How yoga helps with Mindful Eating

Transcript

hi i'm dr michelle may the founder of am i hungry mindful eating programs and training this video is part of a series about mindful eating intended for health and wellness professionals today i want to talk about mindful eating and yoga when i was developing the am i hungry program many many years ago i coincidentally was also learning yoga after a period of time one day i was on my mat and it suddenly dawned on me that they were the same thing what i mean is that the skills that i was teaching people about how to manage their food were the same skills that i was learning on my mat things like awareness and non-judgment and curiosity all of these skills were so helpful in healing our relationship with food and also part of a yoga practice so today i want to introduce you to the co-creators of our mindful eating and yoga program to talk a little bit about the connection between mindful eating and yoga this is jessie dwiggins she's going to talk to us about how mindfulness in yoga can help us increase our awareness of our thoughts physical sensations and emotions and how that can help us break habitual patterns she's going to give us a simple technique for bringing ourselves back into the present moment physical asana or poses and meditation are wonderful playgrounds for becoming mindful because we can get curious about where our attention goes we're able to practice noticing physical sensations thoughts feelings and our reactions to each of them we become sensitive to our patterns and habits as we practice and recognize how they manifest off of our yoga mats and into our lives mindfulness can seem elusive because it's intangible and it's associated with stilling the mind but trying to get your mind to be still is like trying to get your ears to stop hearing or your nose to stop smelling it's impossible and sometimes realizing that is enough to make mindfulness accessible so the practice becomes noticing when your attention lands in the present moment versus repeatingly shifting your attention to the present yoga is a wonderful place to do that because there's lots of sensory information that's only happening in the present moment like the feeling of your breathing or the sensation of your feet touching the floor one of the techniques that i like to use is called noting and it can be used in asana or meditation practice the intention is to track where attention goes without being ensnared by reactive habits it starts with bringing your attention to your breathing and whenever another experience grabs your attention away from the breath you give it your full attention and give it a name or note it just to yourself note it using your senses without judgment label it as hearing seeing sensing tasting smelling or thinking then let what you experienced fade away and return to your breathing and it's a generative process but what happens is you may notice yourself drop into mindfulness effortlessly and it's a really effective spot treatment if your mind doesn't seem to want to settle in a particular yoga pose and once you have a visceral feeling for what mindfulness feels like in a yoga practice it's translatable to other mindfulness practices like mindful eating yoga is a wonderful complement to mindful eating because it allows you to practice mindfulness separate of your relationship with food while building the same mindfulness muscles to practice with eating this is dawn hopkins she's going to talk a little bit about how eating with intention and attention is very similar to the intention and attention that we use on our map so today i want to talk to you a little bit about how practicing mindfulness can apply toward both our yoga practices as well as our eating and how these two practices are so very similar so i want you to think for a moment about a time when maybe you drove to a location got to your destination and didn't even recall the trip there basically that means that we just weren't mindful in that moment in time and more often than not we do this in our lives we go through the motions without really being fully mindful or present yoga is a mindfulness practice and what mindfulness is is taking intention coupled with attention and so when we do our yoga practice oftentimes at the beginning of the class we'll set some sort of an intention more often than not my kind of overarching intention is to feel better at the end than when i felt at the beginning and that is also true of my eating so those intentions can be exactly the same and then we focus our attention in order to achieve that goal or that purpose that we set forth at the beginning of the practice or the beginning of whatever it is that we're doing in yoga our attention is what we call dristy and dristy is where not just where we focus our eyes or our gaze and our yoga postures but it's really about where we focus our attention in terms of what we're doing so when we're doing yoga for example if in the moment when we're sensing and feeling a specific posture if it's not helping us to feel better at the end maybe in that moment that posture just isn't right for our body or maybe we have an injury or some other reason why we might need to make an adjustment or back out of that posture or even do a different variation that is being mindful in our yoga we can do the exact same thing in our eating we can set the intention that we want to feel better at the end than when we started or any other intention that we might have before we eat and then we're practicing focusing our attention on that goal so it requires us to be really in tune with what's going on with our body just like we would be in yoga we're paying attention to how the food tastes how the food feels in our body the sensations of hunger and fullness do we even like what we're eating that sort of thing and we're gathering information that is focusing our attention and if it's not helping us to net the outcome that we desire then we make adjustments in the moment we might change what we're eating we might decide to eat something different we might decide that we're done eating so that is how the two practices are very very similar so this is a very short um explanation of how these two practices integrate how similar they are i hope that you'll decide to join us to find out a little bit more about how we can integrate these two practices to just be more mindful in our lives in general thanks so much i hope this piqued your curiosity about mindful eating and yoga you