A letter came in this week from Diane in Sheffield, England, and she asked the question I probably get more than any other right now.
She was brave enough to put the embarrassing part in writing so she gets the whole episode. Hi, Rick. I'm fifty-four, and I've been dieting on and off since my twenties.
Last month, I read an article about mindful eating and how it can help you lose weight without counting anything, and I wanted to believe it. I really did. I tried it for about a week. I put my fork down between bites.
I chewed slowly. I tried to savor. Honestly, I felt a bit daft, or is it daft? Sitting there chewing like it was a school exercise, and by Friday, I'd given up.
Then last night, I finished a whole packet of biscuits during one episode of a detective show and only realized when my hand hit the bottom of the packet. I'm embarrassed even typing that.
So my question is, can you actually lose weight with mindful eating? And if you can, how? Because the version I tried felt like a gimmick, and I don't have the energy for another gimmick.
Diane, first, thank you for the biscuit packet detail because I guarantee you that half the people listening just felt their stomach drop in recognition.
What you described in that letter was a mechanism, and I'm going to spend this whole episode showing you which mechas- mechanism it was, why the version of mindful eating you tried was designed to fail, and how the real version works.
Let me answer your question straight up front because you asked it straight. Yes, you can lose weight through mindful eating. It's one of the few approaches with the machinery to make weight loss actually stick.
But here's what nobody told you. It doesn't work the way you tried it, and it doesn't work for the reason the magazine article implied.
The chewing drills and the fork choreography, diet culture dressed those up in a mindfulness costume and sold them to you as the real thing. So we're going to do this in four moves.
The problem as you're living it, what you tried and why it failed, and then what actually works with enough detail that you could start tonight. Start with the biscuits because that moment is the whole case study.
You sat down to watch your show. At some point, a packet of biscuits arrived in your lap.
And then, and this is the part that matters, you were gone, absent, awake in the technical sense, but missing from the moment in every way that counts.
Your hand ran a loop from packet to mouth over and over while your attention was in Yorkshire solving the murder. The first moment you showed up was when your fingers scraped cardboard. Who ate those biscuits?
Because it wasn't the Diane who wrote me this letter. The Diane who wrote this letter is intelligent, self-aware, and clear-eyed enough to describe the whole thing in two sentences.
A program did the eating, a habit loop your brain installed years ago, running now without consulting you. Cue couch, show, hand, mouth, repeat. Your brain does this because it's efficient.
It automates anything you repeat, the same way you can drive a familiar route home and arrive with no memory of a single traffic light. The autopilot handled the whole journey, and last night it handled the biscuits.
That's the real name of your problem, Diane, and it has nothing to do with greed, weakness, or some broken relationship with biscuits. Autopilot eating, and it happens at the scale most people never clock.
For most people who've struggled with weight for decades, the majority of their overeating happens in exactly the state you described.
Eyes on a screen, mind somewhere else, hand on a loop, meals at the desk while answering emails, picking up the kids' leftovers while clearing plates, the car park snack that doesn't count because it happens standing up.
None of it registers as eating because nobody was present for it. The calories are real. The experience never happened.
Now hold that thought because it explains why every diet you've tried since your twenties eventually collapsed. A diet hands you a set of rules for the conscious mind. Eat this, not that, this much at these times.
And your conscious mind, which is capable and motivated, follows the rules for a while. But the autopilot doesn't read the rule book. It doesn't attend the Monday morning meeting where you recommitted. It just waits.
And the moment your conscious mind is tired, stressed, or absorbed in a detective show, the autopilot takes the wheel and drives you straight through every rule you made.
Then Monday morning arrives, and you blame the driver who wasn't even in the car. Thirty years of that, Diane. Thirty years of taking the blame for a program.
So when that article told you mindful eating could help you without counting anything, some part of you recognized truth in it Your instinct was right.
Awareness is the answer because awareness is the one thing autopilot can-cannot survive. An unconscious habit needs the dark to operate. The whole loop depends on you not watching.
Which brings us to what you tried and why it fell apart by Friday. You did what the article told you. Fork down between bites, slow chewing, the dutiful attempt to savor, and within days, it felt daft,
like a school exercise, and you quit. Diane, you detected a fraud, and your instincts deserve the credit for it. That article handed you a fresh set of rules with a lavender-scented label and called it mindfulness.
Chewing quotas and mandated pauses with a bit of gratitude performed on command. Diet culture does this to every good idea it touches. It can't sell awareness.
Awareness is free and internal, so it gets converted into compliance, behaviors you can do wrong, tests you can fail,
and the moment eating turns into a performance with a grade attached, you're back in the old machinery: effort, monitoring, fatigue, collapse, shame. Willpower in a meditation costume.
You've spent thirty years learning what the cycle feels like from the inside, which is why your body clocked it within a week. Trust that instinct. It's earned.
Real mindful eating asks something different, and in one sense, something smaller, your presence at the meal. Nothing more. That's the entire practice. Show up. Notice.
No verdicts, and I know that sounds too soft to move a bathroom scale, so now we get to the how, the part you asked for.
There are five mechanisms that convert simple presence into weight loss, and I'm gonna walk through every one of them because you deserve the complete answer. The first mechanism is the one we've already met.
Presence shuts down autopilot eating. Witnessing alone does the work with no resistance required. The nighttime loop can only run while you're absent, so the act of arriving breaks it.
Picture last night with one change, the sofa, the show, the packet, all identical. But this time, when your hand moves, some part of you notices the hand moving. That's all. You don't have to stop it.
You don't have to white-knuckle anything. The noticing alone drags the behavior out of the basement and into the lit room, and behaviors that live in the basement don't survive the light.
Some nights, you'll notice and eat the biscuits anyway with full attention and discover that four of them with your attention present satisfy you more than the whole packet did without it.
That discovery alone, repeated over months, moves real weight without a single act of restriction. You attended. That was the whole intervention. The second mechanism is signal recovery.
Your body broadcasts hunger and fullness constantly and is good at it. But there's a catch built into your wiring. Fullness signals run late.
The stretch receptors in your stomach and the hormones that signal enough take about twenty minutes to reach your brain.
Eat fast and distracted, and you'll blow past genuine satisfaction long before the message arrives, then feel stuffed twenty minutes later and wonder what happened.
Decades of dieting made it worse because diets train you to override your signals in both directions. Ignore hunger when the plan says fast. Ignore fullness when the plan says finish your allotted portion.
After thirty years of that, most people can barely hear their own body.
Slower, present eating gives the fullness signal time to land while there's still food on the plate, so you get to decide to stop with real information already in hand.
This is the honest reason slow eating works, by the way. Chewing buys bandwidth. You're keeping the line open long enough for your body's message to get through. The third mechanism is exposure.
A lot of eating is anesthesia, boredom, loneliness, the low hum of an unresolved worry, the flatness of a Tuesday evening. Food is the fastest legal way to change how you feel, and the autopilot knows it.
When you eat with your attention present, you start catching the moment before you reach the feeling that sent your hand toward the packet in the first place.
Half the time, just naming the feeling discharges most of its power. Oh, I'm restless, and restlessness was driving the whole thing. You can be restless without biscuits.
You can even be sad without biscuits, which sounds obvious written down and feels revolutionary the first time you live it. Food is a terrible therapist, Diane. It never once asks what, what's wrong. Awareness does.
The fourth mechanism might matter most for you, given thirty years of dieting Mindful eating carries no forbidden list, and that dismantles the restriction and rebellion cycle at the root.
Every diet you've ever run created a forbidden category, and every forbidden category built pressure that eventually blew the lid off.
A binge, shame close behind it, then stricter rules that just loaded a bigger release next time. Round and round since your twenties. The biscuits stay legal here. Awareness only asks that you be present with them.
The food you're allowed to have, eaten with attention, loses the electric charge that only forbidden food carries. The frantic quality drains out of it. You cannot binge attentively. Nobody ever has.
Bingeing requires the trance. The fifth mechanism is the quiet accumulation of data. Every meal you're present for teaches you something.
Maybe that four o'clock hunger is depletion wearing a disguise, or that second helping never tastes like the first. Eating in front of the laptop leaves you unsatisfied, no matter, no matter the quantity.
And certain meals hold you for five steady hours, while others dump you into a craving by mid-afternoon. None of these lessons arrive as a rule from outside.
Each one is your own finding from your own body, and knowledge you generate yourself doesn't spark the rebellion that imposed rules do. There's nothing to rebel against. It's just what you now know.
Over a year, that accumulating knowledge quietly rebuilds how you eat in a shape that actually fits your life, because your life is where the data came from. Those five mechanisms run on one engine, Diane.
Presence at your own meals, and look at what the whole approach leaves out. There's no calorie maths anywhere in it, no forbidden category either.
And your body finds nothing to rebel against because nobody's imposing anything. Now the hard part, because there is one, and I'd be lying by omission if I skipped it.
Somewhere in the first weeks of this, a craving will arise. You'll be aware of it, and it won't stop.
You'll be standing in your lounge at nine in the evening, wide awake to what's happening, and the pull toward the cupboard will build anyway, louder, more insistent. And a voice will say, "See? Awareness is useless.
You noticed, and you still want them. Might as well eat them." This is the sticking point. This is where most people conclude the whole approach doesn't work. For that exact moment, carry one picture.
That craving is a wave. It rises, it swells, it crests, and it breaks. Every wave that has ever existed has broken. Not one has stayed at its peak.
Not one of yours will either, however enormous it feels on the way up. And you, Diane, you are not the wave. You are the ocean it's moving through. The wave is surface weather.
You are the depth underneath it, and down there the water is still and quiet, no matter what's crashing above. Being mindful in a craving doesn't mean fighting the wave.
Fighting is the old way, the willpower way, and you know how that ends. Being mindful means dropping beneath the surface and watching the wave do what waves do: rise, crest, break, pass.
The first time you watch one all the way through without being swept, something permanent shifts because you'll have proof that you and the craving are two different things. You are the ocean. The wave breaks.
You remain. That's the picture. Keep it. And when a wave does take you, because some will, early on most of all, you already know the protocol because we've built it together on this show. You go scientist, not judge.
The judge looks at an empty packet and delivers a verdict. The scientist looks at the same packet and gets curious. What was I feeling at eight o'clock? What was the day like before the packet came out?
The judge produces shame, and shame produces more eating, which is the entire business model of the industry we're escaping. The scientist produces information, and information produces change.
A slip observed with curiosity is a lesson. The same slip observed with judgment is the first turn of another spiral. The event is identical. The observer decides what it becomes.
Getting this right matters more than any technique I could hand you, and it's why your question earned the full episode.
If you walk away believing mindful eating is a technique, a fork trick, a chewing protocol, you'll perform it for two weeks, feel daft, quit, and file it with the other thirty years of things that didn't work.
Worse, you'll file yourself with them. One more failure for the pile. One more piece of evidence for the story that something in you is defective. That story is the real enemy here, Diane.
The biscuits were only ever a symptom. Every abandoned gimmick feeds the story, and it's the heaviest thing you carry.
But if you walk away understanding mindful eating as a change in who's present at your own meals, then there's nothing to perform and nothing to quit. You can't fail at showing up to your own life.
You can only forget and then remember. And every remembering is the practice working. One move, Diane, sometime tomorrow at any meal or snack, ask yourself a question before the first bite. Am I here?
That's it. The question carries no judgment about what's on the plate or how you're eating it. Just, am I here? If the answer is no, no punishment, no verdict, just arrive. Put the phone face down.
Look at the plate and take one bite with your full attention on it. Just one. Whatever happens after that happens. You'll have done the entire practice because the entire practice is arrival repeated.
Absence has protected the weight you've fought for 30 years. Meals nobody attended. Biscuits nobody decided to eat. Diets failed because they gave rules to the conscious mind while the autopilot kept the wheel.
The mindful eating you tried failed because it was rules again. Compliance dressed as calm. The real version works through five mechanisms that all reduce to one act. Being present while you eat.
And the cravings that rise along the way are waves moving across the surface. You're the ocean underneath. Diane, thank you for writing this in.
And thank you for the honesty about the packet because your embarrassment just became someone else's turning point. That's how this community works. One person tells the truth and a thousand people get free.
You've spent 30 years being the person eating in the dark. Starting tomorrow at one meal with one question, you become the person who turned the light on. The one who's there at her own table for her own life.
That's who we are now. We eat awake. You've been told to eat less, move more, try harder, want it more. You've been told the problem is discipline. The problem is you. You've been lied to.
The diets didn't fail because you're weak. They failed because they were designed to fail. Willpower was never the answer. Shame was never the fuel. And your body was never the enemy. This is the way out.
Oh, oh, oh. This is the way out. Oh, oh, oh. This is the way out. Oh, oh, oh. This is the way out. Oh, oh, oh. This is the way out.
Oh, oh, oh.