Learning Mindful Eating Creates a Positive Food Relationship in Menopause.
Learning Mindful Eating Creates a Positive Food Relationship in Menopause.
Mindful Eating is being used in many places on the internet as a way to lose weight, however LEARNING Mindful Eating is much broader, and deeper, than the concept of intentional weight loss.
Weight loss is a hot topic at any age. There are so many body changes, including weight gain in menopause and perimenopause that and women spend a LOT of time talking about how to lose weight in midlife.
If you want to explore the connections between menopause and weight, you can read this post next.
If you’re thinking a lot about your weight in menopause, this can keep you from focusing on other things that matter to your overall health.
This can also impact your relationship with food, which could probably use a little TLC if you have made it to 50 or beyond! Learning Mindful Eating will take the focus OFF of calories, so you can actually concentrate on your health.
If you are just focusing on calories in, and calories out, you’re forgetting about OTHER things that make up your health, including:
Sleep quality
Protein needs
Getting enough fiber
An accepting mindset
Fulfilling relationships
Boundaries around your precious time
Your CORE VALUES.
Movement that you love
You may also be missing key nutrients that support bone health, digestive health, brain health and even your own detoxification pathways.
Learning Mindful Eating helps you focus on your own needs by tuning in to your OWN wise mind and not some diet.
With this practice, you will find a way of eating that is satisfying, enjoyable, healthy (whatever that means to you) and above all, SUSTAINABLE.
It will help you develop a more positive relationship to food.
How much are we talking about changing a negative relationship to food, in menopause? Not enough in my opinion.
Our relationship to food is at the heart of our choices of food. This relationship can affect dieting behaviour and keep us in a binge restrict cycle.
Yet, I understand the desire to lose weight, especially when we age.
When I first decided I would be learning Mindful Eating, I thought it would help me with weight loss as well.
Turns out, it helped me see that I overate as a way to cope with anxiety, that I fell into spells of mindless eating that I was barely conscious of, and that I ACTUALLY had a relationship to food, that I never saw before.
That was a thing, I asked? A relationship to food?
Yep. It’s a thing. I NEVER thought about a relationship with food, or even knew that existed, until I started learning Mindful Eating.
Learning Mindful Eating helped me see my relationship to food, and accept that relationship with love and kindness.
It was hard at first, because my relationship to food was fearful and orthorexic.
But this work was something I sorely needed, going through this transition of midlife, where my body was changing and I felt a loss of control.
Before I turned 50, I just tried to diet all the time, and shamed myself for not being able to sustain it all. I also did things like:
Cut out food groups: don’t eat carbs!
Tried to eat less: and was protein deprived and hungry. It also kept me eating too much sugar,
Stop eating after 6 pm: even though I worked out at night sometimes.
I never gave a thought to this food relationship thing. I also had no idea that diets didn’t work, long term.
I just thought that I had to do BETTER. WORK HARDER AT DIETING.
The whole process became increasingly harder for me, as I aged. Why is this? My responsibilities and stress increased, being sandwiched between parent care and work and family struggles.
I also believe that constant calorie restriction through perimenopause, over exercising, and a lot of stress, made me really sick.
I ended up with reactivated EBV. Epstein-Barr virus.
Truth: I loved how it took away my appetite. Isn’t that nuts? And disordered?
No joke, losing weight became a breeze. That was because I had an inflamed liver, and spleen, and was very lucky that my mother’s doctor diagnosed me.
Why do I share this?
If I understood, back then, that everyone has a relationship to food, and their body, I might have understood how disordered that way of thinking was.
I might have prevented hospitalization, liver issues to this day, and ongoing joint pain that can come with Epstein-Barr
Learning mindful eating helped this self-proclaimed stress eater and emotional eater find balance with food.
It helps me work comfort foods into my life with intention, and thought, without over obsessing about weight and calories.
There are many comfort foods I feel an emotional connection with.
What about you?
Bread
Soup
Cookies
My mom’s perogies.
My late fiance’s fudge
His hollandaise sauce
My current partner’s french onion soup
There are some foods that you may feel connected to, but you feel that to eat them is to be UNHEALTHY.
Or worse.
You feel wrong and guilty for wanting them.
Learning Mindful Eating will help food take on new meaning.
It did for me, during an event a colleague held, that involved my two favourite things: FOOD AND WINE.
Except I have had to cut back the wine in menopause.
This colleague became certified in Mindfulness and had been sharing her experience in an event. Mindfulness, being still, accepting the present, letting go, all sounded difficult for me, this Type A personality.
I was a master at ignoring my emotions, at compartmentalizing feelings and eating them away.
With food and wine, she taught me the foundations of Mindfulness and Mindful Eating.
I saw that learning Mindful Eating could improve my food relationship.
If you are new to the idea of a Food Relationship, the video below will exp;lain it:
Learning Mindful Eating was THE game changer that helped me SEE, and then change, my food relationship.
My emotions around food became clearer, and so did my patterns around food.
I also improved my emotional regulation. This was tied to my overeating.
After I grasped the concept of Mindful Eating, I started looking for a training program.
Yet, I still had a diet mentality lurking in my brain.
I thought that learning Mindful Eating would be the “magic” that would bring my 40 year old body back.
There IS NO magic that works against age. No matter how hard we look. If we are aging, we are lucky to be doing it. Mindful Eating does work against TIME, because it keeps you in the NOW, with your food.
Being in the NOW helps you make decisions to stop eating, or start eating, based on YOUR OWN NEEDS, your own body cues, and your own experience, in THIS moment.
Learning Mindful Eating will help you release worry about what will happen when, or if, you eat the pasta.
How? When you practice mindfulness with food, you’re just being in the moment with your pasta, and your body signals, like hunger, fullness and satisfaction.
I know, it sounds strange doesn’t it?
Learning your own body signals, and triggers to eat, along with learning Mindful Eating, helps you discover what food, health and your body, mean to YOU.
What diet does THAT for you?
Mindful eating is one way to bring a Non Diet mentality to your food and nutrition. If this is new to you, I invite you to watch my Food Freedom Series on my YouTube Channel.