excerpt from Eating Mindfully, 2nd ed. by Susan Albers, PsyD

Readers have asked many wonderful questions during the past few years like, “I love ice cream. Can I still eat sweets mindfully?” and “What is the best way to start improving my eating habits?” Here are the ten most popular questions on the minds of readers, and their answers.

1. If I Start Eating Mindfully, What Will Happen To My Weight? Will I Lose Weight?”
2. “Is ‘Eating Mindfully’ A Diet? What’s Wrong With Dieting?”
3. “How Will Awareness Help Me Eat Better?”
4. “How Does Mindfulness Help People With Different Kinds Of Eating Issues?”
5. “How Did You Learn About Mindfulness?”
6. “Is There Evidence That Mindful Eating Can Help Me?”
7. “What Is The Difference Between Mindfulness of the Mind and Mindfulness of Thoughts?”
8. “Does Mindful Eating Mean I Can Eat Anything?”
9. “What is the Difference Between Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness?”
10. “Do I Have To Have A Spiritual Practice or Be Buddhist to Use a Mindful Eating Approach?”

excerpt from Eating Mindfully 2nd ed. by Susan Albers, PsyD

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.

excerpt from The Wisdom to Know the Difference: An Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Workbook

a personal story

You’re not alone. I know the depths to which addiction can take a person, and I know something about recovery. I know it personally, and I know it as a scientist, therapist, and researcher. Woven into this book will be sensibilities science has to offer to the recovering person, but also some small bits and pieces of my own path in recovery and, finally, stories I’ve heard along the way.

The recovery process has been slow at times, even slower than baby steps. The best I’ve done some days was to sit on my hands. I’ve learned to appreciate even those days spent sitting on my hands. If I’m sitting on my hands, it’s very hard to make much mess to clean up later.

I started down this road something like twenty-five years ago. There was a time, in the winter of 1985, when I would be up in the night, lying on the bathroom floor, heartsick, alone, the house quiet all around me. Lying on that floor, between bouts of retching, I found myself in a dreadful spot—impossibly trapped between an absolute inability to drink anymore and an absolute inability to stop. Lying on that floor, I could feel the cool of the linoleum on my cheek and it was good. There in the bathroom, in the middle of the night, tortured, I found a moment’s rest, my cheek pressed to the cool floor. My whole world was reduced to six square inches of cool linoleum. I could not leave that room without the terrors welling up around me. Even trying to rise from the floor filled me with awareness of all that I had done and regretted—and not done, and regretted more.

It was a starting point. From there, people began to teach me about acceptance and about holding my story in the world a little more gently, about letting go of limitations and opening up to possibility. By inches, I made my way up off the floor and out of that bathroom. I became engaged in the world in new ways. When I look where acceptance, openness, and engagement have taken me over the years, I have to pinch myself. I’ve fallen in love with people all over the world. I’ve become intimate with people and places and ideas that I could not have imagined. I’ve found souls all along the way who saw possibilities in me that I could not see in myself. And I’ve in turn had the privilege of seeing in others strength and beauty and possibility that they could not see.

excerpt from The Whole-Food Guide for Breast Cancer Survivors

Introduction

Few things are more devastating to a person’s peace of mind than a cancer diagnosis. It brings up fears not only for our own health but also for the well-being of our families, friends, and loved ones. For this reason and because it takes the lives of thousands of Americans every day, cancer has been the subject of intense scrutiny for half a century and has been studied for more than one hundred years.

Scientists have come to the conclusion that cancer is a chronic disease of the genome that can appear in anyone at any time, triggered by genetic predisposition and a confluence of interactions with the environment. Yet not everyone with the breast cancer gene develops the disease. Whether a woman avoids developing breast cancer, genetics notwithstanding, has everything to do with a myriad of other factors, including exposure to environmental factors, diet, lifestyle, stress, and more.

Once a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, an inevitable fear permeates her body and mind, and her friends and family are affected as well. Alarming questions emerge: Why did this happen to me? Why now? How serious is this illness? What treatment will be suggested? What can I do to improve my chances of having a happy and healthy life after treatment? If this cancer goes away, how can I minimize the risk of recurrence? Too often, some of these important questions go unanswered.

by guest blogger Stephanie Sarkis, PhD, author of 10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD, 2nd ed.: How to Overcome Chronic Distraction and Accomplish Your Goals

Here’s what I’m thinking about when starting this next year of 2012:

There's a trick to keeping your resolutions. It's amazingly simple, yet so effective. Ready?

Tell people about your resolutions.

That's it.

Why is this so effective? Because you've now taken your resolutions from private to public. Now people know.

excerpt from Present Perfect by Pavel Somov, PhD

Imagination is always at least one step ahead of reality. When we appraise the world, ourselves, or others, we compare what is (the real) with what theoretically could be (the imagined).

Say you got a B on a test. You look at this grade and you think that you could have done better, that you could have gotten an A. But that’s theory. The reality is that you got a B, not an A, and this B represented your practical (not theoretical) best.

With this in mind, let me ask you this: what do you mean by perfection—the theoretical best or the practical best? When you think about perfection, are you thinking about the imaginary perfection of what could be or about the perfection of what actually is? Of course, this is something of a rhetorical question. I know the answer: as a perfectionist, you define perfection as a theoretical best. That’s exactly why you are never satisfied with reality as it is.

It’s hard to look forward to our favorite foods when we’re taught to feel fearful, guilty and ashamed for eating — and actually enjoying it.

I think the key to enjoying food – without feeling guilty – is to shift our perspective: from seeing food as enemy #1, 2 and 3, as a sin and something not “worth the calories” (how many times have you said that?) to viewing it with awe, appreciation and curiosity.

Mindfulness gives us the opportunity to do all three.

In True Belonging: Mindful Practices to Help You Overcome Loneliness, Connect with Others & Cultivate Happiness, Jeffrey Brantley, M.D, and Wendy Millstine, NC, also offer great ideas on eating mindfully. First, before you even begin your meal, they suggest taking a few slow breaths.

They also note the importance of thinking about the origins of our food, and how incredibly connected we are to so many people through our meal.

They write:

Read the rest of "The Best Way To Enjoy Your Food This Holiday Season" on Psych Central

I don’t live in a big city. (In fact, the only noises I typically hear are birds chirping or cats in heat. Don’t ask.) But I’ve lived in NYC and have been visiting my family there several times a year for over a decade. So I have a fairly good grasp of what it’s like to be surrounded by a cacophony of car horns and ambulance sirens, a flurry of feet pounding the pavement, and hours (many hours) of traffic. Though it has many perks, city life is rarely peaceful or serene.

That’s why I really like the book Urban Mindfulness: Cultivating Peace, Presence & Purpose in the Middle of It All by Jonathan S. Kaplan, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and founder of UrbanMindfulness.org. In it, he addresses specific problems that plague city dwellers and gives readers a variety of strategies to feel more calm and fulfilled. (He lives in NYC, so I think he knows what he’s talking about.)

Read the rest of "4 Tips on Cultivating Mindfulness When You Live in a Busy, Bustling City" on Psych Central

excerpt from Just One Thing by Rick Hanson, PhD

To take any steps toward your own well-being, you have got to be on your own side. Not against others, but for yourself.

For many people, that’s harder than it sounds. Maybe you were raised to think you didn’t count as much as other people. Maybe when you’ve tried to stick up for yourself, you’ve been blocked or knocked down. Maybe deep down you feel you don’t deserve to be happy.

Think about what it’s like to be a good friend to someone. Then ask: Am I that kind of friend to myself?

If not, you could be too hard on yourself, too quick to feel you’re falling short, too dismissive of what you get done each day. Or too half-hearted about protecting yourself from mistreatment or telling others what you really need. Or too resigned to you own pain, or too slow about doing those things—both inside your head and outside it, in the wider world—to make your life better.

Plus, how can you truly help others if you don’t start by helping yourself?

The foundation of all practice is to wish yourself well, to let your own sorrows and needs and dreams matter to you. Then, whatever you do for yourself will have real oomph behind it!

excerpt from When Love Stumbles by Randi Gunther Ph.D.

For most of us, those feelings of being deeply known and unconditionally treasured first occurred when we were small children. Protected from the more conditional demands of the outside world, we could express our needs and feel entitled to their fulfillment. As an adult newly in love, we are likely to activate those childhood desires, sharing the words, phrases, and feelings that we remember from that time.