Sept/Oct 2007

feature article

The Joy of Eating
Psychology, Physiology, and Food

BY WENDY UNDERHILL

Let me push aside my buttered cinnamon toast and get to work on today’s assignment, the Psychology of Eating. We aren’t talking pathologies and disorders; nor are we talking about the latest news flash about micronutrients. For now, we’re talking about the Why of Eating, as opposed to the What.

Take my cinnamon toast, for example. As kids, my brothers and I not only toasted bread and slathered it with butter and copious quantities of cinnamon sugar, but we also put it under the broiler until it just began to bubble. No surprise, then, that it’s my food of choice when life gets rocky.

Meanwhile, I’m chasing my toast with tea—fully caffeinated and laced with sugar overriding natural, physiological mechanisms for energy and appetite. Dare I also mention that I’m reading the newspaper as I eat? By doing two things at once–eating and reading–I’m not getting full satisfaction from the toast, to say nothing of poor reading comprehension. Indeed, I’m practicing a form of mindless eating.

There’s yet one more psychological ingredient in this breakfast: self-chastisement. So why do I–-or so many of us—eat this way?

Emotional Eating
Sometimes, we eat because it seems to meet an emotional need. We may eat in response to the clock; if it’s noon, it’s time for lunch, whether we’re hungry or not. We may eat when we’re bored, or in response to an emotional upset (“What an awful day. A brownie sure sounds good.”) Sometimes we eat to reward ourselves for a job well done–a lesson we too-often pass on to our kids. And we may even eat because our jaw needs to move, to release frustration or stored tension.

These are just a few of the ways food serves us psychologically. “The truth is, food works as an antidote to emotional needs,” says Denver-based Linda Spangle, R.N., M.A., author of Life is Hard, Food is Easy (LifeLine Press, 2004) and One Hundred Days of Weight Loss (Thomas Nelson, 2007). “It does make us feel better, but it can become your best friend. That’s where it becomes a struggle.”

To step aside from that struggle, just recognizing it, is step one; the second is to know when you’re ready to change. As an example, Blair Koch, of Boulder, spent her childhood in the competitive figure skating world. When she left the sport as a high schooler, her weight swelled from 110 pounds to 180. It wasn’t until after she moved away from home, finished college and began her career that she shed most of the added weight quite by accident. She describes it this way:

“I finally had friends who accepted me for who I was and what I looked like and I just wanted to have some structure in my life. But essentially, I had the ‘energy’ and ‘focus’ that could be put towards me. I was so not into dieting that I didn’t really realize the extent of the weight loss, as I was just having fun eating well, working out, spending time with friends, etc. In fact, I went home that first Thanksgiving and my Dad picked me up at the airport and he walked right by me - he said he didn’t even recognize me!”

Koch is one of the lucky few; when she changed the story of her life, her body changed, too. And yet she’s still a perfect example of how food can serve emotional needs, not physical needs. Most of us take a bit more than just a move to a new city to kick-start a non-diet relationship with food. That “more” might be finding a food counselor who can sort out intentions, actions, and “whys” of emotionally based eating.

Mindless Eating
Food psychology isn’t limited to just the emotional role a brownie may play. We also respond unthinkingly to invisible environmental prompts. The book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink, Ph.D., (Bantam, 2006) details the subtle ploys marketers use to encourage us to eat: big portions, brand names, plate size, prominent snack displays, labeling junk food as if it’s healthy (gumdrops are a “Fat Free Food!”), and on and on. Wansink has done countless experiments that indicate that just about all of us are tricked into eating more by shapes, smells, price, distractions, containers, and more.

The more we are able to deconstruct these “Eat! Eat!” psychological messages, the sooner we can begin to re-engineer our shopping, kitchen, and mealtime habits.

Physiology
The thermodynamic model tells us that food intake minus exercise equals weight change. This decades-old input/output model is correct as far as it goes. If you restrict calories enough, weight drops. However, as Americans gain weight by the year, it is obvious that there is more to the story.
Evolutionarily speaking, humans are more like the ant than the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable. We’re programmed biochemically to stockpile resources (that is, fat) when food is available, and release it during lean times. Now, living in times of endless plenty, we’re stockpiling more and more against the slim possibility of calamity.

So, we have to change this worthy but outdated internal programming. To do so, it helps to look at the chemistry of metabolism and our mental state. “Our frame of mind directly impacts metabolism to such a degree that what we think and feel profoundly influences how we digest a meal,” says Marc David, Boulder-based author of The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy and Weight Loss (Healing Arts, 2005).

(Meet Marc at the Nexus Holistic Expo November 17-18th, Denver Merchandise Mart. Marc will be presenting: THE SOUL OF NUTRITION: METABOLIC TRANSFORMATION FROM DEEP WITHIN - Saturday, November 17th, 2007 10:30 - 11:45am. Presentation is free with $7 admission to expo. Find out more at: http://www.nexuspub.com/n_expo_marc_david.htm )

By reducing stress, we can reboot our systems. Counterintuitive as it may seem, being more relaxed actually boosts our metabolism and increases digestion. Additionally, ongoing stress leads to a buildup of cortisol and insulin, two of the primary hormones that signal the body to store fat–so when we reduce stress, we stop pumping out compounds that make our body hang on to every calorie. How to stop stress? First, we need to slow down our lives. Failing that, we can at least slow down our eating.

Pleasure.
Ah, the pleasure of food. We not only like to smell it and taste it, we like to read about it. The memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin, 2006), is the latest hit book that relishes the details of good food. Here’s a mouthwatering sample, starting as the author returns from a market trip:

“I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn’t need to be cooked at all). I put some olives on the plate, too, and the four knobs of goat cheese I’d picked up yesterday from the formaggeria down the street, and two slices of pink, oily salmon. For dessert–-a lovely peach, which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm from the Roman sunlight. For the longest time I couldn’t even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch, a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing.”

Now that’s pleasure! And if it boosts our metabolism, great.

Intuitive Eating.
Gilbert learned to eat what was fresh, local, beautiful–-and there was no whiff of negativity about it, a negativity inherent in the diet culture. Without moving to Italy, anyone can access a more natural, intuitive eating pattern by first paying attention to our sensations of hunger and satiety.

Once those cycles are brought to the conscious level, we have the choice to eat when we’re hungry and stop when we’re full. (Note: eating slowly helps because there’s a delay between eating and when the brain registers satisfaction.)

This intuitive path is detailed by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD, in her book, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003). She recommends that readers stop counting calories, carbohydrates, or anything else, and that we tune in to whether it is truly a “hunger” in our stomach or some other craving. Then, guess what? You’ll gravitate toward good foods that the body needs nutritionally, not emotionally. While Koch didn’t read Tribble’s book, she could still be a poster child for the concept.

The best part of “intuitive eating” is that it prompts us to eat luscious, real foods. Ersatz meals in a can do provide calories and minerals, but are hardly a satisfying or sustainable way to eat! Indulge in the delicious: avocados, berries, nuts, greens. One of the urges that eating should satisfy is the desire for variety, and that comes in texture, taste, color, and even temperature.

Conscious Eating.
“Conscious” or “mindful” eating starts from a similar premise, and helps challenge old habits, whether developed from cultural messages (“clean your plate”) or physiological pathways established by years of poor eating.

The concept suggests that we be present and aware when eating, appreciating the sight of the food before consuming it. That means sitting down to eat, taking smaller bites, experiencing the mouth feel fully, and savoring flavors.

Being conscious starts much earlier than the meal, of course. It begins with advance planning for what to buy and how to take your intentions to eat joyfully on the road. If nothing else, conscious eating means thinking first, eating second.

The sacred nature of food.
From a mind-body-spirit perspective, eating can be a sacred act. Thinking of it this way may lead to eating with a conscience. If you’re not convinced, check out the venerable Diet for a Small Planet or Diet for a New America or the 100-mile diet offered in Plenty: One Man, One Woman and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally (Crown, 2007). Food choices based on the sake of the earth tend to satisfy the body as well. Other worth-reading books that examine the sacred aspects of food: Art of the Inner Meal: Eating as a Spiritual Path, by Donald Altman (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999) and Conscious Eating, a masterpiece by Gabriel Cousens (North Atlantic Books, 2000). Getting in touch with the sacred tends to provide greater satisfaction in all of aspects of life. Think about that the next time you reach for your personal equivalent of cinnamon toast.

Wendy Underhill is a regular contributor to Nexus. Look for her column "The Enlightened Tourist" each issue.