Decode Your Cravings - Workbook Conscious Eating

Transcription

1 - Workbook Conscious Eating

2 What is Conscious Eating? Conscious eating is an eating practice that helps you reconnect with food and be in tune with your body and mind. When used in conjunction with other techniques and strategies in, it helps heal your relationship with food and promotes consistency in your habits. There are three parts to Conscious Eating practice: 1. Preparation - Reconnecting with the process of acquiring and preparing food. 2. The Practice of Eating - Your actual behaviors and thoughts during mealtimes. 3. Processing - Reviewing your journal entries, expanding on them, and correcting the record. We call it a practice because it s something that requires attention and persistence. It s not something you do a few times. Rather, it s a series of habits that you work to adopt going forward. Part one and two should be considered a goal every single time you eat. Part three is a learning and healing process that you should use for 7 days at a time, repeating as needed to strengthen or restore your connection.

3 Part 1 / Preparation Our modern society is completely backwards from the process we evolved with. Today, we have nothing to do with the hunting process aside from a small percentage of people who still hunt. More comical, the gathering process is limited to hopping in a 4Runner and wandering the grocery aisles. Hardly a chore. Preparation Habits & Behaviors 1. Connect fully with the process of acquiring your food. Prepare your mindset for health. Don t rush the shopping experience. Connect with the food you re choosing to purchase rather than mindlessly adding things to your cart. Read nutrition labels. Buy local when possible & build a relationship with providers. There s no chance of going hungry anymore either. Instead, our problem is having too much and wasting the extra. What about cooking and meal prep? You can t just cook, you have to vacuum and toss in a load of laundry at the same time. Or, you re not even at or near your home and don t take part in the preparation at all. If we want to restore our connection to food, body, and self, we must change our preparation habits. 2. Prepare and cook your own food as often as possible. Restaurants are convenient, but they increase your disconnection. The more you cook your own food, the better off you ll be (and healthier too). 3. Make the decision to eat based on authentic hunger. Learn the difference between physical hunger and psychological hunger. Distinguish between nourishing your body and medicating your pain and stress. Don t eat based on a schedule or some other external trigger wait for your body s signals. 4. Prepare and cook your food without distraction. Be fully present in the process. Avoid phones, televisions, and other distractions. If you have kids to watch, involve them in the process or have them play on their own. 5. Connect fully with the process of preparation and cooking. Smell and taste as you go. Fully integrate yourself and your core cravings into the process. See cooking and prep as a form of moving meditation.

4 Part 2 // Eating When we sit down to a meal, our goal is to restore our connection to the food, our connection to our bodies, and our connection to our Self (and sub-selves). Eating Habits & Behaviors 1. Clear all distractions from the process of eating. Just as you clear distractions from prep and cooking, clear them from eating as well. No devices, no newspapers, no nothing. The only exception is other human beings. 2. Always eat sitting down at a table. The antithesis of Conscious Eating is eating in a rush, in a car, on the couch, or on the move. I get that you re busy, but you need to invest time in yourself and the relationship you re building with food. 3. Approach food as love and nourishment for your body. Food is not the enemy. Your body is not the enemy. Doing battle against these things will leave you bloodied and bruised and no better off. Eat to nourish your body and soul. As you engage in this practice, you should also notice that your ability to make healthier decisions becomes easier and more consistent. Eating Habits & Behaviors (Continued) 4. Practice breath work. Deep breathing is the best way to quickly turn off the sympathetic state and turn on the parasympathetic state. Take a deep breath in your nose, hold for five seconds, and then make a small circle with your lips to exhale through. Breathe out at a steady pace for as long as possible. Repeat this process for a total of five breaths. 5. Engage your five senses. Touch your food, smell your food, look at the details of your food, try to discern the different individual flavors, and listen to the sounds around you. A focus on your senses will keep you present and connected. 6. Savor every single bite. Part of hunger and satiety is taste. The first bite always tastes the best because your taste buds are designed to signal you to keep eating. As you get full, the taste buds dull and it becomes harder to savor each next bite. This is another signal that you should listen to. 7. Take your time. Put your fork down between every bite. If you re eating with others, use this time to connect with them and fulfill your core relationship cravings. 8. Journal thoughts and emotions while eating (or after if not possible). Is your Inner-Rebel or one of your other subpersonalities speaking up? Write down their messages. Write about any emotions such as joy, shame, guilt, or fear.

5 Journaling with Conscious Eating One of the most important aspects of conscious eating is the journaling exercise. The process of eating teaches you a lot about yourself, if you re listening. Because we ve been at war with food for so long, it s common for our sub-personalities to awaken during mealtime and snacking. They start talking Your Inner-Rebel may start to tell you how the food you re about to eat is so boring (because you re restricting fat or carbs). Your Perfectionist may start to tell you that your meal isn t good enough. It s not organic, or grass-fed, or home-cooked. It has too many calories or too much meat. Your Taskmaster might chime in to remind you that you don t have time for eating. That you need to eat faster because there s stuff that has to get done. After all, you re never productive enough. It s important to begin to identify all these parts of you. This is how you start to really understand yourself and your behavior. This is how you put a name and a face to all the manipulation. This is how you begin to put your Authentic Self back in the driver s seat. You don t have to journal all the time, though. We recommend a 7 day discovery period of journaling followed by 7 day refresher period as needed (every few months). Your shame-filled Inner-Child may feel bad for eating, regardless of what food you ve chosen, because when you were seven your mom called you Piggy and told you that you ate too much. Your Addict may tell you to eat all the food. Just binge. It ll feel so good. And don t leave without dessert, because dessert is the best medication.

6 Prompts In addition to journaling as described on the previous page, it can be helpful to use prompts to kickstart your selfinvestigation. Here are a few prompts we recommend What do I want food to do for me deeply, at the core? What is my inner-critic telling me [specifically] before, during, and after eating? Is there a certain time of day or physical location where I binge or feel intense cravings? The times where I m able to choose healthy, nourishing food could be described as Was my last meal fulfilling? What could have made it more fulfilling? Were there any messages of shame, guilt, or fear during my last meal [or today s meals]? is the biggest stressor in my life. It may contribute to using food as a coping mechanism

7 Part 3 /// Processing While the journaling is extremely important, if you don t process and review what you re discovering nothing will change. The action list to the right describes the processing step in detail. If you need any help with it or need any help processing, reach out in the support group or add private coaching credits to your account so we can help you one-on-one. Remember, we're only challenging you to engage in this process for 7 days. Repeat as needed if your connection starts to fall apart and life starts getting in the way. Processing Habits & Behaviors 1. Before bed, open your journal and review. Read back over everything you journaled from the day s mealtimes. This helps refresh your memory and brings you back into focus and connection. 2. Expand on the entries. Allow yourself to go deeper into each entry. For example, if you ve written something about your Perfectionist, close your eyes and work on connecting with that Perfectionist inside of you. Why was it speaking to you? Why was it trying to manipulate your behavior? Are you missing something in your life it s trying to tell you about? Spend about 10 minutes trying to better understand this part of you. Write down any epiphanies. 3. Correct any negative self-talk. When a part of you talks to your Self in a destructive way, those messages must be reprogrammed. If you ate a treat out of the vending machine and something in your head said, This is why you re fat, because you have no self-control, that needs to be corrected. We will cover re-mapping negative self-talk in detail in a future module.

8 Well Done.