Practical and Spiritual Habits to Dissolve Eating Disorders and Addictions

1. Try to cook/prepare/order meals that contain the 6 essential flavors: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter and astringent. The physiological (rather than psychology) urge to over-eat comes from a lack of satiation. The brain sends signals of satiation when the tongue comes into contact with all of those tastes (which represent the array of a balanced nutritional profile). In other words, in the S.A.D. (standard American diet) where the most consumed vegetable is potatoes in the form of “French fries”, there's a narrowing of the scope of tastes to salty and sweet (ketchup is practically sugar syrup). The brain continues to drive the individual to eat more because it hopes/expects/prays that the next bite will contain the actual nutrient profile (mapped to the taste triggers) that the body actually needs.

2. It's recommended to eat portions of only the space filling two cupped hands, then wait 20 minutes and if there's still a desire to eat more, go for it, again only in that amount. It takes 20 minutes for the stomach’s "fullness" to register with the brain.

3. Make friends with whole foods, list your favorite from each category and experiment with new ways to prepare them in combination:

vegetables
herbs
legumes
grains
nuts
seeds
fruits
berries
spices

With these true, real, whole foods, you can never go wrong.

4. Try to identify the emotional triggers for eating and experiment with other actions. If eating is done as a reward, try substituting an inedible reward, such as a self massage, or reading something you enjoy but don't often give yourself permission or time to. If you can build more inedible pleasures into your life, they will help break the addictive eating patterns. In the case of eating to medicate emotional pain, a similar pattern interruption may be to find soothing in other sensuous things that are again, inedible.

5. Eat more raw food. It doesn't have to be religious extremism, but rather an awareness and attitude that encourages each plate of food to be in an optimal ratio of 80:20 raw/cooked.

6. Identify the foods that are the worst for you, that you love the most. Find raw food recipes for them and never skip a beat and never go without, just replace the ingredients/process with one that does nothing but support and nourish you, rather than undermine and destroy you.

7. Acquire the following kitchen toys:

1. Food processor
2. Food dehydrator (I recommend the Excalibur)
3. Blender
4. Coffee grinder
5. Juicer
6. Grater

With this tool kit, you can recreate virtually any cooked food texture. And as I've studied junk food addiction, I've realized that texture is half the battle. With a food processor you can make your own nut butters, humus, salsa, frozen fruit based ice cream, etc. With a dehydrator you can make candy bars, bread, pizza, fruit roll ups, granola bars, and much more. With a blender you can make smoothies and raw soups. With a coffee grinder you can make your own tahini and other seed spreads, as well as grind flax seeds to mix with water as a raw/vegan egg replacer. With a juicer you can make amazing green juices and rather than throwing out the pulp, stir it back in to keep the roughage and benefit from the fiber in the digestive tract. (Avoid straight fruit and carrot juices as they tend to cause sugar spikes in the blood stream. It’s better to eat fruits whole so that the sugar can be absorbed more slowly).

8. Start jar sprouting in your kitchen next to the sink. It's a 3 day rather than 3 month cycle from sowing to harvest! It's also a way to capture the highest most dense concentration of nutrients in a plant’s life cycle. As it's breaking out of the seed and bursting forth into life as a plant, its nutrient and enzyme count is super high. Also, having a sacred care-giving relationship to your food is essential in forming the connection of reverence and respect that can break the cycle of bad eating habits. Likewise, if every smoker grew their own tobacco, a natural ensuing respect for the plant would surely interrupt patterns of addiction.

9. Eat with full consciousness. Turn off the tv, turn off the lights, turn off your mind, and really give each bite full attention. Create a sacred space and seduce your mouth and stomach slowly. Try to make eating a meditation of gratitude for life and appreciation for the miracle of being able to enjoy such rich pleasure. Think about the worms that eat your scraps in compost piles, while I’m sure they're happy eating decaying organic matter, you on the other hand have an opportunity to experience a much more vast array of tastes, textures, and flavors so really enjoy it. Go into an altered state and be hypnotized by the meal. This doesn’t mean that you should only eat alone, or preclude the enjoyment of family meals. You can building this consciousness and awareness and create a group intention to meditate on the meal beyond simply saying grace. By remaining in grace alone or together with a group to honor the meal, yourself, and each other, you will eat in a more fully conscious way and thus you’ll eat the appropriate amount.

10. Use chop sticks or miniature utensils. To force yourself to eat slower and enjoy each bite more, putting a throttle on the shoveling is a must. Think of it like this, when eating with a high emotional need attached to the meal, perhaps you need for example, 25 units of food derived pleasure to feel complete. If you're shoveling it in with full size spoons and forks, you'll take in an excessive amount of food (depending on what it is). But if you use a smaller utensil, you'll still experience 25 units of food derived pleasure, you'll just be experiencing it in more reasonable amounts and a more reasonable rate. The actual psychological experience of a small spoon or fork load of a dish is no different than a large one. I've personally noticed that the smaller bowl/plate and smaller utensil method actually unconsciously reconfigures my rate of shoveling. I can be emotionally satisfied and full in proper amounts, really just because it slowed me down and took me longer to finish the bowl. Thus there was time for the fullness of the stomach to be registered by the brain, and more savoring occurred by necessity.

11. Don't punish yourself for dietary sins. Negative associations to eating never help, they always hurt. If you're going to eat something you know is bad for you, rather than build up a huge negative self-abusive mental storm of defeat and compulsion, try to just be fully present. Give the dreaded double triple chocolate whatever your absolute full attention because the more fully you experience it in that moment, the larger an arc of satisfaction you'll create which will span more time before the urge arises again. If you eat unconsciously, and the fullness of the pleasure of the experience is lost, and your being is only slightly brushed past by food, then naturally you'll want to have the experience again and again and again in short intervals because you'll need to reach a cumulative satiation point. However, if you take one unit of that food, and you give it your full attention, it will be as if you ate a mountain of that chocolate because you amplified its pleasurable effect using the power of your mind. The resonance of the experience will provide long lasting satisfaction that will stretch the psychological value a long way. That's what I mean by the arc of the experience. Most people eat junk food in a way that if graphed as a curve would like a bunch of thumb tacks, one after another. But if you develop this ability to eat meditatively, you can take that thumb tack and stretch it into a mountain that spans the time scale of a 100 would be thumb tack experiences.

12. Drink lots of water. Adding a slice of lemon or lime, and/or a bit of home grown mint or lemon balm will make it more like true “vitamin water”.

13. Don’t think that 3 big meals a day is natural. Like all wild animals, our true evolved nature is to graze. As gather/hunters, for 3 million years all of our ancestors would eat many times throughout the day in small amounts. The 3 meal a day system was developed by our modern industrial slave masters to streamline factory production…Try spreading your calories evenly throughout the day in 6 smaller diverse healthy meals.

14. Stop eating several hours before going to sleep.

15. Find friends that want to eat healthier and leverage the power of group will and group mind to make healthy eating an effortless joyful community endeavor.