What would inspire me to get outside and on one of the numerous open space paths on a more regular basis, not because I should, but because I find joy in the breathing of the fresh air, the movement of my body, the magnificent sights and sounds of nature.

A Big Hairy Audacious Goal! And that’s when the Countdown to 60! Half-Marathon program was hatched.   Completing a half-marathon to celebrate my 60th birthday.  A destination half-marthon, probably somewhere in California, and  inviting friends from all over to come play with me, walk or run or dance with me, whether it’s a shorter distance or the half-marathon distance, whether we are geographically co-located, or you do it in your own hometown.

So that a year from now, I am proclaiming, “This is what 60 feels like!  Vibrant, gutsy, bubbly, strong!”

Who’s in?