Book a Free Q & A Session to find out!Mindfulness-Based Eating Awareness Training Program (MB-EAT) is a program designed to help you achieve a more balanced approach to mindful eating and living. It’s not a diet but a new way of relating to food, to eating, to yourself, and to your body!
The training consists of a comprehensive 10-week online program that integrates a wide range of mindfulness meditation practices; didactic instruction; guided eating practices with increasingly challenging foods and food situations; self-reflection to cultivate a more balanced relationship to eating, weight, and food; motivational practices; weekly home practices, and group check-ins/discussion.
Participants learn to pay attention to what their body really needs, how to experience the full pleasure and taste of food without overeating, and how to relieve the guilt and struggle so often associated with overeating. The program emphasizes quality over quantity, recognizing hunger and fullness, practicing taste satisfaction and satiety, understanding emotional triggers for eating, and self-forgiveness.
By promoting enhanced self-awareness around food, the program helps to end mindless, stress-related and emotional eating.
MB-EAT discourages “diet mentality,” and “judging” ourselves for our eating behaviors. In this way, MB-EAT contrasts with traditional, more restrictive approaches to weight management/weight loss by focusing on flexibility, self-acceptance, making long-term behavioral changes, and increasing enjoyment of eating. MB-EAT emphasizes the value of connecting to the “wise inner self” in the need for self-regulation, as an alternative to depending on externally imposed rules of dieting, food restriction, and socially imposed norms regarding body weight and appearance.
The foundation of MB-EAT is mindfulness — the intentional focus on your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations in the present moment without self-judgment. It helps us become more aware of — rather than react to – our personal experiences and choices regarding food and eating. As you become more aware of your eating habits, you will learn to take steps towards behavioral changes that improve your relationship with food and yourself.
Classes meet for 2 hours online, once per week, for 10-weeks. The class directs efforts toward improving physical and emotional wellbeing by reducing weight stigma – rather than emphasizing weight loss as the key to our self-definition.
This unique program was developed by Jean Kristeller, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Indiana State University and Founding Director and past-President of The Center for Mindful Eating. She is author of The Joy of Half a Cookie (Perigree/Penguin 2015) and over 50 professional papers and book chapters.
She has conducted research both on the psychology of meditation and the psychology of food intake regulation for over 35 years, and has received multiple NIH grants for research related to her MB-EAT program for individuals with binge eating disorder, diabetes, and adult and childhood obesity.
As a grad student at Yale in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dr. Kristeller had a compulsive overeating problem.
After working with Jon Kabat-Zinn (who created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program) at the University of Massachusetts, she had the idea of integrating meditation practice as part of a treatment program that she developed for obesity and compulsive overeating from a stress-management framework.
The result, she found, was transformative. She realized that mindfulness training offered tools not only for relaxation and managing stress-related eating but also for totally shifting one’s relationship to food.
MB-EAT evolved from more than 30 years of experience and NIH-funded research by Dr. Jean Kristeller to help people learn to come into balance with their eating. The core MB-EAT program, which emphasizes inner and outer wisdom, has been adapted to a range of populations, including individuals with varying levels of obesity, eating disorders, and Type II diabetes. Her NIH-funded research found that the practice of mindfulness meditation and mindful eating helps people decrease binge eating, manifest less depression, and experience a better sense of inner balance and control around eating.
MB-EAT is a mindfulness-based eating awareness program. This 10-week program blends mindful eating with mindfulness meditation practices, didactic instruction on principles of food intake and emotional regulation, experiential exercises, group discussion, and self-reflection to cultivate a more balanced relationship to eating, weight, and food and to help end the cycle of mindless, stress-related and/or emotional eating.
MB-EAT is designed to integrate “inner wisdom” (greater use of awareness of hunger, fullness, and taste, and emotional triggers in making food choices) and “outer wisdom” (more personally satisfying and flexible use of nutritional guidelines to manage food choices and quantity).
MB-EAT emphasizes how to enjoy food more, eat less of it, and end the cycle of overeating, guilt, and deprivation (“cultivating your inner gourmet rather than martialing your inner police force”) (Kristeller, Joy of Half a Cookie, p. 5).
MB-EAT is based on longstanding principles of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the capacity to bring full attention and awareness to one’s experience, in the moment, without judgment. Mindful Eating brings mindfulness to food choices and the experience of eating by helping you become aware of your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations related to eating.
MB-EAT classes meet for 2 hours, once per week, for 10-weeks. Each week, we practice meditation and exercises to engage in mindful eating and develop a better relationship with food. Discussion of research, as well as small group exercises and home practice, enhance mastery of the material.
Training consists of:
Mindful eating can lead to greater psychological wellbeing, increased pleasure when eating, and body acceptance. It promotes a slower and more thoughtful way of eating that helps us to enjoy our food more, choose more healthful foods, and make us less likely to overeat. By enhancing our ability to improve self-regulation, it helps us let go of our preoccupation with issues related to eating and weight, and thereby shifts our energy to other important concerns and values in our lives.
Evidence from multiple NIH-funded randomized clinical trials on MB-EAT with people with a range of eating issues has shown a significant improvement in their eating and emotional regulation. Through emphasis on the value of connecting to our “wise inner voice,” MB-EAT poses an alternative approach to depending on externally imposed rules of dieting, food restriction, self-judgments, and socially imposed norms regarding body weight and appearance.
MB-EAT has been the subject of dozens of research articles. NIH-funded research that is based on MB-EAT has found positive effects for decreasing binge episodes, improving one’s sense of self-control with regard to eating, and diminishing depressive symptoms. See Jean Kristeller & Kevin D. Jordan, Mindful Eating: Connecting with the Wise Self, the Spiritual Self, Frontiers in Psychology, v. 9, no. 1271 (Aug. 14, 2018).
Session 1: Introduction: Inner Wisdom/Outer Wisdom; Raisin Exercise; Basic Meditation Instruction
Session 2: Mini-Meditation; Mindfully Eating High Fat Food: Cheese and Crackers; Food Labels/Serving Sizes; ‘Quality over Quantity’ Challenge; Introduction to “Keep in Balance”
Session 3: Hunger Awareness; Emotional Eating and Other Triggers; Body Scan; Weighing Pros & Cons
Session 4: Introduction to Physical Activity/Pedometers; Chocolate: Taste Satiety versus Taste Satisfaction, Challenges of Restaurant Eating
Session 5: Stomach Fullness and Body Satiety; Making Food Choices: Cookies vs. Chips; Chaining: Eating and Emotions; Forgiveness Meditation
Session 6: Outer Wisdom: Nutrition; Hourly Energy Balance; Mindfully Eating Fruits and Veggies; Integrated Mindful Eating Meditation
Session 7: Mindful Savoring Meditation; Pot Luck Meal; Review of ‘Quality over Quantity’ Challenge
Session 8: Mindful Movement/Physical Activity; Walking Meditation; Chain Analysis; Stress and Eating; Eating Trigger Meditation; Craving Meditation; Chair Yoga
Session 9: Chain Analysis (continued); Personal Values Exercise; My Favorite Food Meditation; Maintaining Change
Session 10: Wisdom Meditation; Mindfully Snacking; Keep in Balance Review
The program also includes 2 follow-up group meetings after Session 10. Date TBA.
Join an Upcoming Class
For information on the next classes in MB-EAT and MBSR, please contact Kelly Weisberg at: [email protected] or use this form to reach out.
*Disclaimer: MB-EAT and MBSR are educational programs and not therapy. Participation in an MBSR program may not be indicated for those with histories of addiction, suicidal ideation, trauma or psychosis.
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