The FastDay Forum

Several writers advocate mindful eating and a number of people (@tracieknits, @sallyo) have written about Dr Amanda Sainsbury-Salis' Don't Go Hungry Diet and how her ideas have been useful to them.

This is an excellent set of ideas to run with along side 5:2. As Tracie says, it's about focusing in on how hungry you are and eating to that measure. One of the things she recommends is scoring your level of hunger before and after eating.

So,

before eating you will be
• 0 : not hungry;
• -1 : slightly hungry ( I could wait awhile before eating);
• -2 : quite hungry ( I would like to eat something, a snack or a light meal);
• -3 : very hungry ( I'd like to eat something substantial right now) or
• -4 : Ravenously hungry. ( I could eat anything!)

And then after eating you have to rate your satiety level. So

• +1 : unsatisfied (I still feel a bit hungry and I'd gladly eat something now.)
• +2 : Just satisfied (My body is relaxed an comfortable and if I ate any more I would still feel comfortable but I don't need any more.)
• +3 Elegantly satisfied (My body is relaxed and comfortable but if I ate any more I would begin to feel over satisfied.)
• +4 Over satisfied ( I know in my heart of hearts that I've eaten more than my body wants and I feel uncomfortable)

Amanda argues that those of us who are over weight have lost touch with our bodies and we don't eat to our hunger signals. We eat for other reasons. She recommends keeping a daily food diary - the Success Diary, she calls it, in which you asses your hunger level and satiety level before and after every thing you eat. I have done this over a 3 month period and it did indeed give me insight into my behaviour around food.

She says that when you eat when you are hungry, stop when you've have enough, you will lose weight. Your body loses weight, as has been said here, in steps. You lose, then you maintain, then you lose a bit more. As well as trying to eat when you are hungry, she also advises a diet of non processed foods, as much as possible - so eat fruit but not fruit juice for example, lots of vegetables. Also she believes it's important to eat a big variety of different foods so that you get all the nutrients your body needs. And exercise. So in the food diary, as well as looking at your hunger/satiety levels you also record what you eat so that you can track how much processed food, the range of fruit and veg you are eating.

So it's not about counting calories. It's not about cutting out whole food groups. It's about really focussing in on how your body feels and if you feel like you really want something, that's what you should eat. She talks about junk food which she calls 'fun food', I think and talks about 'having a party in your mouth'. It's ok to do that but you don't want to party all the time. It's a treat, not an everyday thing. [Reformatted from post214623.html?hilit=Amanda%20Sainsbury%20Salis's%20Don't%20Go%20Hungry%20Diet.#p214623]

@Sallyo, The one issue that arises with the kind of mindful eating that you describe is that people who have something wrong with their blood sugar will be physiologically ravenous shortly after eating, because that is what swiftly moving blood sugars will do to us. So asking, "Am I hungry" gives the answer, "Yes!" And eating just makes it worse.

So I think the issue here is that there are different reasons why people become overweight, and if the problem is comfort eating, emotional eating, this strategy is very helpful. If the problem a metabolic one, it wont' help, and the person often will blame themselves for gluttony because they are getting that continual hunger symptom. There is one last issue which is that some people are heavy because they are abuse survivors and the fat which makes them unattractive keeps them safe. Those people need a whole nother kind of help to be able to diet successfully. [From: post214645.html?hilit=swiftly%20moving%20blood%20sugars%20will%20do%20to%20us#p214645]

There are people for whom mindful eating is revelatory and transformative and I'd be grateful to hear from those people.

There are people for whom this hyperawareness of food and their emotional state would send their chimp/wild child/ego defence into over-drive and the constant logging and checking-in might well drive rebound episodes of over-eating or trigger what Gillian Riley calls the addictive desire to over-eat.

Do we know ourselves and our likely reactions well enough to assess whether mindfulness would work for us from the outset? Or is it something that is amenable to intermittent auditing (so to speak)?

Dear@SSure.

I'm thinking that mindul eating is miles away from a constant logging of experience in the way which you describe. To my mind, there might be a potential danger in that, but a mindful approach would be different in that it would entail simply ( although in practice it is not simple at all) sitting with our experience and registering it for what it is. We can observe our turmoil and disengage from it and we can fully experience eating, rather than just stuffing food down our throats. Mindfulness is about sitting ( not always literally) with our experience, seeing it for what it is and letting go. It can help us to still the monkey mind (or inner chimp) of which people speak.

Mindful eating would entail fully experiencing the experience of eating. There is an excercise in mindfulness which involves eating a single raisin. Fully savouring the experience might take as long as 5 or 10 minutes. I thnk that a truly mindful approach would be very helpful , both in our experience of fasting and of eating. I need to remember that.

New here so I hope you don't mind me jumping in with my experience of this - mindful eating is something that's been in my consciousness for quite a few years now! My weight problems are 100% to do with emotional/psychological problems with food which I've had since childhood (long story!). And I find the idea and practice of mindful eating incredibly soothing, and a way of caring for and honouring myself as I deal with the emotions related to eating.

That said, it didn't help me with weight loss, and I wasn't able to accept that the weight I was (bordering on obese) is a weight I should accept and try to be comfortable with. But I think as a maintenance strategy, it's wonderful and definitely a tool in my kit for the future!

I first truly became aware of mindful eating when I bought and followed Paul McKenna's "I Can Make You Thin". As well as being a wonderfully relaxing hypnotic tape, it included a diary and each day you had a checklist:

I ate when I was hungry
I ate what I really wanted
I ate consciously
I stopped when full
I drank water
I moved my body
I listened to the CD
I did the mirror exercise (something I rarely did...if ever!! )

I have to say I did actually lose weight when following these instructions and listening to the CD etc. The only thing was, I was never sure if I was hungry and I find it difficult to imagine myself thin!
Having said that, although I don't really follow this anymore, I can't eat anything without chewing and counting to at least 20. You also need to smell your food, really take it in. All too often, we wait for our meal and when it comes we just woolf it down and barely taste it. If we take the trouble to become aware of what we're eating and when we are really hungry, it will probably surprise us how little we actually need.

Hmm, think I may follow this diary again (alongside my fasting of course! )

For me, mindful eating has become, 'eat slowly, savour and digest'.
It is all to easy for me to eat fast (ingrained from student life when in student catered halls, if you didn't eat fast, you didn't get food), so the key now is eat small amounts and wait for the trigger that says, 'full'. I now know how much will make me 'full' and how much will make me feel overfull. It takes longer for my body to reach my satiety consciousness.
May not make much sense and I don't always get it right.
But I do, 95% of the time.

For me, mindfulness means keeping it simple. I find anything that clutters things up, either in the external life or the internal life, ultimately leads to not being able to sustain/ failure / opt-out / overload / stress, whatever you want to call it. I do like @PennyForthem's approach, and it is hopefully one which should be available to everyone who has spent any time fasting. Everyone here will have come to experience it in their own way, from different experiences or directions, but it is something that can get forgotten quite easily sometimes.

Here in the states, I have worked with Judith Matz (dietsurvivors.com) & learned about "intuitive eating" which is the same as mindful eating & sounds like Paul McKenna's program as well. I also listen to a Darren Marks weight loss hypnosis app & a you tube by Kim Carmen Walsh on changing your thinking. I find them very helpful & have noticed a difference when I do not use them. I do wait until I am hungry to eat, not ravenous, about a 3-4 on the scale of 10 & have found it helps me maintain my blood sugars & require less insulin, so when you find what works for you, it can be helpful. I agree with others that when all the pieces are in place, it works for me 85-90% of the time. Finally, Thich Naht Hahn has a new book about mindfulness & weight loss (Savor:Mindful Eating, Mindful Life), from the first chapter preview, I may pick it up.

[Tracieknits]

I am in the car, so sorry for the short reply. I'm not good with this keyboard. But, just because an approach might not work for a few people does not mean it should be disregarded for everyone. After all, there are people who should not do 5:2. That doesn't mean it's not a valid tool for many.

[wildmissus]

I have practised mindfulness in the past to help me cope with life and it works for me. Mindfulness is about being and not doing which can be difficult to do as our minds tend to wander quickly. So mindfulness is not about analysing or planning and taking action, just about being.

Following on from the Diet Fatigue thread and the many helpful comments made on it I realised that on non fast days I never give a thought to hunger, I just scoff food all day long. I have downloaded a kindle book on Mindful Eating. I have also noticed a few successful fasters on the forum talking about mindful eating - whether they realise that is what they are doing or not. At the moment I am just trying to be aware of how I feel when I eat, either how a type of food makes me feel or the volume of food I have eaten. Once I have read the book I will do the exercises and really give mindful eating a go.

The biggest problem with mindfulness is remembering to do it!

Doh! Just read the Diet Fatigue thread and realised that there are a lot of posts since I last looked at it and this thread stems from it. But just to say things in a different way, mindfulness is like trying to lose weight - you have to keep at it or you fall of the wagon.

I thought about this whilst sitting watching Rapunzel for the nth time (as you do) with a grandchild under each arm.
With a lapful of sticky, half fingered belvita biscuits (theirs, not mine) I got to thinking about how I got to what I call considered eating.
It has been a long process... 4 years I guess.
1. The realisation I was terribly overweight
2. Losing 2 stones
3. Putting a stone back on
4. Discovering 5 2
5. Losing anther 4 st
6. Discovering selective powers, that I didn't know I possessed
7. Discovering a balance for me ..... gluttony v being lean
8. Finding I can be lean and happy, whilst eating mindfully (my way)

Only my take, but there you go. I might have missed the point entirely (I often do ) but to say that mindful eating doesn't arrive overnight. You might need to have a mindset change to achieve it....

Good thread. I think 'mindful eating' is a bit different from the Don't Go Hungry Diet. Mindful eating is suggestive of meditation practices and would certainly be a useful tool in the weigh loss game. It would include focussing on your hunger levels and satiety levels but it includes more than that. It includes whole body awareness of the smell, the taste, the sensations of eating, and of not eating. It includes the full awareness of the emotional environment around food. I don't know that I'm up for doing that at this time in my life, but I am up for eating to fit my hunger levels.

I've just re-read the first chapter of Amanda's book: Don't Go Hungry for Life and she talks about her own experience of dieting herself fat, the constant see-saw between dieting and post-diet bingeing. She calls it the Diet Dungeon. It doesn't matter how much she tried to lose weight, she put it all back on and more. She knew every thing about weightloss, she read everything she could get her hands on , but she put on weight. Then she decided to do a Phd on weight loss and got a scholarship to a Swiss University in Geneva. It was here that she developed her theory. Perhaps I will start another thread and summarise the chapters as I read them. It would be a good thing for me to do as I embark on the next stage of my weight loss journey.

Doing 5:2 is not in the Diet Dungeon for me. I have managed to lose 13kg and keep it off for a year. I am not unhappy about food. and have no sense of deprivation - except on 2 days a week. The 'I can have it tomorrow' mantra works for me. And often I don't even want it tomorrow.

There are people for whom mindful eating is revelatory and transformative and I'd be grateful to hear from those people.
There are people for whom this hyperawareness of food and their emotional state would send their chimp/wild child/ego defence into over-drive and the constant logging and checking-in might well drive rebound episodes of over-eating or trigger what Gillian Riley calls the addictive desire to over-eat.
Do we know ourselves and our likely reactions well enough to assess whether mindfulness would work for us from the outset? Or is it something that is amenable to intermittent auditing (so to speak)?

What an intriguing thread! I have been reading a bit about mindfulness, and would like to start practicing it (will ask for more input from you, @WildMissus, at some point).
First, I'll stress that I think mindful eating makes a lot of sense as a strategy for many people. But I'd like to add a third set of people to @SSure's categorization above.
The author of Don't Go Hungry says (according to @Sallyo - I have not read the book) that those of us who are over weight have lost touch with our bodies and we don't eat to our hunger signals. Certainly this is true for a lot of people, and I was probably one of them.
But now I am striving to be utterly and completely unmindful about eating. And not because I'm afraid of my chimp. The rest of my immediate family operates in this way, and in the past, I've always been amazed that they can do so. They eat when they are hungry. They stop when they are full. Generally speaking, they don't gain or lose weight, and they are all reasonably healthy. Three of the four could be described as thin, the fourth is heavier, but does not have an overweight BMI. Now that weight loss is no longer my goal, I see this "unmindfulness" as something I can and should achieve, and I think I am on my way to doing so.

Yes, @wendyjane, that unmindfulness makes sense too. I think you are right about skinny people. They just eat when they're hungry and stop when they've had enough. I think years of dieting robs people of that ability because the deprivation syndrome sets in: I have to eat more than I need today in case I don't get enough another day when I am on a diet. And we start to obsess about food. That is not mindfulness.

Very interesting, I haven't yet read Amanda Sainsbury-Salis, but I have read the book by Josie Spinardi which talks about eating like a skinny person, as well as the problems which result from dieting which Sallyo mentions, I found it to be a very good read. The way I understand it, those of us who have dieted and had a strange relationship with food need to use mindful eating before hopefully graduating to instinctive eating, we can't just suddenly not think about eating and eat 'normally', we don't know how to.
My problem with all of this is taking the necessary time to eat and think about eating, when I do think about when I want to eat, stopping when I am full and I eat what I really want I find it works very well, but I find it easy to get out of the habit of doing it. As soon as I am in a hurry, a bit stressed, distracted by work or the kids I find it easy to scoff anything without any thoughts at all.
Probably the top practical thing I have taken away from Spinardi's book is to only eat food on a plate in an appropriate place, e.g. at the table, as I have a problem with snacking on things when I go into the kitchen, when I make dinner etc., so I have found actually making the decision to eat something and putting it on a plate (even if it is just one cracker) really helpful. As I am an emotional eater the other thing which has helped is asking myself what I expect eating to solve when I want to eat when upset etc., it sounds obvious but I never did it before, and it helps me a lot to think about that instead of just eating.

I find these intriguing and am learning a lot from the varieties of mindfulness and the distinctions that are made.

Sainsbury-Salis' system seems to quantify the qualitative/subjective . Like Spinardi, Riley, and many others, it seems to make people aware that there are many reasons that we eat, and hunger is one of them and, for some, rarely the primary driver.

iirc, Spinardi has a system that would drive me scatty. If I can find my notes on it, I'll post it below. @Nicky_94, do you recall what it is? And the part about distinguishing hunger depending on where in your tummy you feel something?

Similarly to @PennyForThem, Spinardi writes of the need to accept that this is a process and happens over time:

“But can you imagine if the very first time that you fell after pulling yourself up on that coffee table, a voice came thundering down at you, berating you for falling? “I knew you couldn't do it! You fell, you idiot! I can’t believe you fell. Everyone else is walking, but not you. You are a pathetic little crawler and you always will be!” No, quite the opposite! Toddlers are met with lavish praise at each minor progression, even steps in the general direction of progress. When the little one pulls herself up, she gets applause. Mom grabs the video camera and calls the grandparents. Can you imagine how different—and by different, I mean better—this journey would be if with every advancement you made, every small, wobbly step you took in the direction toward Hunger Directed Eating (however imperfect it was), you lavished praise, delighted wonderment, and encouragement upon yourself?”
― Josie Spinardi, How to Have Your Cake and Your Skinny Jeans Too: Stop Binge Eating, Overeating and Dieting For Good Get the Naturally Thin Body You Crave From the Inside Out