Learning to trust your gut.
Hunger can be a whisper, a gentle nudge, a gliding shadow, begging to be noticed. Feed it and it sinks beneath awareness, quenched until it inevitably returns. This is normal hunger, satisfied through eating. The gnawing, howling pleading of the hungry ghost, however, is never satisfied. Wanting, yearning, longing, it appears in times of stress, in times of sorrow, loneliness, and boredom. In Buddhism, this mythical creature, symbolizing our unmet desires with its tiny mouth and slender neck, cannot possibly swallow enough to fill its immense belly. Feed it ice cream, grilled cheese, chocolate, any manner of so-called comfort foods—it’s never enough; you can’t eat enough food when food is not what your ghost craves.
Given the strong emotional component of our relationship with food, it’s no wonder that traditional calorie-counting just doesn’t cut it. According to a 2007 Consumer Reports survey, an estimated 41 percent of Americans are dieting to lose weight, feeding a $100 billion weight-loss industry—that boasts a 95-percent failure rate. The market is flooded with an increasing surfeit of low-calorie, sugar-free foods and beverages aimed at helping rein in our waistlines. And although the U.S. Centers for Disease Control released a statement last May that the obesity rate appears to be leveling off (that is, not increasing at an alarming or significant rate), millions are still caught in a cycle of weight loss followed by weight gain. Obviously, that’s not good news: while debates rage in the medical community about certain links between obesity and health, a correlation with coronary artery disease and diabetes II is well-established. Equally debilitating, in their own way, are the psychological effects of unsuccessful efforts to lose weight, which often include feelings of failure and depression.
Here in the East Bay, though, the view is not so bleak. A host of local therapists and treatment centers offers a therapeutic menu that focuses on mindful eating instead of dieting, and a less rigid approach to the pleasures (and pitfalls) of the pantry. And the benefits, both the experts and their clients say, are many.
“More than fast food, it is fast living that disconnects us from important internal cues,” says marriage and family therapist Signe Darpinian, who launches My Weigh, a mindful and intuitive eating center in Oakland’s Jack London Square, this month. Distracted dining, she points out—that is, eating while reading, watching TV, or driving—directs our attention to the activity, and away from the body’s quiet counsel to stop eating when satisfied.
It is no surprise that learning to eat mindfully begins with practicing mindfulness. In simplest terms, being mindful is deliberately paying attention, without judgment, to both internal and external environments. It requires taking note of what is going on mentally, emotionally, and physically. Far from asking us to control our emotions and physical states, mindfulness asks only that we accept the present moment for what it is.
Berkeley social psychologist Ronna Kabatznick, author of The Zen of Eating and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, weaves lessons learned from years of Buddhist meditation practice studies into therapies that help people shine a light on their own hungry ghosts—the feelings of emptiness and deprivation that are constantly craving more. “When we are unaware of the hungry ghost and what it is actually hungering for,” Kabatznick says, “we feel driven to eat, to satisfy ourselves with food. Paradoxically, the more we eat, the less satisfied we feel.”
Trust work: Signe Darpinian with client Rhonda Golkin, who’s finally at peace with food and her body. Photo by Lori Eanes.
For those conflicted with cravings, Kabatznick says, “the plate of food can be a battleground. With all the fantasies and needs we project onto food, we don’t see food for what it is.” Often, she says, we “ignore the internal signals from our body and mind that say ‘I’m hungry’ or ‘I’m full.’” For many people, there is a tendency to rely instead on external cues such as social situations, advertising messages, or the mere presence of food on our plates. Under such circumstances, it’s no wonder that we sometimes find ourselves eating on automatic pilot, not connecting with the colors, shapes, sizes, and smells of our food—“eating without eating,” as Kabatznick puts it.
“Everybody seeks satisfaction and contentment through food,” Kabatznick says. “Contentment means the end of craving.” She encourages clients to explore the dynamics of their cravings, the “forces and illusions” that drive overeating. “It’s only by understanding our hearts’ desires,” she says, “that we can really have a healthy relationship with food.”
Like Kabatznick, Darpinian draws on Eastern philosophy in her work with women who struggle with eating issues. “It is really tough for people with such a big preoccupation with food and weight to take on mindfulness,” says Darpinian, 38, because their minds are often buzzing with food-related thoughts. But at Meghan’s Place, a Modesto-based mindful eating center similar to My Weigh that Darpinian founded in 2004, she tailored the practice—often associated with austerity and simplicity—to make it more accessible to her clients. She promotes, she says, a kind of “drive-through spirituality,” suggesting that clients take just a few moments each day to quiet the mind. “It’s like exercise. It might not feel good at first,” she says, noting that people tend to drop endeavors that initially seem difficult. With her low-key approach to the philosophy, though, clients aren’t overwhelmed or alienated, and the benefits of mindfulness have time to take root.
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Two years ago, intent on escaping a lifelong yo-yo dieting cycle, Rhonda Golkin decided to give Meghan’s Place a try. “It was at the point where I didn’t want to be seen out in public by people I knew,” recalls Golkin, who lives in Modesto. “I was very much an emotional eater . . . eating to numb out.” As a child and young woman, Golkin says, she never learned to trust her own ideas about how she should look or feel. She assumed that her excess weight was all that others noticed about her. “It was all external, and that’s all I ever thought about,” she says. But through her work with Darpinian, Golkin says, she has finally learned how to believe in her own perceptions.
Perspective shifts like Golkin’s please Darpinian immensely—they are just what she is striving for at the new Oakland center, which has an upbeat, decidedly non-institutional vibe. Funky decor, bold colors, and animal prints give the site a distinctive down-the-rabbit-hole appeal. “I just can’t see in neutrals,” explains Darpinian, closing the door to the neon-green deco-style fridge. She is about to serve chicken sandwiches from the nearby Oakland restaurant, Bake Sale Betty’s, to her three core staff members, assembled today for a training session. With animated charm, she describes her vision. “I knew how I wanted my clients to feel,” she says. “I didn’t want them to feel they were not well.”
The My Weigh program caters primarily to women whose eating issues aren’t severe enough to be diagnosed as a mental disorder, like anorexia nervosa or bulimia, but are disruptive enough to require attention. Chronic dieters and emotional eaters are good candidates, Darpinian says. My Weigh also offers a program for teenagers—male and female alike—to teach healthy eating skills and increase self-esteem. (The Center for Eating Disorders at Stanford University School for Medicine will be tracking the work with teens.)
Primarily, though, Darpinian focuses on programs for women because, she believes, eating and weight issues don’t appear to affect the quality of life for men as much as they do for women. Men tend to have their “eggs in other baskets,” she says, in terms of determining self-worth; women, on the other hand, strongly link appearance to their overall sense of well-being.
Although Darpinian’s approach doesn’t necessarily start with changing behaviors around food, it can end with people finding a new sense of peace and freedom at the dinner (or breakfast or lunch) table. “The philosophy behind the program is a comprehensive solution that doesn’t address weight loss in a vacuum,” says Darpinian, holding a sandwich blossoming with coleslaw. “It tackles the behind-the-food issues that typically make it difficult to eat in response to internal cues.” The typical diet, she notes, focuses on what to eat. This program incorporates the importance of how to eat.
“We need to redefine how we are measuring success with weight loss,” Darpinian says. “If weight comes off as a result of nourishing the soul in ways other than food, that’s great.” But “an improved quality of life,” she believes, is a more profound marker of success “than a number on a scale.”
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My Weigh doesn’t stop at therapy and training in the art of eating: motion is also on the menu. Darpinian aims to expose clients to a “buffet of exercises and joyful movement” through therapy like yoga and dance. Art therapy, too, is a core element of the program.
Mindfulness is not the only key to sorting through food and body image issues. In fact, Darpinian presents the practice side by side with a widely-used therapeutic model called dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. Darpinian describes this approach as “a nicely packaged blend of East-meets-West,” grounded in psychologies from both hemispheres. Via this therapy, participants work toward better communication, regulating moods, tolerating uncomfortable emotions, and developing a sense of “higher self.” My Weigh’s alternative therapy and exercise classes reinforce the principles of both mindfulness and dialectical behavior therapy skills. Yoga, for example, teaches mindfulness, while a hip-hop class may highlight how to get through challenging situations.
Emotional eaters like Golkin often use food as a way to cope with difficult emotions, such as stress, anger, and anxiety, because the very act of eating leads to calm, numbness, and disconnection from feelings. An emotional eater, therefore, uses food in order not to feel—a strategy that often works so well that it is difficult to overcome.
“It is a lot easier to eat or go on a diet than it is to look at the source of the original pain for some people,” says Karen Scheuner, a registered dietitian and nutrition therapist based in Berkeley. The consequences of emotional eating, such as weight gain, guilt, or negative body image, provide a second layer of pain that, ironically, feels more manageable. “People often feel trapped in their essential pain,” Scheuner says, “if they are in a bad marriage, for example. Sometimes they think there is no solution.” It becomes convenient to redirect attention to a weight problem because at least there is a theoretical solution: weight loss. And the diet industry continues to offer hope that the next regimen, unlike all those that preceded it, will actually work.
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Pamela Mathers, a Modesto-based writer who has struggled with weight for most of her life, survived a childhood tainted with deprivation. “We were really poor,” she says, “so food was always monitored. You couldn’t just go to the cupboard and get something.” When she was in high school, she says, her mom “got religion” about her own eating habits, and dragged the family along on her weight-loss program. The food monitoring intensified—and with it, the deprivation.
As an adult, Mathers was clueless about managing her eating. “Over the years my weight went up and down,” she says. She tried just about every diet around. Typical of most dieters, she’d lose weight initially, feel great, and then put the weight back on—usually with a few bonus pounds. At 57, exhausted by this fruitless lifelong cycle, Mathers gave herself an ultimatum. She would spend one more year trying to lose weight. If she didn’t succeed, then on her 58th birthday, she would decide either to have gastric bypass surgery—or to accept her body as it was, and stop dieting once and for all.
Mathers, who has been working with Darpinian at Meghan’s Place for the past year, is an expert on the subject of cravings. A particular cake at her local supermarket was her secret binge food. “I would wait until my husband had gone to bed and would go to the store to get it,” she says. “It was like heroin to me.” Taking to heart the lessons she was learning at Meghan’s Place, however, Mathers realized that it wasn’t cake she was craving, but something more.
“Now I’m trying to address the need first, then to find alternative ways to nurture myself,” she says. First, she identified emotional triggers that led her to eat without hunger. Next, she found a better way to respond to those emotions. In Mathers’s case, it turned out, a deep discomfort with anger fueled many binges. “I used to see anger as a character deficit, not realizing that anger is healthy,” she says. “It just depends what you do with it.” These days, when rage threatens to consume her, “I swear!” Mathers says. “I have this whole litany!”
Golkin, too, once fought to manage food cravings. “My hardest time would be before bed, when I would crave something good”—though “not necessarily food.” The quirky but effective antidote: developing an inner food critic. “If I was craving chocolate, for example,” she says, “I would sit with a piece of chocolate for 15 minutes and savor it, and get all the aspects of taste and texture.” Eventually, “I found that I would just get bored with the chocolate.”
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As helpful as practicing mindfulness and connecting cravings to feelings may be, however, there is still more to the healthy eating formula. Darpinian calls the missing link “eating with your authentic appetite”—paying close attention to the body’s signal to eat when hungry, and to stop eating when full. This is the basis of intuitive eating, which picks up where mindful eating leaves off.
Unfortunately, following our authentic appetites may not be as simple as it sounds. Tiffany Jones (a pseudonym), a 28-year-old from Modesto who works with Darpinian on both mindful and intuitive eating, struggled with understanding when to eat. “For me, it was really mechanical at first,” Jones says. “I didn’t know what those [hunger] signals were, much less how to recognize them.”
With guidance, she started rating her perceptions of hunger and fullness on a scale from one to 10. One, for example, would be so starving she could eat her hand; 10 would be so full that she might need to lie down. For Jones, it was crucial not to get too hungry, which could lead to out-of-control eating. Equally important, however, was not to get uncomfortably full, which could lead to feelings of guilt and weight gain. Her goal, then, was to eat until she was satisfied, perhaps a six or seven on her hunger scale.
Strange as it may sound, it often takes a great deal of practice to, as Scheuner puts it, “reclaim the body’s innate ability to self-feed.” In order to reconnect with hunger cues, she says, “you have to bring in mindfulness. You cannot be disconnected if you want to be an intuitive eater.”
Unlike most dieters, intuitive eaters choose foods based both on nutritional quality and their own preferences, even leaving room for sweets and snack foods. Experts say that keeping a variety of healthy foods on hand makes it easier to make choices based on the authentic appetite. And ultimately, Darpianian says, those discerning choices are the ones that really leave us satisfied.
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The concept of intuitive eating has been around since at least the early ’90s, when two registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, described it in their seminal Intuitive Eating, today the bible of most eating behavior specialists. There is nothing radical about the approach; in fact, the term intuitive eating is based on the premise that humans innately eat this way. Picture a toddler happily eating strained peas: suddenly, his jaws clamp shut and the child is visibly (if not audibly) disturbed at the prospect of eating another bite. Fussy eater? Maybe. But more likely, this kid knows when he’s had enough and will be happy to eat again in a couple of hours. The fact is, most of us, over time, have simply forgotten what it’s like to eat normally.
Scheuner asks a new client to start by experiencing the sensation of hunger and describe it verbally. “They have to be able to identify hunger for them[selves] first,” she says. “It is unique for everyone.” Next, she offers the client guidance in determining what she wants to eat—not tomorrow, not in general, but right in that moment. For many chronic dieters, trusting the gut can be a new and confusing experience. But, says Scheuner, “once the judgment [about good or bad choices] comes in, you are not fully embracing mindful eating.” Finally, Scheuner directs the client to ask her stomach—not her mouth—what it feels like eating. Does it want something hot, or cold? Salty, or sweet? Creamy, or crunchy? And so on. Amazingly, she says, the answers surface.
After many months of focused work, Golkin, Mathers, and Jones all say they are not only more confident eaters, but also more confident human beings. Embracing a more self-aware way of eating, Golkin says, “has changed the way I feel about everything. It gives me a chance to work on other goals for myself instead of just obsessing about food, weight, and my body.”
Jones has finally begun dating, something she’d been avoiding, and is ready to let people know the real her. “I’m not just sending my representative,” she says. Mathers recently turned 58—and decided against the gastric bypass surgery. “I know I am becoming a normal eater,” she says. “And intuitive eating is the answer for me. I’ve encountered a lot of adversity in my life, and know that I can conquer this too.”
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Katherine Dittmann, M.S., R.D., is a nutrition therapist who works with girls and women with eating disorders.
