Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time by Pavel G. Somov

From the Publisher

Do you use food to comfort yourself when you're feeling depressed or stressed? Do you sometimes eat simply because you're bored? There are so many opportunities to snack and overeat mindlessly, it's no wonder that most diets fail. But mindless eating can lead to health problems, obesity, and a feeling that you've lost control.

Eating the Moment offers 141 mindfulness activities to help you listen to your body, understand why you're eating, and control your cravings if you're eating out of habit or because of your emotions. You won't find any start dates, dieting tips, or meal plans in this book, just practical and meaningful exercises to help you end mindless eating and begin nourishing yourself in healthy and fulfilling ways.

Mindfulness itself has been studied in recent years and found to effectively reduce symptoms of chronic pain, anxiety and panic, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, and depression, as well as a range of other health and psychological problems. Recent research has shown mindfulness to be effective in helping binge eaters control their binging and to feel more in control of their eating.
In this book, psychologist Pavel Somov introduces techniques, exercises, and tools to help overeaters to slow down and become more aware of their food and food-related issues such as triggers for overeating. Readers can then use these techniques to get control over their overeating.
Topics include:

• Environmental triggers for eating
• The process of eating
• When and why we stop eating
• Cravings
• The sensual aspects of eating
• Emotional eating
• Searching for meaning in food
•Developing a philosophy of eating

Unlike most books about eating, Somov doesn't judge the reader for emotional eating, being triggered into eating, or eating out of boredom. He doesn't tell the reader how to eat; instead, he helps the reader become more aware of why he or she is eating at the moment, and helps the reader slow down, develop awareness of the experience of eating, and become more centered around his or her eating. Binge eaters and compulsive eaters usually report that they feel out of control of their eating. When they overeat, they may feel shame and guilt, leading them to restrict their eating, which makes them feel punished and unhappy, which then triggers them into overeating again. By developing habitual awareness and a playful attitude about the process of eating, a compulsive eater will find that his or her eating slows down, becoming less compulsive and dictated by external forces such as boredom, emotional pain, or habit. There are 141 specific exercises in this book to promote mindful eating, as well as brief discussions of why we eat and stop eating, mindfulness principles, finding meaning in food and the act of eating, and developing a "philosophy of eating."

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