Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Summary
On episode 498 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Dr. Lynn Rossy, a licensed clinical psychologist and author of The Mindfulness-Based Eating Solution who developed Eat for Life, a research-based mindful eating program, and serves as president of the Center for Mindful Eating.
Her book, Savor Every Bite: Mindful Ways to Eat, Love Your Body, and Live with Joy, argues that emotional and binge eating are not solved by another diet. Most diets fail long term because they ignore the internal hunger and fullness signals we have learned to override.
Dr. Rossy walks through her BASICS approach to mindful eating and the RAIN process for handling the emotions that often drive people to food in the first place, along with the case for treating yourself like your own best friend.
Links
- https://lynnrossy.com
- Episode 152 – Mindfulness-based eating with Lynn Rossy
Key Takeaways
- Diets fail 80 to 94% of the time long term. Dr. Rossy teaches mindful eating instead, which trains you to listen to your own internal signals for when to eat, why, how much, and when to stop, rather than outsourcing those decisions to an external plan.
- Emotional eating is about the whole person at the table, not the food. Stress, boredom, sadness, and anger show up at every meal. When those emotions go unprocessed, food becomes the tool people reach for to manage them.
- Slowing down changes what you actually want to eat. Dr. Rossy describes losing her taste for Diet Coke after a nine day silent meditation retreat away from it. Once your taste buds are not dulled by constant sugar and processed food, many former favorites stop tasting good.
- Mindfulness teaches you to sit with difficult emotions instead of numbing them. Emotions are not problems to fix; they are information that needs to be felt and allowed to move through you, whether that is grief, hurt, or frustration.
- Her BASICS framework for a meal: breathe and check your belly for real hunger, assess your food, slow down, investigate your hunger halfway through the meal, chew thoroughly, and savor every bite.
- The RAIN process for handling an emotion: recognize and label it, accept and allow it instead of resisting, investigate how it feels in your body and what story you are telling yourself about it, and then not-identify with it while nurturing yourself with real self-care.
- Treat yourself like your own best friend. Dr. Rossy’s husband once told her, “don’t treat my best friend like that,” after hearing her self-criticism. She argues self-kindness, not self-criticism, is what actually produces healthy behavior.
- Dr. Rossy’s three strategies to get and stay well: connect with your values and set non-negotiable intentions around them, such as daily movement; find physical activity that feels good rather than forcing a routine you dread; and relate to food as nourishment and pleasure, never as a fix for something else going on in your life.
“Emotions are mentionable, they’re manageable, and they’re natural.”
Dr. Lynn Rossy
Another Episode You May Enjoy
Episode 532 – How to fix your relationship with food | Amy Freinberg-Trufas