A mindful guide to compulsive eating behaviour.
How many thoughts have you had about food today?
Not meals. Thoughts. The tally of what you've eaten and what you're still allowed. The negotiation over whether the biscuit is worth it.
The silent inventory of the fridge you did an hour ago without noticing you were doing it.
Most people have never actually counted. If you did, the number would probably startle you.
That is what I mean by a head full of food. Not obsession. Not disorder. A low background hum of food-related noise that has been running for so long you may have stopped hearing it. Checking in. Checking up. Keeping score.
It behaves like static. It interferes. It gets between you and your actual appetite, your actual pleasure, your actual body. It may only be when it stops that you realise how loud it was.
Most people spend more energy managing the static than they spend on the eating itself.
That is what this workbook sets out to quiet. Not by handing you another set of rules to add to the pile. There are already too many, and they are largely why the static exists in the first place. This book helps you understand where the noise comes from, and how to turn down the volume.
The first half is six chapters of explanation of the hunger beneath the hunger. Why the sweet taste carries so much judgement. Why willpower was never actually the problem. What a craving is really trying to tell you, if you let it finish the sentence. What stress does to your body's relationship with food, chemically, not metaphorically.
Why pleasure at a meal is part of the machinery of digestion itself. And an honest look at sugar, without the fear-mongering and without the free
pass either.
The second half is fourteen practices to discover where YOUR hunger is arising from. Not homework. No gold star for finishing, no correct order to do them in. Each one comes in two sizes, Fun size and King size, so you can go exactly as deep as you're ready for and stop the moment you're not.
None of this requires you to overhaul your life or declare war on your kitchen cupboard.
It requires you to get curious about a voice you have been listening to for so long you assumed it was your own. Spoiler alert, it probably isn’t.