The Center for Mindful Eating

About the issue

This spring, our quarterly Food for Thought newsletter brings into focus the role emotions play in regard to food and eating. This focus will help us better understand the concept of emotional eating as a dysfunctional behavior and thus how mindful eating can help.

In the first article, Emotional Eating: How Can Mindful Eating Help? Reflections from Research Findings, Cecilia Clementi, PhD., Psych.D., explores the construct of emotional eating in relationship to other psychological disorders. According to research findings, mindful eating can play an important role in the regulation of emotions when learning to distinguish hunger from distressing emotional states, such as anxiety.

In our practice-related article, Mindfulness of Emotions, Alice Rosen, LMHC, shares a case study of a client struggling with food and body image. Rosen describes how a mindful eating approach can help promote the development of acceptance, compassion and nonjudgment towards discomfort, a supportive tool when overcoming obstacles during the process of change.

In the educational handout Get Stressed, Eat, Repeat: How We Can Break Emotional Eating Simply by Paying Attention, Judson Brewer, MD, Ph.D, explains the mechanism by which the brain learns patterns related to eating based on the reward system. Brewer describes how mindfulness can help recognize cravings and eating urges in response to emotional states, based on evidence collected from the Eat Right Now app his UMass Medical School research team created.

To round out this issue, Lynn Rossy, PhD, offers a meditation practice on our theme Mindfulness of Emotions. She provides guidance on how to stay in touch with whatever emotions arise during meditation, especially the disturbing ones, simply by observing them with curiosity, acceptance, compassion and nonjudgment. In doing so, she explains that the nature of the emotions and their relationship with thoughts and body sensations can be entered into more deeply as a felt experience that is fluid and ever changing.

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