Webinar Recording: Mindfulness Practices with Food Cravings

By Leo Babauta

In this webinar, I talked about a mindful practice to deal with cravings (and giving in or not giving in to them) with equanimity and love. (See notes below.)

I also answered questions about:

• The joyful aspect of healthy eating vs. going to an extreme and eat what you don’t care for because it’s healthy.
• What to do instead of using sugar when you’re feeling very, very tired.
• The idea (and boredom) of eating the same thing everyday as a way to get things under control.
• Eating more than you should, and feeling too full.
• The challenge of working at home and being close to the kitchen.
• Not feeling inspired, feeling discouraged.
• Feeling a good detachment, but also feeling untethered.
• How to stop little time wasters/distractions, like checking news, social media.
• Resistance that drains the excitement, interest, and enthusiasm.
• Getting bored with eating the same dinner, and cooking being a trigger for overeating.

Webinar Notes

Here are the notes from my talk (video is below the notes):

• Craving a food that I normally want around a certain time or emotion — it’s because of habit (I always have it in the afternoon, for example), or emotional trigger (boredom, loneliness, etc.)
• Both of these are habitual, and they can be very strong, and we often don’t know they’re happening.
• The other habitual kind of craving that comes up is if it’s right in front of us, at a party or some other kind of social event (eating out with friends, for example) … a food reward part of our brain kicks in and overrides anything else.
• There are some practical things you can do: avoid the temptations, or use a substitute to fulfill the cravings. For example, for a sweet craving, I’ll often satisfy it with whole fruit, dried fruit, or even just a square or two of dark chocolate, and if I eat those mindfully and slowly, savoring them, I find my craving is often satisfied. If I have a salty craving (for potato chips or french fries, for example), I can often satisfy that with some salty nuts, or carrots and hummus.
• But what I want to talk about is bringing mindfulness to this process …
• The thing to know with these habitual cravings, whether out of the habit of eating in the afternoon, the habit of eating when you’re bored, or the habit of eating when you see temptations at a social gathering … is that it’s all unconscious, on autopilot. Our rational brain kicks off, and we don’t think about it.
• The key, then, is to go off autopilot and bring in the mindfulness.
• This doesn’t mean that cravings are bad. We all have cravings, and having the craving isn’t bad. We can have cravings and not be afflicted by them. We can even give in to the craving, and have a little bit of what we’re craving, or even more than a little, and not be afflicted by that act.
• This can be done by practicing equanimity with the craving and our actions, but being aware of the whole thing instead of saying, “Screw it.” When we say, Screw it, we’re just shutting down our mindfulness. Stay mindful, see what’s going on, but allow yourself to be OK with whatever experience, thoughts and feelings arise.

Here’s a practice to be OK with cravings and giving in to them:

1. have a tempting food in front of you
2. be mindful of what comes up in you as you sit there, looking at it
3. don’t act on the cravings but just sit and watch the food, and see what cravings come up
4. practice equanimity, giving love to these cravings just as you give love to everything else around you
5. now take a bite, and be mindful of the food but also of the feelings that arise in you
6. say yes to your experience, rather than wanting not to have eaten that bite (rejecting the experience)
7. give love to this experience, with equanimity, just as you would to everything else around you in your experience.

The same can happen with not giving in to cravings. You can have a craving and not eat it. Normally, we might feel bad about that, like we’re depriving ourselves, we’re sacrificing, life isn’t as good without giving in … but actually we can skip giving in and not be afflicted by it.

The practice of not giving in is the same:

1. have a tempting food in front of you
2. be mindful of what comes up in you as you sit there, looking at it
3. don’t act on the cravings but just sit and watch the food, and see what cravings come up
4. practice equanimity, giving love to these cravings just as you give love to everything else around you
5. now put the food away, and be mindful of the feelings that arise in you
6. say yes to your experience, rather than wanting to have eaten that bite (rejecting the experience)
7. give love to this experience, with equanimity, just as you would to everything else around you in your experience.

This is a practice you can do on your own, once a day, and work the skill of either giving in mindfully, or mindfully not giving in. In this way, you’re building up a muscle, but also developing the ability to choose … you can be mindful of your cravings, and decide to either have a few bites or not, and not have afflictions from either action. In this way, you are free.

The Webinar Recording

You can watch the video below or download the video here (or just download the audio):