Beware of claims that mindful eating will help you lose weight

Mindful eating is increasingly being promoted as a solution to being overweight. Mindful eating, we are promised, will help useat less,transform our relationship with foodandend our battle with weight once and for all. The truth is, we simplycan't say with confidencethat mindful eating can help with weight management.

This is not because of a lack of trials. There have beenplenty of evaluationsof mindfulness-based weight-loss programmes, and many of these have shown that people do indeed lose weight. But these programmes tend to incorporate other elements that have little to do with mindfulness. For example, people may be provided withnutritional adviceor be prompted tothink about their motivations for weight loss. They are also likely to attend group-based workshops and, in doing so, may benefit from thesupport and encouragementof other group members. As such, we don't know whether it's themindful eatingthat's helping these people lose weight or the non-mindfulness bits of the programmes.

It's much easier to rule out these factors with experiments in a laboratory. And here there is很好的证据that some mindful eating strategies can influence what a person eats. In particular, getting someone to focus on thesensory propertiesof their food while eating (for example its taste, texture, look and smell) can reduce the amount of high-calorie snack food they eat后来. But we don't really know why.

One possibilityis that this approach lets people maximise the amount of sensory pleasure they get from their food, as opposed to simply eating in order to fill up. This could lead to a person choosing to eat less because the more we eat a food, the less pleasure we get from it; the first bite of a large chocolate brownie may taste quite heavenly, the last bite possibly a little sickly. So if we stop eating sooner, the average amount of sensory pleasure we get from the experience will be greater than if we proceed to stuff down every last morsel.

But, if this is the case, this strategy could cause someone to eat more when they'renot hungry, because food can be pleasurable even when we're full, such as when we eat dessert after a large main course. It may also havelittle effecton those who are dieting if they are already restricting their portion sizes (and getting them to focus on sensory pleasure could make them forget about their weight-loss goals). Indeed, although this type of mindful-eating strategy has been found to reduce snacking in bothnormal weightandoverweightpeople, none of this research has been specifically carried out with people who are trying to lose weight, nor have the effects been carefully examined outside the lab. It's possible that people compensate for reduced intake on one occasion by eating more at another time.

Thinking about food-related thoughts

Another mindful eating strategy that has beenshown to influence eating behaviouris that of noticing people's thoughts about food and trying to create a distance between the thoughts and the person. For example, a individual might be asked to think of themselves as the driver of a bus, and all their thoughts about food ("I really need chocolate", "I deserve chocolate", "I can't cope without chocolate") as noisy passengers on the bus; the passengers can make as much racket as they like, but the driver is still in charge of deciding where they go. This type of strategy has beenshown to help people resisttempting foods.

But, again, these studies were conducted with people who were interested in eating more healthily, notpeoplewho were dieting to lose weight. In fact,other similar researchsuggests this type of strategy may have no additional advantage for those who already haveweight-lossgoals in mind.

Other mindful eating strategies

Of course the two strategies described above are not the only ways ofeating mindfully. As well as paying attention to what you're eating, and noticing yourfood-related thoughts, mindful eating can also be about becoming more aware of feelings of hunger and fullness or of particular cues that trigger over indulgence (a work success, a lover's rejection). In principle they could help someonemanage problem eating, which may in turn help them lose weight. But at this point we simply don't have the evidence to state this with confidence. So, although there may be many good reasons to eat mindfully, losingweightis not necessarily one of them.

This article was originally published onThe Conversation. Read theoriginal article.