Conscious EatingDecode Your Cravings - Workbook

Decode Your Cravings

Conscious eating is an eating practice that helps you

reconnect with food and be in tune with your body

and mind.

When used in conjunction with other techniques and strategies in

Decode Your Cravings, it helps heal your relationship with food and

promotes consistency in your habits.

There are three parts to Conscious Eating practice:

1. Preparation - Reconnecting with the process of acquiring and

preparing food.

2. The Practice of Eating - Your actual behaviors and thoughts during

mealtimes.

3. Processing - Reviewing your journal entries, expanding on them,

and “correcting the record.”

We call it a “practice” because it’s something that requires attention

and persistence. It’s not something you do a few times. Rather, it’s a

series of habits that you work to adopt going forward.

Part one and two should be considered a goal every single time you eat.

Part three is a learning and healing process that you should use for 7

days at a time, repeating as needed to strengthen or restore your

connection.

What is Conscious Eating?

Decode Your Cravings

Our modern society is completely backwards from the process we

evolved with. Today, we have nothing to do with the hunting

process aside from a small percentage of people who still hunt.

More comical, the gathering process is limited to hopping in a

4Runner and wandering the grocery aisles. Hardly a chore.

There’s no chance of going hungry anymore either. Instead, our

problem is having too much and wasting the extra. What about

cooking and meal prep? You can’t just cook, you have to vacuum

and toss in a load of laundry at the same time. Or, you’re not even

at or near your home and don’t take part in the preparation at all.

If we want to restore our connection to food, body, and self, we

must change our preparation habits.

Part 1 / PreparationPreparation Habits & Behaviors

1. Connect fully with the process of acquiring your food. Prepare

your mindset for health. Don’t rush the shopping experience.

Connect with the food you’re choosing to purchase rather than

mindlessly adding things to your cart. Read nutrition labels.

Buy local when possible & build a relationship with providers.

2. Prepare and cook your own food as often as possible.

Restaurants are convenient, but they increase your

disconnection. The more you cook your own food, the better off

you’ll be (and healthier too).

3. Make the decision to eat based on authentic hunger. Learn the

difference between physical hunger and psychological hunger.

Distinguish between nourishing your body and medicating your

pain and stress. Don’t eat based on a schedule or some other

external trigger—wait for your body’s signals.

4. Prepare and cook your food without distraction. Be fully

present in the process. Avoid phones, televisions, and other

distractions. If you have kids to watch, involve them in the

process or have them play on their own.

5. Connect fully with the process of preparation and cooking.

Smell and taste as you go. Fully integrate yourself and your

core cravings into the process. See cooking and prep as a form

of moving meditation.

Decode Your Cravings

When we sit down to a meal, our goal is to restore our connection

to the food, our connection to our bodies, and our connection to

our Self (and sub-selves).

Part 2 // EatingEating Habits & Behaviors (Continued)

4.Practice breath work. Deep breathing is the best way to quickly

turn off the sympathetic state and turn on the parasympathetic

state. Take a deep breath in your nose, hold for five seconds,

and then make a small circle with your lips to exhale through.

Breathe out at a steady pace for as long as possible. Repeat this

process for a total of five breaths.

5. Engage your five senses. Touch your food, smell your food,

look at the details of your food, try to discern the different

individual flavors, and listen to the sounds around you. A focus

on your senses will keep you present and connected.

6. Savor every single bite. Part of hunger and satiety is taste. The

first bite always tastes the best because your taste buds are

designed to signal you to keep eating. As you get full, the taste

buds dull and it becomes harder to savor each next bite. This is

another signal that you should listen to.

7. Take your time. Put your fork down between every bite. If

you’re eating with others, use this time to connect with them

and fulfill your core relationship cravings.

8. Journal thoughts and emotions while eating (or after if not

possible). Is your Inner-Rebel or one of your other sub-

personalities speaking up? Write down their messages. Write

about any emotions such as joy, shame, guilt, or fear.

Eating Habits & Behaviors

1. Clear all distractions from the process of eating. Just as you

clear distractions from prep and cooking, clear them from

eating as well. No devices, no newspapers, no nothing. The

only exception is other human beings.

2. Always eat sitting down at a table. The antithesis of Conscious

Eating is eating in a rush, in a car, on the couch, or on the

move. I get that you’re busy, but you need to invest time in

yourself and the relationship you’re building with food.

3. Approach food as love and nourishment for your body. Food is

not the enemy. Your body is not the enemy. Doing battle

against these things will leave you bloodied and bruised and no

better off. Eat to nourish your body and soul. As you engage in

this practice, you should also notice that your ability to make

healthier decisions becomes easier and more consistent.

One of the most important aspects of conscious eating is the

journaling exercise. The process of eating teaches you a lot

about yourself, if you’re listening.

Because we’ve been at war with food for so long, it’s common

for our sub-personalities to awaken during mealtime and

snacking. They start talking…

Your Inner-Rebel may start to tell you how the food you’re

about to eat is so boring (because you’re restricting fat or

carbs).

Your Perfectionist may start to tell you that your meal isn’t

good enough. It’s not organic, or grass-fed, or home-cooked. It

has too many calories or too much meat.

Your shame-filled Inner-Child may feel bad for eating,

regardless of what food you’ve chosen, because when you were

seven your mom called you Piggy and told you that you ate too

much.

Your Addict may tell you to eat all the food. Just binge. It’ll feel

so good. And don’t leave without dessert, because dessert is the

best medication.

Your Taskmaster might chime in to remind you that you don’t

have time for eating. That you need to eat faster because there’s

stuff that has to get done. After all, you’re never productive

enough.

It’s important to begin to identify all these parts of you. This is

how you start to really understand yourself and your behavior.

This is how you put a name and a face to all the manipulation.

This is how you begin to put your Authentic Self back in the

driver’s seat.

You don’t have to journal all the time, though. We recommend a

7 day discovery period of journaling followed by 7 day refresher

period as needed (every few months).

Decode Your Cravings

Journaling with Conscious Eating

In addition to journaling as described on the previous page, it

can be helpful to use prompts to kickstart your self-

investigation. Here are a few prompts we recommend…

“What do I want food to do for me—deeply, at the core?”

“What is my inner-critic telling me [specifically] before, during, and after eating?”

“Is there a certain time of day or physical location where I binge or feel intense cravings?”

“_____ is the biggest stressor in my life. It may contribute to using food as a coping mechanism…”

“The times where I’m able to choose healthy, nourishing food could be described as…

“Was my last meal fulfilling? What could have made it more fulfilling?”

“Were there any messages of shame, guilt, or fear during my last meal [or today’s meals]?”

Decode Your Cravings

Prompts

Decode Your Cravings

While the journaling is extremely important, if you don’t process

and review what you’re discovering nothing will change.

The action list to the right describes the processing step in detail.

If you need any help with it or need any help processing, reach

out in the support group or add private coaching credits to your

account so we can help you one-on-one.

Remember, we're only challenging you to engage in this process

for 7 days. Repeat as needed if your connection starts to fall apart

and life starts getting in the way.

Part 3 /// ProcessingProcessing Habits & Behaviors

1. Before bed, open your journal and review. Read back over

everything you journaled from the day’s mealtimes. This helps

refresh your memory and brings you back into focus and

connection.

2. Expand on the entries. Allow yourself to go deeper into each

entry. For example, if you’ve written something about your

Perfectionist, close your eyes and work on connecting with that

Perfectionist inside of you. Why was it speaking to you? Why

was it trying to manipulate your behavior? Are you missing

something in your life it’s trying to tell you about? Spend about

10 minutes trying to better understand this part of you. Write

down any epiphanies.

3. Correct any negative self-talk. When a part of you talks to your

Self in a destructive way, those messages must be

reprogrammed. If you ate a treat out of the vending machine

and something in your head said, “This is why you’re fat,

because you have no self-control,” that needs to be corrected.

We will cover re-mapping negative self-talk in detail in a

future Decode Your Cravings module.

Well Done.