Embracing the Satisfaction Challenge

By Andrea Wachter

Throughout the past two months Alive and Well Women has been encouraging our community to engage in mindful eating with our Mindful Eating Mondays campaign and our Mindful Eating Workshop: Savor. In the past, we shared the first section of Andrea Wachter’s article titled “Stepping Off the Diet Riot Roller Coaster”. Because we find ourselves fully invested in this season of mindful eating, we are excited to now continue sharing the rest of her content from this article! We will be sharing a section of her article for the next 5 weeks and encourage you to join us as we accept her step by step challenge to eat mindfully. If you have not already done so, jump over to the first section of Andrea Wachter’s article here and then join us for this weeks mindful eating challenge to aim for comfortable satisfaction!

Aim for Comfortable Satisfaction

Once you start eating what your body truly wants, the next step is learning when to stop eating. It takes a lot of awareness, willingness and courage to stop when you are comfortably satisfied rather than stuffed or still hungry. Eating moderately and intuitively means we have to feel emotions that we may have previously attempted to numb with excess food or restricting. It means we will have to find other ways to fill our time, our minds and our unmet needs

Additionally, moderate non-diet eating means we will sometimes have to deal with social pressure, whether it’s subtle or spoken. It takes clarity, courage and conviction to eat differently than others are, especially if they are strongly encouraging us to go along with what or how much they are eating. Of course there are times when we will choose to eat when and what others are eating because that feels like the most loving choice to make at that time, but there will be times that listening to our own internal signals means we don’t go along with the flock or the clock.

I remember a recent family visit when I wanted leftovers and a cookie for breakfast rather than the eggs and toast everyone else was having. Oftentimes I eat what others are having but sometimes, my cravings are strong and it feels more loving to listen to my body than to my fear of what others might think or say.

It takes courage to stop eating when we are politely full even though everyone else is still eating (and encouraging us to also). But we don’t always go to the bathroom when others do, or sleep or shower when they do. Honest, loving, intuitive eating means that sometimes we do things differently than others but our choices are not fueled by body hate or attempts to control our weight.

For more on mindful eating, check out The Center for Mindful Eating.

This blog was originally published on recoverywarriors.com