Perhaps it sounds strange to talk about food stress. After all, food is just, well, food.
It is something you put in your body to give it nourishment so you will have the energy to do the activities that make up your life. It is easy to think of food as nothing more than what you consume. Unlike the days when people lived directly off the land and most of the food they ate was food they grew, we buy food in large grocery stores. In our minds, any kind of food is always available all year round. So we have become consumers of food.
Still, there is more to our relationship with food that this. There is a significant social component to food. When you get together with friends, quite often food is involved. Sitting around the table, sharing and conversing before, during and after a meal, can not only nourish our bodies; it can nourish our souls. You don’t have to scroll through social media very long before you come across a picture of someone’s plate of food; there may be lots of reasons for that, but it is an expression of the place of food in our lives.
Food can even have a religious or spiritual significance. If you grew up going to church, you probably attended potluck meals and fellowship dinners. Almost all religious traditions have a sacred meal as one of their practices; these meals have been going on for thousands of years and can have an inspiring, even mystical, quality to them.
So it is fair to say that we do more than buy and consume food. We have a deep relationship with our food and drink.
Often, that relationship can be stressful and problematic. As I talk about a relationship with food that can be stressful and problematic, I invite you to become more mindful of the place of food in your life. That place may be connected to a struggle with obesity, which can contribute to problems like diabetes and cardiovascular disease. That place may involve an obsession with physical appearance that leads to a variety of diets. That place may be using food as a way to avoid dealing with difficult emotions and situations (they call them “comfort food” for a reason).
In his book, Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn says that since “the food we eat over a lifetime has a major influence on our health, we need to pay attention in a sensible, non-alarmist, non-fanatical way to the whole domain of what we put in our bodies…We simply have to bring some degree of mindfulness to what we purchase and put in our bodies in order to navigate and modulate the potential dangers to our health across the life span” (519).
There are a variety of ways that we can use mindfulness to become aware of and free ourselves from some of the unconscious behaviors and motivations related to food. Some of these practices are simple, but they are not easy because our relationship with food has been around for as long as we have lived. You can begin by being aware of how much you eat and how often you eat. You can be mindful of how you feel after you eat. Do you feel differently after eating certain foods? Do you feel differently when you eat quickly or slowly?
Since eating is something that you do several times a day, you have the chance to practice mindfulness with your food.
For example, pick a meal and eat it mindfully. You can turn off your phone and eat your meal in silence. When the food is in front of you, notice its colors and shapes, its aromas and its temperatures. As you place the food in your mouth, be mind of the textures: soft, thick, crisp. See if you can taste the different flavors that are part of any dish.
As you eat, see if you can be aware of how your body is feeling. Do those feelings change? Can you sense when your body is saying to you “enough”? What do you want to do when your body says that?
Throughout the day, be mindful of your hunger and your cravings. It is not unusual to feel a hunger or a craving and simply satisfy it with whatever food you have nearby. But can you pause for a moment and simply feel the craving in your body? If you usually satisfy this craving with something that is not really good for you, can you pause and ask if you really do want to put this in your body? Can you choose another food, or can you simply let the hunger be there without satisfying it?
When I was first learning the practice of mindfulness, one of my teachers gave everyone in the group a grape. The instructions were simple: Spend ten minutes eating this grape. My very first thought was how am I going to fill up ten minutes with this one grape. And then there were other thoughts: What does this have to do with mindfulness? I wish I could look around and see how the other group members were doing this (but our teacher was smart enough to tell us to go off by ourselves to do the practice).
And so, I brought my attention to the grape. I had never given this much attention before to one grape. When I eat grapes, I break off a stem and pop them into my mouth. I had never noticed the smooth texture of the skin. I had never noticed that grapes actually have a smell. I peeled off the skin and felt the texture of the pulp. I could feel some juice running down my fingers. There were more smells. Finally, I put the grape in my mouth. I was mindful of the explosion of juice. I was actually tasting the grape. I felt it go down my throat. Even today, it is hard for me to go back to the practice of popping grapes in my mouth. I may not spend ten minutes with each of them, but I have a different enjoyment of eating grapes.
I have a different relationship with this particular food because of my mindfulness. If you would like to learn more about how mindfulness can help you with different stressors in your life, I invite you to visit my stress reduction specialty page.