How common and effortless it is to eat in an uncontrolled, unaware, mindless manner. If you’ve ever continued to snack when you were full, cut calories despite being hungry, or used guilt to guide your eating, you’ve experienced mindless eating firsthand. Let’s face it. Deciding what to eat is not an easy task. It’s so tricky that in the United States eating concerns and weight obsessions have reached epidemic proportions, with serious health, emotional, and economic consequences for a large part of the population. We desperately need something new to help us overcome these issues—mindful eating may be the answer.

What is mindful eating? A few weeks ago, I discovered an excellent example of it, and the incident involves the best chocolate lava cake I’ve ever had. You might be wondering how dessert fits into a book about managing your weight and healthy eating. If you want to know the answer, keep reading. Mindful eating, as you will learn in this book, is eating more consciously, so you can eat just enough to be satisfied—without eating too much or too little. It sounds simple, but if you’ve ever tried it, you know it’s much easier said than done. Yet, it is an essential skill for managing your weight.

I was at one of my favorite restaurants, a tiny bistro with a menu that changes by season, with a good friend whose name also happens to be Susan. When the waitress arrived, Susan asked to hear the dessert special first. She was interested in the bistro’s signature dessert, a warm chocolate fudge molten lava cake. Susan wanted to know, up front, whether the cake was still on the menu because it would impact what she ordered for dinner. If they offered the lava cake, she figured she’d order an appetizer and the cake, no entrée. If not, she’d skip dessert all together and just order an entrée. She said, “I’m going to make room, not find room.” Knowing this dessert was on the menu helped her choose her meal wisely. She had plenty of room for dessert without feeling overly stuffed. The cake was warm, gooey, and the melted chocolate ran down it like a river.

In general, mindful eating is like this example—learning to eat the things you love in a sensible way. It’s breaking old, mind¬less eating habits and closely gauging your appetite to just eat when you are hungry and stop when you are satisfied. This is a skill that helps you to get to a healthy weight. In this book, you will learn much more about how making simple changes like this can make a big difference to your weight and health.

You may also be wondering what turns an everyday activity like eating into such an overwhelming process. The answer to that question is, of course, a complex one. Throughout this book, we will return to that question with some answers. But the bot¬tom line is this: to make smart, healthy eating choices, your body and mind work together to send you essential cues about what you need and want to eat. These cues give you information about how much and what to eat. The sensations and emotions that signal when you’re full, famished, or just wanting to eat something rich and delicious are a complex combination of bodily and emotional feelings. If you are attentive and responsive to these cues, your eating will be healthier and well regulated.

In this book, you will learn how mindlessness unknowingly corrupts the way you eat a meal and how it manifests in a variety of eating problems. You will gain insight into why mindfulness, which is, of course, the opposite of mindlessness, can provide you with valuable skills to control the way you eat.

excerpt from Eating Mindfully 2nd ed.: How to End Mindless Eating and Enjoy a Balanced Relationship with Food by Susan Albers, PsyD; foreword by Lilian Cheung, DSc, RD