[One Small Bowl] 5 Principles, My take

[Guest guest]

My BG was better today, but I can't seem to break 100 yet. I was at 106. Yesterday’s Meals: 6am bowl: eggs and bacon 10am bow: seafood salad (clams, scallops, salmon, mayo, green onion and bell pepper) 2pm bowl: salami rollups with cream cheese and bell pepper 7pm bowl: ground beef, cabbage, tomatoes and bell pepper Liquids: cup of coffee with coconut oil and cream 1/2 gallon water cup of coffee with coconut oil and cream I was working on a major sewing commission yesterday, and it was a difficult one. I have never made a costume from the 1880's before, not with the bustle and the gathering over the bustle. I was struggling and tucking and pinning and soon realized that it was 11pm and it's still not done. I am getting to the point I will need to get out of the house soon or go crazy. One more day of it, no matter where I am at with it, I will get out tomorrow. I was so hoping I could get it in the mail when I finally got out again. We'll see. I realized that I wasn't hungry much yesterday and that being busy helped, ketosis helped and I do believe the coconut oil helped. I could barely finish my last bowl of the day. In fact, I know I could have skipped it. Funny, about 11pm, I did head into the kitchen to hunt for something to eat but nothing appealed to me and I smiled and walked away....I was tired, not hungry. I am on page 86 of One Bowl by Don Gerrard with the 5 Principles: 1. You will be able to feel more comfortable in your body by decreasing your consumption of disruptive foods and increasing you consumption of harmonious ones. This first principle is the key to the One Bowl method. However, to be effective, you must apply it along with four other principles. 2. Eat whenever you are hungry, as often as you are hungry, but stop eating the minute your hunger ceases. I never deprive myself of any food I want, or let myself go hungry, but i always stop eating as soon as the sensation of hunger fades. This will be before i feel really full, or stuffed, so I never overeat. But I always feel satisfied. 3. In the beginning, eat only one food at each meal. Over time, this has been my preferred way of eating, but this does not mean that everyone should eat this way. Whenever I eat more than one food, I do so in courses. But nine tenths of the meals are now single-course meals. I eat one food and then when hunger ceases I usually feel satisfied and do not refill my bowl. 4. When you get hungry, make a search to find just the right food that you most want to eat at that particular moment. Recognize that different moods on different days will bring the desire for many different foods. Consider hunting food as an important part of your daily life, and give time to it.....all the time you need. 5. I never have to abandon eating any type of food I like. People's tastes an responses to food vary enormously. You may find highly spiced foods, or raw foods, or boiled foods, or whatever, more harmonious than I do. One Bowl eating gives you the opportunity to discover what your own individual organism really wants to eat at every meal. Honor your being by finding and eating that perfect food. Gerrard goes on to say that he did not follow these principles over night, but they evolved over a period of months. I left out his personal food preferences in number 4, as it was rather long. Basically he said, that if a meal was not harmonious, then the method of preparation may be key. He mentions to try other ways of preparing a food to bring it to what tastes good. I suppose this is a way of encouraging experimentation with foods. My slight irritation with number 4 is that he makes it sounds as though we are always at home, always have a multitude of choices and assumes there are no health issues at stake. As in all intuitive/mindful books I have read, this idea that we can eat anything does not apply to everyone. I suppose the word harmonious is the catch phrase. If it makes you feel awful, don't eat it. That's a given, but people coming out of disordered eating can hardly grasp such subtle concepts. If one is use to feeling stuffed to the point of pain as a cue to stop eating, stopping when no longer hungry is like looking for a needle in a haystack. This is why I love One Bowl compared to other mindful eating books, at least the bowl itself is such a wonderful guide to eating less, at least " less at a time " . Eating from a small bowl brings the attention to the nurturing aspect of adding food to the bowl and having full permission for eating it, a very positive experience. The process of adding more food to the bowl delays eating naturally. It is much easier than counting bites or setting down the knife and fork and all the other behavior modification techniques I have tried and given up on. Nothing feels more annoying that to weigh out a portion of food and put it on a large plate and see the smallness of the food. I would rather see the smallness of the bowl and the food brimming to the edge, even if it ends up being the same amount of food. I am not being tricked or pretending it is more food, I am enjoying that my bowl is full, even though it is small. I guess it is like the glass half empty or half full thing. The small bowl does make it easier for me to decide when to stop eating, even if I do not follow the hunger signal most of the time. It is much harder for me to sit at a table full of food and a big empty plate, fill it with what I think I want to eat and then stop because after 6 bites because I am no longer technically hungry. That can happen in literally minutes and then I sit there with food in front of me and it feels weird to not eat anymore while everyone else is just still eating. I have to make decision about what to do the food on my plate, save it? toss it? return it to the skillet? My husband talks about how hard it is for him to stop eating from a bag if there is still food in it, or still food on the table in front of him, it is common probably to most people. When dieting I can have discipline with limiting my food intake, but it is not natural. It is a mental process that I force upon myself to stop because of the worry over the calories, weight gain or feelings of losing control. I can feel resentment brewing in that situation. With my small bowl, I feel that I can filled it up and it is mine to eat, I do not have to leave anything behind because I have the comfort of knowing that it is only a small amount anyways. But it does take time to get to that place, especially after so many years of disordered eating. I feel a huge difference in my sense of wellbeing when I am filling my bowl and eating from it, than I did when I weighed my food and ate according to the numbers. The odd thing with the numbers game is that there is little joy in it. It is like eating hospital or institutional foods, you eat all the little portions doled out according to the nutritional formulas, you eat it because it is there and always feel unsatisfied with it. If it were suppose to feed the body, it would feel right, but it doesn't. Looking at my meal by the calorie count makes it less likely I will notice the smell, the tastes and feel the joy of eating it. It was because of this that I started incorporating mindfulness with the foods I ate on the truck. I was eating the same foods days in and day out like a robot getting it's 1000 units of fuel. I understand the one-food-at-a-time thing that Gerrard stresses. The more mindful I get, the more I want to taste the food for itself. I am finding out how much I prefer simple foods, just as he describes trying. This morning I scrambled two eggs with a bit of cream, cooked in butter with a sprinkle of sea salt. It was fabulous, reminding me how much more flavour eggs had without the bacon. I love bacon, but any strong tasting food pared with a mild food, seems to cancel out the mild flavours. I tend to combine foods, Asian style to put in my bowl, but I will be playing around more with single items at a time as I go through this journey. I just cooked up ground beef with veggies, so that will be the menu until it is gone. Two recent experiences, the seafood salad that I made tasted really good, but I could not taste the individual ingredients. I could tell by the texture what I was eating, but the subtle flavour of the scallops were lost and the salmon took over. Seafood salad, a lifeless mess of what? The other one, was the day I put cubes of havarti cheese in my bowl, and I noted how wonderful and buttery that tasted. Had I mixed anything else in that, I would have lost that moment of delight. So I will be moving in this direction more. The weirdest outcome so far, is that when I really like the taste of something, I eat less of it. That never happened before. I use to want more of it if I liked it. Something shifted into wanting more if the food didn't really taste good, leaving me unsatisfied. Could it be the reason for overeating at a buffet? Not getting that satisfaction of taste because there is simply too many choices and the great tastes get drowned out? --

Posted By One Small Bowl to One Small Bowl at 3/30/2011 09:55:00 AM