Originally published July 27 2005
Meditating on food may help you savor flavor and shed extra pounds
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The National Institutes of Health is spending $1.8 million over four years on studies at three U.S. universities on the use of meditation while eating, which could prove to be an effective weight loss technique.
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.
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 instead of 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 involves 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.
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.
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.
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.
Though neither the mindful eating nor the control group, on average, lost weight, both groups reduced bingeing substantially, compared with the nonintervention group.
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