Mindful eating

The book

6 steps

Balance

Mindful eating plate

Eating well and appropriately are essential eating adjuvant therapies to cancer treatments. Eating well and appropriately does not mean eating super functional food, food for detoxifications or food to enhance our immune system. Eating therapy is essentially eating mindfully and nutritiously. It also means eating moderately.

Eating is much more than just satisfying hunger, it entails high emotional quotions as with cravings. Cancer treatments creates side effects affecting eating, like loss of appetite, taste, and the ability to swollow, nausea and much more.

If the cancer patient is obsese and has diabetes, he should eat less and should loose some weight to stabilise fat in the body. If the cancer patient rejects food due to side effects, then the patient is vulnerable to cachexia; a dangerous condition when cancer cells will eat normal cells to survive. That is why cancer is sometimes referred as a “wasting disease”

Susan Albers, PSY.D’s latest book Eat.Q. avocates the power of emotional intelligence to address our problems in eating. This is not another health or weight loss book.  Susan Albers is an experienced psychologist specialising in mindful eating, mindfulness and emotional intelligence. The author recognises the emotional elements that are affecting us when we eat. This book provides the solution to emotional eating, stress related eating and plain old over-eating. Her EAT formula is definitely a fresh approach to mindful eating. EAT is an acronym for Embracing your feelings, Accepting your emotions, and Turning to new, positive alternatives to eating.

The book is however heavy reading to digest and understand it’s tools for success. Whilst the book is essentially to help obese people to reduce weight, it is also a good book for cancer patients to avoid cachexia. Just use the same concepts in handling the eating process with emotional  intelligence.

This is a good book to have and to guide us through in eating well and mindfully.

Take care

Allen Lai