You and chocolate can be friends!

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The podcast hosted by me, Kyla Holley. With many years experience as an eating disorder and bariatric therapist, I know exactly what it takes to help you break. Music. Free from your diet history and develop a more healthy relationship with food. Please follow this podcast to make sure you don't miss a thing.

Today, I would like to talk to you about mindful eating.

And please, before you switch off thinking that I've suddenly become Gwyneth Paltrow and I'm going to try and sell you a dodgy smelling candle this is not the case mindful eating is the number one skill you can learn if in your relationship with food you believe you've got any aspect of binging or overeating because often when I meet people they say things like I love food that's the problem I just love food I want to eat all the time it's delicious

and then when we get into to actually how they eat, we discover that they generally eat very fast. They generally eat a lot of what I call filler foods, those foods that fill up our stomach like bread and rice and things like that. They eat very quickly. They pay very little attention to their food. They often eat while they're driving, for instance, or while they're watching TV.

And quite often when you assess the the entire relationship with food, you end up asking the question, well, you've told me you love food, but where is the love? Mindful eating is about the love, basically. It's about actually enjoying the food. This is not a...

Gimmick to make you eat less or lose weight this is saying if you love food really love the food let's do that let's enjoy the food and I consider myself a foodie I really do love food there's nothing I love more than going out to breakfast or going out for dinner if we are traveling the first things I'm looking at for every place we stop is what are the good restaurants where can can we go? What can we try? So I would put myself in that category of being a foodie.

So I really do love food, but I do try and really enjoy my food. And I also don't waste my time eating things that I don't enjoy. What's the point in just filling my body with things that haven't given me that joy of food? So what we want to do is strip things right back.

And I want you to try, Try if you can to do a mindfulness exercise around food. I wouldn't expect you to eat this way every meal, every day of the week. It would be ridiculous and unsustainable. But I want you to try and just eat one thing in the way that I'm about to describe to feel the difference that it makes for you. And when I do this exercise in groups, I use those little Cadbury favorites, you know, the little individually wrapped.

Chocolate bars, because for a group setting, they're just easy, they're hygienic, and I can just take a box along with me. And I hand everybody out one of these favourites. Now, if you've met this particular chocolate before, or any chocolate, but these are a good example, you probably would have come across them at Christmas or at Easter.

It's likely that you would have opened the packet and you would have sat there watching TV, or maybe sat there talking talking to friends and family, and just continually just ripped open the packets, the little packets, and eaten the chocolate while you were talking, while you were drinking, while you were doing something else, and not really noticed what you were doing until there was a whole pile of wrappers next to you.

And you had no idea at that stage how many you had eaten or really what you'd had or what they tasted like. But you look at this big pile of wrappers and you you probably go, well, I should probably stop eating now because that's quite a big pile of wrappers next to me. And everybody does this. It's no reflection on any individual. It's what we do. We just rip open the little packets, eat the chocolates while we're doing something else.

The problem with that is that firstly, you don't get the enjoyment you should get from that food. food and also potentially you could eat a lot more than you plan to eat. So what I want you to do is to grab some sort of food. As I say, I'm going to talk you through from the Cadbury's favourite angle. So if you've got something like a chocolate bar, that's great.

But I encourage you with this to choose something that's interesting to eat, something that has different textures, textures something that is say crunchy on the outside but gooey on the inside or you know just something that has something going on for it rather than you know a plain piece of white bread or something like that so something with texture and flavor ideally something that's going to change as well chocolate changes when you eat it you know it

melts and it changes its structure and that's the sort of food we want you to practice on. Chocolate is also an ideal one to practice on because most people say that chocolate is their nemesis. Chocolate is where it all goes wrong. They're a chocoholic. They can't control themselves around chocolate. And when anyone comes to me with that idea about chocolate, I always say, great, that's the first place we need to go.

Unlike, for instance, other diets that will say, oh, you're someone that likes chocolate. Therefore, let's work out ways you can avoid chocolate. I absolutely work the other way around because guess what? Chocolate is unavoidable. It's going to be there every day of your life for the rest of your life.

It's much better to learn how to have that item of food that you say you crave and you you say you love in a way that feels really relaxed and appropriate to you so that it can become an everyday part of your life rather than trying to distract yourself from it, trying to deny yourself it, because all those things just lead us to place a higher value on that particular food, way more value than it deserves. It's just a food.

So I encourage you to get yourself an item of food. You may need to pause this in order to do it. You may need to go out and buy some Cadbury's favourites. Who knows? But some item of food, ideally something that's wrapped and something that has something going on about it, a change in texture or taste or something like that. Now, if you don't have a food with you and you don't particularly want to stop this and rush off and get one, what I want you to do is use your imagination for this part.

And I want you to imagine that box of Cadbury's favourites. OK, big purple box, sort of longer at one end, wider at one end than it is at the other. I want you to imagine opening that box and selecting one of the chocolates from it. Now, imagine you've got that chocolate in your hand. My choice when I go to one of those boxes tends to be a crunchy. So that's what I'm going to imagine because a crunchy is always my first choice.

So I select my crunchy the first thing I want you to do is actually hold that in your hands in front of you and take a look at it I know this sounds silly but quite often we don't take a look I know that the crunchy is a sort of metallic orange wrapper and it would be very easy for me to just dive my hand into the box find that that color of wrapper pull it out and start eating it it without thinking. But I want you to take the time to actually look. Look at the packaging.

Look at the writing. Read it. There'll be a little flap on the back. Lift that up. Have a look what's written underneath. Have a look at the shininess of the wrapper. Have a look at what other colours are there apart from the initial colour that you expected to find. Have a look at the different fonts that they use on the label? And also, does the label give you a suggestion of what's inside?

How have they perhaps used colour on the label or different coloured fonts or different shaped fonts to give you that expectation of what you might expect inside that wrapper? And also, lift the wrapper to your nose and give it a little smell and ask yourself, can you actually smell any indication of what's inside? How strong is the smell from outside of that wrapper? Is it zero? Can you smell absolutely nothing? Or can you get a little whiff of chocolate coming through?

A little whiff of what you can expect when you open the wrapper? Now, once you've finished giving that wrapper a full 360, I want you to look at every aspect, the little sort of zigzag cut on the corners if it's got one, the little flap and what's written underneath, all the different change in the colours. Give it a little crinkle and see how it sounds and have a proper look at this thing. The next stage is to just gently pull the wrapper and make a little tiny hole, a little tiny gap.

And I want you to go back to it and give it another little sniff. Have a sniff and see how the smell has changed since you last smelt it. Has it doubled? Has it times to 100? Is the smell now absolutely delicious? What is the smell doing Is it doing for you? Is it igniting your taste buds? What's going on as far as your level of expectation of this chocolate? What are you going to get from it? How much are you going to enjoy it?

And while you smell that chocolate, I just want you to gently pull the wrapper apart and again, listen to the sound that the wrapper makes as you pull it apart. And now I want you to discard the wrapper and have a look at what you've got in your hand. Have a look at the actual chocolate itself and look at the textures again. Is the texture underneath that chocolate different from the texture on top? Is there any bit of the chocolate which doesn't look right?

Because sometimes chocolate, depending on where it's stored and how it's stored, can have a little kind of bit of white finish on it. You know, has something happened to your chocolate? Is it perfect? Is it imperfect? If it's imperfect, what little imperfections has it got? Have a real proper look at it and just feel if your hands are warm. Is the chocolate changing under your fingers? Is it getting a bit sticky? Is that changing?

Have a look at that and see how it changes the texture of the chocolate. chocolate. Now I want you to have another sniff because now the chocolate is out in the open, the oxygen has got to it. Does it smell different than it did in the wrapper? It may do. Who knows? It may smell exactly the same. And while you've been going through this process, because we're a few minutes in now, has the anticipation of eating the chocolate increased? Are you really really looking forward to that chocolate now?

Or has the opposite happened? Has the smelling and the looking and the imagining actually reduced what you want from that chocolate? Do you now think that perhaps you won't enjoy it as much as you thought you would? Any answers to these questions are absolutely fine, by the way. This doesn't matter. You're not trying to find solutions. You're just trying to enjoy the experience of it and really experience this for the first time. Now comes the time that you're going to take a little taste.

So what I want you to do is just bite a little tiny bit off the corner of the chocolate bar and just hold it at the front of your tongue. Just hold it there and see if you can feel the melting happening. Can you feel things changing with the heat of your mouth on the chocolate? Can you feel what's happening at the front of your mouth?

And as soon as you start to feel that melting happen, I want you to now push that chocolate round and try and coat your entire tongue with a layer of that chocolate. Don't swallow yet. You're going to just coat your tongue. And I want you to really taste it. We have different taste buds on our tongue that do different things. And generally, if we love chocolate, the taste of the chocolate is only going to last as long as that chocolate is in our mouth.

As soon as we swallow it, it's gone. The taste is gone. So give your mouth as much opportunity as possible to taste every aspect of that chocolate. Really move it around in your mouth and feel how the texture changes. If you've picked a chocolate that's got crunchy bits in it or gooey bits in it, now's the time that you might want to find a crunchy bit and give that a crunch and just feel the texture between your teeth. While the other bits of the chocolate bar, Perhaps there's caramel in there.

Perhaps there's some other sort of gooey, chocolatey aspect to it. But I want you to crunch away as well. And when you feel that you've really got everything out of that mouthful that you can possibly get, then's the time to actually swallow. And do the same again now with anything that's left in your mouth. You might get a little bit of residual chocolate there or something crunchy left behind or something like that. So have another sweep of your mouth.

Really see what flavors are left before you decide to swallow again. And now's the time to check in. What did you think of that mouthful of chocolate? Was it amazing? Was it everything you thought it would be? Rate it out of 10. Was it a 10 out of 10? Was it a five out of 10? Who knows? It really doesn't matter. How you judge the chocolate is entirely up to you. There's no rules around this, but I want you to give it a score. What was it? Was it everything you expected?

Was there anything you didn't expect? I had someone do this exercise with me a while ago and she chose a mini boost bar because she said it's her favorite. And after After this exercise, she said, I've never realized before, and I must have eaten hundreds of boost bars. I've never realized that the little crunchy bits are actually little sort of round balls. She said, I never realized they were ball shaped. She said, I just, it didn't occur to me. I've never taken the time before.

So what we're doing is just experiencing. And now again, Again, I want you to take another small bite of that chocolate, same size as before, and repeat all those stages. Remember the front of your tongue first, feel it melting, then start to move it around. Coat your tongue with all those different flavors.

Feel it melt everywhere. If you come across any gooey bits or crunchy bits or something like that, you might want want to give those a little bit of a chew as you go and make sure you've got everything you can get out of that mouthful before you swallow. And once you do, do it again. There might be some residual taste going around. And then again, I want you to swallow. And again, it's time to check in. What do you make of that mouthful? And judge it against the first mouthful you had.

Was the second one better? Was it an improvement? Is eating this way actually improving the chocolate as you go through? Or has the thrill gone a little bit from the chocolate? Is it getting less satisfying with that mouthful? Or perhaps you're completely neutral. You can't tell a difference. It's exactly the same. All these things are fine. It doesn't matter what the answer is. It's the the experience that matters.

So what I want you to do is go through the rest of that chocolate bar, taking these tiny little bites and then you're going to.

Moving them around in your mouth, feeling the chocolate melt, really getting 100% out of each mouthful and judging each mouthful as you go. And when you realize that the chocolate perhaps is diminishing and perhaps isn't giving you what you need from it anymore, the experience isn't as good perhaps anymore, that's up to you what you do then. You can decide to eat the rest of the chocolate, absolutely.

There's no rules here. Or if you decide to put the chocolate away and go back to it later, that's fine as well. This is not an exercise designed to make you lose weight or stop eating chocolate or anything like that. All this is, is saying if you love food, food really love it. And what you will find over time, if you actually develop mindfulness around your food,

and I'm not talking about eating every morsel of food in the same way as we've just done, because nobody has the time for that, but actually stopping and looking at the food that you're eating, experiencing the food that you're eating, checking in every now and again with yourself and saying, am I satisfied now? Have I got everything I needed to get out of that food? Or is that food still giving me something?

What we know is that people that apply mindfulness to their eating and have had some element of binging or overeating in their past, this is the number one skill you can learn. Because what tends to happen when we binge or we overeat is we kind of of go into this trance-like state where we dissociate from what we're doing. We switch off. And some people do describe it as a trance. And some people genuinely can't actually remember what they did during one of these trance-like states.

And all we want to do is bring back a level of awareness about what you're doing so that you are in the driver's seat. You make the choices. The food doesn't control you. You are in control of the food. You get to make the decisions. And the only way you're going to be able to make the decisions is if you're fully conscious of what's going on. So this is what we're doing here. There's no judgment involved. If you decide you want to eat.

Three chocolate bars and you eat them all mindfully, that is absolutely fine. There should be no guilt and no shame attached to this exercise at all.

What there should be is a journey for you into experiencing food, sometimes for the first time. The chocolate idea is great if you know that chocolate is one of the things that you find hard to stick to the rules around, then for sure go for chocolate. Or you may decide actually that you want to try something else to eat mindfully. It really doesn't matter whether it's chocolate, whether it's cereal, whether it's a piece of steak, something like that.

But whatever you decide to eat, try and do this mindfulness exercise and see if your experience of eating it is different from the times that you've eaten it before. I would love to hear your feedback about this. Remember, you can email me with ideas. You can email me with feedback. It's info at akfeb.com. I would love to hear from you. And hopefully this will be a bit of a game changer for you if you've someone who has any sort of binge eating behavior or any sort of overeating behavior.

Give this a try, even if it's just for one time, to really experience the difference and then see how much you can incorporate a more mindful approach into your eating from now on.

Thank you so much for your company today. I would also love it if you could follow this podcast. It really does mean a lot to me. Also, we have a six-week online change your relationship with the food course that you can take, just visit www.acfeb.com and click on the ACFEB and me courses link. There's also a journal and a workbook available on Amazon, and you'll find that link in our bio. I really hope you can join me again next week. Goodbye. Music.