Mindful Eating is a powerful and creative way to change your relationship to food. Please visit The Center For Mindful Eating at www.tcme.org, created by the leading experts in this field. If you click on "newsletter" and then click on "patient newsletter," you can print out a series of thought-provoking handouts to give to others.

Mindful Eating Changes Your Brain!

In our preliminary experiment, two experienced mindful eaters (who learned mindful eating from different experiential teaching environments) were first told to eat 4 ounces of trail mix while listening to a lecture on tombstones. Why tombstones? We were looking for a mildly stimulating lecture, where the participant could easily choose to tune in or tune out to the speaker.

After 3 minutes of listening and eating, a neurological tracer was injected through an IV tube, and the participants continued to 'mindlessly' eat for another four minutes. Then they were SPECT scanned.

On the following day, the lecture was played again. But this time, the participants were instructed to eat mindfully, paying close attention to the textures, shapes, and flavors of trail mix, along with other dimensions that are commonly found in various mindfulness-based meditation programs. The same injection procedure was followed, and the participants were scanned again.

Here's what's exciting: similar activity in the left and right frontal lobes, thalamus, and caudate were activated in both participants. The success of this first stage now allows us to bring in additional 'mindful eaters' to build a larger database and confirm our initial findings. We'll also bring in people who have never been exposed to mindful eating and run them through the same protocol.

So what do these brain changes suggest? First: mindful eating clearly has a different neurological effect, and we suspect that the changes we see helps an individual become more attentive of the food he or she is eating. Thus, people who wish to have a healthier diet or lose weight can, through mindful eating practices, develop more conscious control of the quantity of food they eat.

Mindful eating may be an effective way to retrain your brain since the caudate is involved with learning and memory. Stimulating the caudate might then give the eater better feedback and help regulate glucose metabolism in the brain.(i) Frontal lobe stimulation also gives the eater more control by increasing motivational consciousness. And, as we found in our other meditation and mindfulness studies, this increased activity in the frontal lobes reduces anxiety, worry, depression, and irritability, feelings that cause many people to mindlessly overeat. The caudate may also have a suppressing effect on the destructive emotions generated by various parts of the limbic brain. And without the caudate nucleus, we would not be able to control the accuracy of our body movements. Thus, one might even argue that mindful eating improves our movement and coordination.(ii) Other evidence suggests that improved caudate function can reduce obsessive compulsive behavior, and this adds further evidence to research that mindful eating reduces binge eating.

Advanced meditators show similar changes in the frontal lobe, thalamus, and caudate, and this lends evidence that mindful eating is a valid "spiritual" practice. So slow down and tune in to every bite you take, for you might literally eat your way to enlightenment!

ADDENDUM: In an earlier study on glossolalia, we found decreased activity in the left caudate as a person "surrenders" their motor control during a spiritual epiphany. We suspect that mindful eating will strengthen a person's control over what he or she consciously chooses to eat.




NOTES

(i) Elsebet S. Hansen, Steen Hasselbalch, Ian Law; Tom G. Bolwig (2002). 'The caudate nucleus in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Reduced metabolism following treatment with paroxetine: a PET study'. International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology 5 (1): 1 10. doi:10.1017/S1461145701002681. PMID 12057027.

(ii) Why do we have a caudate nucleus? Villablanca JR. Acta Neurobiol Exp (Wars). 2010;70(1):95-105.PMID: 20407491 [PubMed - in process]Free Article


The Caudate Nucleus image was created by Life Science Databases(LSDB).

YOUR STARVING BRAIN

New brain research shows that overeaters may have a more sensitive and over-reactive brain whenever they see, smell, taste, or even think about food. The reward system in the limbic areas respond more strongly, and tell us that we must eat now, and as much as possible.

In the past, before food was plentiful and cheap, this primitive response was a survival mechanism. Today, it can be a liability, for each time we see a fast-food restaurant, or a picture of a person enjoying a bite to eat on a commercial, our brain sends out a warning: Eat now, for tomorrow I may starve!

Thus, for some of us, overeating is not so much a lack of willpower, or low self-esteem, but a natural biological and neurological process that is fundamentally out of touch with the fact that food is readily available. However, we can train our brains, through mindful eating and conscious commitment to override our propensity to overeat.

The following two videos are from the program, Human Body: Pushing the Limits (Discovery Channel).

7 minutes: No organ is hungrier than the brain. And when necessary, we?ll eat bizarre foods to survive. You?ll also discover that chocolate is more pleasurable and intense than kissing!



7 minutes: Watch how your brain is hardwired to prevent you from starving, to the point that your brain will order the body . . . to eat itself! You?ll also discover why eating less may help you to live longer.



What can you do to change the way you eat? Watch this TED talk by Jamie Oliver, commit to eating healthy whole foods, and join the food revolution (20 minutes).



Alan Kristal, at the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, talks about his published study showing that those who practice mindful eating, yoga, and other forms of contemplative practice, are less likely to be obese (2 minutes).