A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety. – Aesop’s Fables

Stress! We have it. It’s part of the fabric of our daily lives. Some of the words we use to describe stress are very telling as to the physiological effects of the experience. We get: hot, worked up, fired up, butterflies in the stomach, antsy, tense. What’s happening to us when we experience those feeling is that some conflict has stimulated our adrenal cortex to dump hormones into our system to better prepare us for “fight or flight.” And stress makes us HUNGRY.

The hormones like the steroid cortisol, promote the breakdown of fats and proteins so they can be synthesized by the liver into glucose (blood sugar) for our “fevered” brain and to prepare the muscles for action. Bodily systems not essential to the conflict are suppressed so that all of our available resources can go towards prepping us for action: the immune system changes, our digestive system slows way down. The sour feeling we feel in our stomach is now attributed by researchers not to increased acid production but rather a slowdown of the flow from our stomach to our intestines; as blood and oxygen are stolen away from our stomach to be used by our brain and muscles. The stomach contents sit there longer, churning away, making us nauseas or causing acid reflux.

When the stress hormone levels drop, our blood sugar levels drop. Oxygen and blood flow return to our digestive system. These two effects combine to make us feel very hungry. This can promote weight gain if we didn’t actually burn very many calories during our stress. Most modern stress, such as a boss hovering over your shoulder while you’re at your computer, doesn’t burn calories the way running from a bear might have for some ancestor. We can very easily end up over compensating by eating far more calories than what we burned. The opposite state of “fight or flight” is “rest and digest.” Food has enormous power to help us to relax. Turning to food in times of stress is actually quite natural but it has to be done very consciously. If your body hasn’t exercised away the stress, to physically burn off the products of it, then you are in real danger of overcompensating.

The purpose of food is to take care of us, to comfort us, it is what we should turn to. But what we must acknowledge is that it isn’t just the nutrition that calms us, it’s the sensation. Think about the last time you were really hungry to the point it made you tense and anxious. When we are in that state it’s usually the very first bite that calms us down. This is long before any of the nutrients of the meal have hit the bloodstream. Your mind is sated before your body. This is the proper way to eat when we feel strong emotions. Ideally you’d like to physically burn off the products of stress with exercise to relieve it but that’s not always possible. It is always possible to take a morsel of food and fully experience it; to lose oneself in the sensations of it. The more of your mind that you concentrate on your food the less of your mind left to concentrate on your troubles. The quicker you can lower the stress the less effect it will have on you.

A few tips for eating after you’ve been stressed:

• Be aware of why you’re hungry. Don’t try to shut your hunger off or tune it out. You are supposed to be hungry after stress!

• Find some way to do some exercise when you’re stressed to burn off the effects. Climb the stairs instead of taking the elevator. Take a walking break outside. Do some stretching.

• Focus on the calming aspects of the food. It’s not really the nutrition, it’s the ritual of preparation, the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations that are truly calming. A very small sensual morsel can accomplish more than a banquet.

• Realize that the feeling will pass. It’s best to think of stress hormone swings like a pendulum: the harder they swing one way the harder they will swing the other. To stop a child on a swing you can’t just push hard from the other side! Try to dampen the swings to achieve a sense of balance.

It’s very important to keep in mind the relation between food and stress. Stress makes us hungry and unquenched hunger is a stress of its own. So now you have two stresses, but only one that can be relieved by food alone. The usual dynamic is that we get stressed and through biology we become hungry… and then hunger becomes its own stress. We eat some and we feel better, since we’ve relieved the stress of hunger, so in our minds we do the math and figure if we eat more we will feel even better. But we can’t relieve non-hunger stress with food… unless we use food as a platform for meditation.

Food can be an excellent distraction. One can focus all of one’s concentration on it and completely lose oneself in the sensual pleasures of a small morsel of some really good grub. If we eat a small amount when we become hungry after stress, using the somaception exercise, we can transform the eating experience into a meditative relaxation experience. Food is therapy. A small amount to quench the hunger eaten with full concentration can calm the nerves and bring far more comfort than a stuffed belly.

An excellent article in Wired about the placebo effect:

To test products internally, pharmaceutical companies routinely run trials in which a long-established medication and an experimental one compete against each other as well as against a placebo. As head of Lilly’s early-stage psychiatric drug development in the late ’90s, Potter saw that even durable warhorses like Prozac, which had been on the market for years, were being overtaken by dummy pills in more recent tests. The company’s next-generation antidepressants were faring badly, too, doing no better than placebo in seven out of 10 trials.

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

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Regular yoga practice is associated with mindful eating

Study suggests that mindful eating can play a key role in long-term weight maintenance

SEATTLE — Aug. 3, 2009 — Regular yoga practice is associated with mindful eating, and people who eat mindfully are less likely to be obese, according to a study led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The study was prompted by initial findings reported four years ago by Alan Kristal, Dr.P.H., and colleagues, who found that regular yoga practice may help prevent middle-age spread in normal-weight people and may promote weight loss in those who are overweight. At the time, the researchers suspected that the weight-loss effect had more to do with increased body awareness, specifically a sensitivity to hunger and satiety than the physical activity of yoga practice itself.

The follow-up study, published in the August issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, confirms their initial hunch.

“In our earlier study, we found that middle-age people who practice yoga gained less weight over a 10-year period than those who did not. This was independent of physical activity and dietary patterns. We hypothesized that mindfulness – a skill learned either directly or indirectly through yoga – could affect eating behavior,” said Kristal, associate head of the Cancer Prevention Program in the Public Health Sciences Division at the Hutchinson Center.

The researchers found that people who ate mindfully – those were aware of why they ate and stopped eating when full – weighed less than those who ate mindlessly, who ate when not hungry or in response to anxiety or depression. The researchers also found a strong association between yoga practice and mindful eating but found no association between other types of physical activity, such as walking or running, and mindful eating.

“These findings fit with our hypothesis that yoga increases mindfulness in eating and leads to less weight gain over time, independent of the physical activity aspect of yoga practice,” said Kristal, who is also a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health.

Kristal, a yoga enthusiast for the past 15 years, said that yoga cultivates mindfulness in a number of ways, such as being able to hold a challenging physical pose by observing the discomfort in a non-judgmental way, with an accepting, calm mind and focus on the breath. “This ability to be calm and observant during physical discomfort teaches how to maintain calm in other challenging situations, such as not eating more even when the food tastes good and not eating when you’re not hungry,” he said.

To test whether yoga in fact increases mindfulness and mindful eating, Kristal and colleagues developed a Mindful Eating Questionnaire, a 28-item survey that measured a variety of factors:

• disinhibition – eating even when full;
• awareness – being aware of how food looks, tastes and smells;
• external cues – eating in response to environmental cues, such as advertising;
• emotional response – eating in response to sadness or stress; and
• distraction – focusing on other things while eating.

Each question was graded on a scale of 1 to 4, in which higher scores signified more mindful eating. The questionnaire was administered to more than 300 people at Seattle-area yoga studios, fitness facilities and weight-loss programs, among other venues. More than 80 percent of the study participants were women, well-educated and Caucasian, with an average age of 42. Participants provided self-reported information on a number of factors, including weight, height, yoga practice, walking for exercise or transportation and other forms of moderate and strenuous exercise.

More than 40 percent of the participants practiced yoga more than an hour per week, 46 percent walked for exercise or transportation for at least 90 minutes per week and more than 50 percent engaged in more than 90 minutes of moderate and/or strenuous physical activity per week.

The average weight of the study participants was within the normal range – not surprising considering that the study sample intentionally consisted of people more physically active than the U.S. population in general. Body-mass index was lower among participants who practiced yoga as compared to those who did not (an average of 23.1 vs. 25.8, respectively).

Higher scores on the mindfulness questionnaire overall (and on each of the categories within the questionnaire) was associated with a lower BMI, which suggests that mindful eating may play an important role in long-term weight maintenance, Kristal said.

“Mindful eating is a skill that augments the usual approaches to weight loss, such as dieting, counting calories and limiting portion sizes. Adding yoga practice to a standard weight-loss program may make it more effective,” said Kristal, who himself scored high on the mindful-eating survey and has a BMI within the normal range.

Moving forward, Kristal and colleagues suggest that their Mindful Eating Questionnaire, the first tool of its kind to characterize and measure mindful eating, may be useful both in clinical practice and research to understand and promote healthy dietary behavior.

“Beyond calories and diets, mindful eating takes a more holistic approach that can empower individuals to build positive relationships with food and eating, said first author Celia Framson, M.P.H., R.D., C.D., a former graduate student of Kristal’s – and former yoga teacher – who now works with adolescents with eating disorders at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “The Mindful Eating Questionnaire offers a new and relevant dimension for measuring the effectiveness of dietary behavior interventions. It also encourages nutrition and medical practitioners to consider the broad scope of behavior involved in healthy eating,” she said.

Other authors on the paper included Denise Benitez, owner of Seattle Yoga Arts; Alyson Littman, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the UW School of Public Health and Department of Veterans Affairs; Steve Zeliadt, Ph.D., of VA Puget Sound Healthcare; and Jeanette Schenk, R.D., a research dietitian in the Hutchinson Center’s Cancer Prevention Program.

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center funded the study.

http://www.fhcrc.org/about/ne/news/2009/08/03/yoga.html

A lot of us feel guilty about eating out of boredom. But food can be a wonderful way to express creativity. All of us are cooks in some manner even if it is just seasoning our food or heating it to the temperature we like. The cure for boredom is creativity. The cure for guilt is pride.

If you are bored and want to eat then don’t eat boring. Do something interesting with your food. Make the experience creative and exciting. Something you can feel proud about later.

Check out what some very creative individuals are doing with fast food.
www.fancyfastfood.com