"Mindful eating" is not always a helpful concept

I've been having the following thoughts and feelings for a long time, but I think due to handling things better lately, I'm finally at the point where I can articulate them more clearly.

Here they are, in short:

When I first started working with a nutritionist, I didn't understand the point of mindful eating at all. I'm not sure what I thought the reasons for it were -- I guess partly it's so often used to try to get people to eat *less* (which is the opposite of what I need) that I was wary of it for that reason; and also, just a sense that it's part of a "culture of spiritual 'virtue' / perfectionism" that I feel very suspicious of in general (which to be clear I do not think is intrinsic to the Eastern religions from which the concept of mindfulness emerged -- but I do think it's intrinsic to the way the Western world has appropriated it for its own Protestant-Ethic purposes).

In the process of working with a nutritionist, I did begin to get the idea that the point of mindful eating from a "How to Eat Food" perspective was to clue in better to your body's signals). So once I got that, that was more helpful. However, here is what I can now say about me and mindful eating (and I'm sure I'm not alone):

Eating comes with distress for me. (At least this is true in a context in which I'm preparing food and eating generally alone -- having other people involved in my meals makes a huge difference, but that's not the reality of my life right now.) At this point, the distress is simple physical distress that I think comes from basic facts about who I am -- sensory integration issues (discomfort with how different foods feel to the touch when I prepare them, or in my mouth); chronic pain that affects my comfort with preparing food; "moving through molasses"-type issues; issues with making decisions around planning meals and groceries and "getting it right" or "right enough" so that my body will not be chronically sad about what I am or am not feeding it; and general lack of appetite/interest/motivation when it comes to food.

These are multiple sources of distress and aversion that I've learned to manage well enough that I now have damn-near functional daily and weekly food habits, in the midst of living a pretty emotionally and professionally overwhelming life at the moment. (After 7 years of struggle I am inexpressibly thrilled about feeling like something is finally working for realz.) The point is, though, these sources of distress and aversion are things I manage, not things that have gone away, or that I expect to go away any time soon -- and they're facts of my life that I feel frankly pretty neutral about at this point, not problems I really expect to solve or see solutions for within the real constraints of my life.

So what does this mean for me when it comes to mindful eating? It means that DISTRACTING MYSELF BY DOING SOMETHING ELSE PLEASURABLE WHILE I EAT is a key coping mechanism that causes me to BE ABLE TO EAT.

Yes, I've learned other strategies that are part of why I'm doing so much better with food. But after years of on-and-off experimentation, one thing is very clear: when I'm in the habit of reading fiction while I eat, I eat regularly. When I get out of that habit, I stop eating regularly. The relation between the two activities is quite clear.

To make this slightly more nuanced, I think that reading while I eat actually enables me to be MORE mindful. When I do not read, I get overwhelmed by distress that makes me unable to detect sensations like hunger, fullness, what type of food I want to eat, etc. When I do read, the pleasure that I get from reading motivates me and suppresses the distress enough that I can detect those types of signals from my body, which enable me to eat enough that I get full, and eat the variety of food that my body actually wants.

I will add one more note of context: I am not a person who is a stranger to mindfulness practice; in fact I practiced mindful breathing and meditation daily for 4.5 years and today still practice mindfulness techniques that help me fall asleep and deal with anxiety. So I understand some of what mindfulness offers in terms of relief of mental health issues, and I do credit my mindfulness practice with bringing me to a much better mental health place. Also, in particular, I understand the concept that facing distressing emotions and sensations head-on without avoiding them helps them have less power over you / helps reduce them. However, part of my goal in writing this is to assert that those techniques are not always accessible or possible for everyone all the time (which I know because they definitely are not always accessible or possible for me), and it feels important to me to talk back to the "spiritual virtuism" thing that I mentioned above, in favor of people being where they are and doing what's possible for them where they are. And if there are alternative techniques that work and do no harm and feel more accessible, then that is a good thing and they should be articulated and made available.

By the way, I really appreciated this related article in the New York Times Magazine.