On teaching mindful eating 🧘‍♀️

Welcome to the third installment of my monthly email for mental health providers with tips on how to support your clients with food, movement, and body image related difficulties. Here are links to the first and second installments.
Hi there!

I was recently approached to review a book for continuing education credits and quickly said yes figuring it’d be nice to get paid to read! The book was titled Core Concepts of Mindful Eating: The Professional Edition by Megrette Fletcher M.Ed, RD, CDE.

I loved that this book wasn’t just an explanation of mindful eating but rather an in depth education on how, as a mental health provider, to effectively teach clients about mindfulness and mindful eating. We all know that understanding a topic doesn’t mean you automatically know how to teach the topic. I find this especially true with mindfulness - it’s a super simple concept that can feel remarkably abstract to newbies. I’d love to share two major takeaways from the book in the hopes that they might help you too!

Before I go on, I want to make one comment about my experience as a reviewer. I read the book carefully and took notes with the expectation that I’d be asked for feedback. Nope. The review form included about 5 yes/no questions that asked if the information was accurate and grammatically correct. It was a pretty lame assessment if you ask me. Oh well.

Takeaway #1: Here’s a direct quote from Fletcher, “Mindful eating is not about creating a to-do list such as eat in silence, chew your food 20 times, eat slowly, eat with chopsticks. Mindful eating asks that you determine what conditions need to be present for you to be aware of the enjoyment you are getting from your meal or snack. Can you be aware if you are eating quickly? If yes, terrific. If not, it makes it harder for you to taste and enjoy your meal, this is great to know. This is a critical point to understand, and it is worth repeating: Focus on conditions necessary for awareness of enjoyment to arise.“

I love the reminder to focus less on specific behaviors, or how to do mindful eating right, and more on the spirit of mindfulness. Only the subject can determine for themself if they’re being mindful. We can’t really know as an outsider if another person’s experience was mindful.

Takeaway #2: I loved the way Fletcher identified three clear areas of the present moment that one can focus on. Those areas are the sensory experience, the thought experience, and the emotional experience. This was a really helpful way for me to frame different applications of mindfulness to clients. I also love using this as a jumping off point to help people understand how to notice the physical experience of their emotions.

Personally, I would add one more area of the present moment: awareness of awareness itself. Not all clients respond well to this level of spiritual or abstract thinking, but for the right clients, it can be fun to challenge them to observe the observer within them.


I always love learning more and more about mindfulness so please let me know if you have a favorite book or resource on the subject! That’s all for now - thanks for reading.

Best,

Laura Silver, MS, RD, CDN
Silver Street Nutrition

P.S. My team and I have a couple of openings right now for new nutrition counseling clients. If your clients are looking for more support with their relationship to food, body image, and more - we'd love to support them.