Embodied Eating, Part 1
Psychology Today blog: Body Sense
by Alan Fogel, PhD
October 20, 2009
The Experience of Food: Suppression or Sensation?
By all measures, eating disorders are epidemic in industrialized nations. The rise of the middle class in N. America, Europe, India, China, and Japan has apparently brought with it conditions that create opportunities for the overuse and misuse of food. On the one hand, there is the year-round world-wide availability of a huge diversity of food, including highly processed foods. There is increased pressure on families to work more to maintain their middle-class standard of living that leads to less free time and an increasing reliance on fast food containing high levels of salts, sugars, fats, and carbohydrates.
The consumption of consumer appliances, computers, televisions, and video games means that recreation has turned increasingly indoors, become sedentary, and has the effect of numbing the body and its sensations as one is engaged in these activities. This sociocultural process has been especially hard on youth with a dramatic worldwide rise in pediatric obesity and adolescent eating disorders. Pediatric obesity can lead to early onset type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and predispose the individual to adult obesity.
In eating disorders, food is used as a way to suppress the body sense including unwanted emotions such as frustration and discouragement, and the signs of stress including muscle tension, fatigue, and pain. There are two basic eating strategies to suppress the body sense: either to eat too much or eat too little.
In the case of those who eat too little, they are focused more on external images of the ideal body or behaving in accordance with peer group expectations. They are excessively pre-occupied with being negatively evaluated because of the way they look, and the stress of performance suppresses their own body sense about what is good and healthy for themselves. Eating too little can become chronic in the case of anorexia nervosa (self-starvation). Anorexic teens show a typical profile of emotional suppression, in which higher levels of sympathetic nervous system arousal occur in the body with the person showing little or no awareness of their internal state.
Those who eat too much focus on the food itself. If food is present, no matter what type of food, they are likely to indulge in eating it. They suppress body sense awareness required for homeostatic regulation of food intake, such as the feeling of satiety, or gastrointestinal distress and indigestion. Individuals who suffer from obesity are also less able to feel pleasurable sensations from the taste of food compared to others, due to a possible genetically-linked impairment of dopamine receptors in the brain, resulting in overconsumption of foods high in fats and sugars in order to be able to feel satisfied. Binge eating has been linked to life stress coupled with suppression of body sensations and emotions, and negative mood in a wide range of populations and in many different research studies.
Either filling up with too much food or entering a state of semi-starvation create changes in the peripheral receptors of the homeostatic body systems that lead to particular states such as feeling soporific or energizing, depressive or anxious. Clinical case reports reveal that these states actually suppress the body sense, the underlying feelings of loneliness, loss, and trauma from which the food or starvation "high" becomes a palliative.
For optimal health and rejuvenation, we all need exercise, rest, time to our body sense and feel deeply into ourselves, and meaningful and emotionally expressive human contact. Under stress, however, these "needs" can be easily ignored. We do, however, have to eat. It's required. When done using our full body sense, eating not only satisfies hunger and nutritional needs, but it can become a highly pleasurable and renewing experience.
Using your body sense to eat starts at the market. How do you go about buying food? Are you looking for something prepared, easy, quick, and cheap? Is your shopping for food in-and-out? Do you think about where and how the food was grown? If you take a few extra minutes, you can have a wonderfully sensual experience in the market and later at home when you prepare the food. Fresh fruits and vegetables come in great varieties of colors, tastes, textures, and smells. Can you let your choices be guided by all your senses, not just your economic sense of value or your conceptual thoughts about what seems easiest or most habitual.
First Lady Michelle Obama recently visited a new farmer's market located only blocks from the White House. Mrs. Obama encouraged Americans to get to know the people who grow their food. She said that farmers markets are especially important in neighborhoods where access to healthy options are limited. Mrs Obama has been speaking out for healthy eating since planting the White House vegetable garden in the spring.
Buying and preparing food using your body sense can be restorative: the zen of shopping and chopping. You have to eat, right? Maybe you don't have time to meditate or exercise or get a massage but you can use this necessity of eating to pull you back into your body and its senses. This connection to and through food can be expanded if you share foraging, cooking, and eating with friends and family. Food brings people together like nothing else, especially if your life is otherwise spent away from these cherished people. Research shows that having regular family mealtimes increases child health and promotes social and cognitive development, in part because of the shared activity that accompanies eating slowly and with other's watching.
Like all forms of body sense awareness in the subjective emotional present, practicing Slow Food techniques will nourish your senses with pleasure and purpose, sending cascades of mood elevating neurotransmitters and hormones through your system. So, what may seem like an unnecessary break from your chores will actually recharge your batteries so you can go back to work with more energy and enthusiasm than before.
Alan Fogel is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His most recent book is The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Body Sense.
Psychology Today blog: Body Sense
by Alan Fogel, PhD
October 20, 2009
The Experience of Food: Suppression or Sensation?
By all measures, eating disorders are epidemic in industrialized nations. The rise of the middle class in N. America, Europe, India, China, and Japan has apparently brought with it conditions that create opportunities for the overuse and misuse of food. On the one hand, there is the year-round world-wide availability of a huge diversity of food, including highly processed foods. There is increased pressure on families to work more to maintain their middle-class standard of living that leads to less free time and an increasing reliance on fast food containing high levels of salts, sugars, fats, and carbohydrates.
The consumption of consumer appliances, computers, televisions, and video games means that recreation has turned increasingly indoors, become sedentary, and has the effect of numbing the body and its sensations as one is engaged in these activities. This sociocultural process has been especially hard on youth with a dramatic worldwide rise in pediatric obesity and adolescent eating disorders. Pediatric obesity can lead to early onset type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and predispose the individual to adult obesity.
In eating disorders, food is used as a way to suppress the body sense including unwanted emotions such as frustration and discouragement, and the signs of stress including muscle tension, fatigue, and pain. There are two basic eating strategies to suppress the body sense: either to eat too much or eat too little.
In the case of those who eat too little, they are focused more on external images of the ideal body or behaving in accordance with peer group expectations. They are excessively pre-occupied with being negatively evaluated because of the way they look, and the stress of performance suppresses their own body sense about what is good and healthy for themselves. Eating too little can become chronic in the case of anorexia nervosa (self-starvation). Anorexic teens show a typical profile of emotional suppression, in which higher levels of sympathetic nervous system arousal occur in the body with the person showing little or no awareness of their internal state.
Those who eat too much focus on the food itself. If food is present, no matter what type of food, they are likely to indulge in eating it. They suppress body sense awareness required for homeostatic regulation of food intake, such as the feeling of satiety, or gastrointestinal distress and indigestion. Individuals who suffer from obesity are also less able to feel pleasurable sensations from the taste of food compared to others, due to a possible genetically-linked impairment of dopamine receptors in the brain, resulting in overconsumption of foods high in fats and sugars in order to be able to feel satisfied. Binge eating has been linked to life stress coupled with suppression of body sensations and emotions, and negative mood in a wide range of populations and in many different research studies.
Either filling up with too much food or entering a state of semi-starvation create changes in the peripheral receptors of the homeostatic body systems that lead to particular states such as feeling soporific or energizing, depressive or anxious. Clinical case reports reveal that these states actually suppress the body sense, the underlying feelings of loneliness, loss, and trauma from which the food or starvation "high" becomes a palliative.
For optimal health and rejuvenation, we all need exercise, rest, time to our body sense and feel deeply into ourselves, and meaningful and emotionally expressive human contact. Under stress, however, these "needs" can be easily ignored. We do, however, have to eat. It's required. When done using our full body sense, eating not only satisfies hunger and nutritional needs, but it can become a highly pleasurable and renewing experience.
Using your body sense to eat starts at the market. How do you go about buying food? Are you looking for something prepared, easy, quick, and cheap? Is your shopping for food in-and-out? Do you think about where and how the food was grown? If you take a few extra minutes, you can have a wonderfully sensual experience in the market and later at home when you prepare the food. Fresh fruits and vegetables come in great varieties of colors, tastes, textures, and smells. Can you let your choices be guided by all your senses, not just your economic sense of value or your conceptual thoughts about what seems easiest or most habitual.
First Lady Michelle Obama recently visited a new farmer's market located only blocks from the White House. Mrs. Obama encouraged Americans to get to know the people who grow their food. She said that farmers markets are especially important in neighborhoods where access to healthy options are limited. Mrs Obama has been speaking out for healthy eating since planting the White House vegetable garden in the spring.
Buying and preparing food using your body sense can be restorative: the zen of shopping and chopping. You have to eat, right? Maybe you don't have time to meditate or exercise or get a massage but you can use this necessity of eating to pull you back into your body and its senses. This connection to and through food can be expanded if you share foraging, cooking, and eating with friends and family. Food brings people together like nothing else, especially if your life is otherwise spent away from these cherished people. Research shows that having regular family mealtimes increases child health and promotes social and cognitive development, in part because of the shared activity that accompanies eating slowly and with other's watching.
Like all forms of body sense awareness in the subjective emotional present, practicing Slow Food techniques will nourish your senses with pleasure and purpose, sending cascades of mood elevating neurotransmitters and hormones through your system. So, what may seem like an unnecessary break from your chores will actually recharge your batteries so you can go back to work with more energy and enthusiasm than before.
Alan Fogel is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His most recent book is The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Body Sense.