Really.
TRY this: place a forkful of food in your mouth . . . Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry. Today’s experiment in eating, however, involves becoming aware of that reflexive urge to plow through your meal like Cookie Monster on a shortbread bender. Resist it. Leave the fork on the table. Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam. Continue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you’ll experience the third-eye-opening pleasures and frustrations of a practice known as mindful eating.
Okay, stop giggling there in back. This is serious. There’s a pay off. Keep reading.
“As we practice this regularly, we become aware that we don’t need to eat as much,” said Phap Khoi, 43, a robed monk who has been stationed at Blue Cliff since it opened in 2007. “Whereas when people just gulp down food, they can eat a lot and not feel full.” It’s this byproduct of mindful eating — its potential as a psychological barrier to overeating — that has generated excitement among nutritionists like Dr. Cheung.
The article then details a variety of mindful eating experiences weaving threads of Buddhist mediation as a metaphor that guides the mental state behind the chewing. Remove the spiritualist notions and the inevitable Silicon Valley example (Google holds a weekly one hour silent vegan lunch in their cafeteria) and the New New Thing here is quite familiar: WATTage.
Most of us, most of the time, buy and consume food in a Low WATT state. We Cue from color, smell, recommendation, comparisons or scribbles on the menu chalkboard. Then, most often surrounded by family, friends, or just a mass of humanity in the café, diner, or table we eat while we talk, laugh, drink, hoot, stare, drift, or hurry. With food easily accessible, safe, abundant, tasty, affordable, and omnipresent, just throw the WATTage switch to Low and you get that spare tire.
We don’t need synonyms or metaphors or religion or the Google Cool (Lunch)Table for this from a persuasion theory perspective. We’re just talking about good old WATTage, that dimmer switch we turn from moment to moment, but most often left in the efficient and effective Low WATT setting. No fooling: think while you eat and you will eat less.
Thus, standard persuasion theory strongly supports mindful eating as a reasonable intervention to control eating and overweight. But, persuasion theory and research also proves that High WATT plays are the most difficult to trigger and maintain. Most people most of the time simply cannot sustain High WATTage in the way mindful eating requires. Let’s recall the brilliant Professor Whitehead from 1911.
A society advances by the number of operations it can perform without thinking.
This from the guy who cowrote the Principia Mathematica. Whitehead goes on to note.
Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
Thus, even before your favorite 1970s dual process model (Kahneman and Tversky, Petty and Cacioppo, Shelly Chaiken and just on the persuasion side), we’ve got a mathematician, of all people, seeing WATTage and its variation. Whitehead’s military comparison also illuminates the rarity of High WATT operation, restricting it to decisive engagements, not everyday experience.
Thus, mindfulness advocates are essentially arguing for “Charge!” everytime we eat which is easy, fun, and popular if you score high on the Need for Cognition scale. Those in the top 15% have no trouble with daily cavalry assaults and cannot understand why the rest of us want to sit in the shade pounding down Twinkies with nary a thought. These differences in cognition and human nature escape even the mindful.
Thus, mindful eating is yet another example of confusing the word for the thing, of, gasp, eating the menu. To say, “Think!” and believe we have a solution is like clicking your heels and thinking of Dorothy, Toto, and Kansas when you want to escape. You only awaken to the loving arms of Auntie Em in the movies.
Or more artfully expressed with George Booth.
The last words go to Whitehead.
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case.
Think about it, mavens and muggles.