Do something Friday

Can you even believe this is the last Friday of February? This year is flying by!! Which reminds of a quote I read this week -- "The days are long but the years are short."

But now let's talk about judgment -- when was the last time you put some thought and energy into the non-judgment aspect of mindful eating? I was on a conference call yesterday with a woman who used the term "sorting" as a way of processing information. She sorted her experiences into pleasant/neutral/or unpleasant.

Once she decided which kind of experience she was having, she didn't delve into why the experience was seeming like it was -- she just jumped into what she was going to do about the experience.

If you are eating and you realize the food (whether it is carrots or cake) is a neutral experience -- you may want to stop eating it if you are not hungry. This doesn't require you to analyze the label on the food to make this decision. If you consider that the definition of overeating is "eating for any other reason than physical hunger" then you can see that we overeat often (by the strictest definition) -- This isn't a cause for judgment.

Our own judgment sets us up to start hiding our behaviors from ourselves. We will opt not to see them. Or perhaps we will only highlight the activities that we have judged as negative -- those are the ones we will focus all of our attention on and beat ourselves up about.

What if you started just noticing your behaviors -- not trying to change them. Notice what particular stresses cause you to stress eat. Notice which people you eat to a fuller sensation with. Which workdays tend to leave you with little time to eat during the day so when you get home you are too hungry to feel in charge of your eating decisions.

Just in the noticing, you will find their are areas that don't require a ton of effort to tweak into a behavior that works for you. Perhaps you will find that you are making more mindful decisions than you realize and all the "work" you think you need to do isn't quite as much as you thought.

Just noticing, without judging the information, will start you moving on an easier path to mindfulness.

This weekend, make a conscious effort to change the jugmental language you use in your head. If you hear yourself say something like "I shouldn't have this" or "This is full of fat" -- make an effort to reframe that thought into something like --"I am going to chose not to have this because I am not hungry for it right now" or "Fat is one of the 3 nutrients I need to live -- there is nothing inherently wrong with fat. It carries flavors. It has calories. I can eat fat or carb or protein if I enjoy the flavor of the food"