Life after bread pudding…a mindful eating journey

By Klia Bassing

Bread pudding–that’s what brought me to meditation practice. I remember walking past Marvelous Market in Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle late in the year 2000. I’d recently decided to give up processed flour and sugar in an effort to curb my nightly cravings and overeating. A friend in recovery from food-related addictions had suggested “letting go” of these foods. While letting go of certain foods might appear to be a form of deprivation, if practiced with the intention of self-care, it can be a skillful means toward personal freedom.

That day in Dupont Circle, though, it sure felt like deprivation. I looked longingly through the store window at the bread pudding on display. The dessert was about the size of three of my fists, and was therefore supposedly about three times as large as my stomach. Yet, I’d eaten these delicacies whole and straight out of the white cardboard box in one sitting. The first time I did this was in high school. After coming home from a night out with friends—another evening of feeling like the odd one out who couldn’t say the right things—I saw the bread pudding in my parents’ refrigerator and took it to the sunroom in the back of the house. The sunroom was where my mother put the outdoor plants in the winter and it was also where we kept the TV—the only witness to that night’s and many future nights’ binges.

I was only planning on having a few slivers of the bread pudding. But as the butter knife sank in again and again, that plan evaporated as did my self-esteem. I sank into a trance of oblivion…watching TV…eating one more sliver after another…what did one more sliver matter?

Many more late night one-more-slivers followed during high school. Then leftover pasta eaten furtively from the vegetarian co-op to which I belonged in college. After college, the pattern continued with my sneaking a roommate’s Girl Scout cookies—surely he wouldn’t notice if just one more was gone. The morning after these out-of-control food forays found me wallowing in self-loathing. Self-loathing can be the most painful split from the wholeness to which we ultimately belong. Not wanting anything to do with ourselves…to even be inside our own skin.

In an effort to get back into my own good graces, I would desperately counter-balance the binges by starving myself for a day or by giving myself stomach cramps from laxative “diet teas.” Finally, the friend in recovery from food addiction suggested abstaining from processed flour and sugar. Thus I found myself in Dupont Circle walking past Marvelous Market that day in late 2000. Tears came to my eyes as I realized that I could no longer eat my childhood favorite food. The tears shocked me. I was not a person who cried easily—I’d thought crying too “girly.” I realized with those tears that this was not about the pudding.

In the Spring of 2001 I was on a week-long silent meditation retreat. Another friend had suggested meditation classes as a step toward recovery from compulsive food behavior. Despite my fears that those weird new-agey meditators would try to brainwash me and make me give them all my money, I was desperate enough to try it. In the very first class I attended, as my mind and body came into the same time zone, I discovered a sense of wholeness and peace that I’d never known possible, but had sought my entire life. I signed up for a retreat with both fear and hope.

One morning before lunch during that meditation retreat, the regular meditation ended early. One of the teachers, Pat, invited us to do an eating meditation with raisins. I started sweating. Not knowing how common this exercise was in meditation communities, my mind wildly tried to convince me that this was some exercise specifically created to shame me. We were each handed three raisins and invited to contemplate the cultivation and logistics required to bring the raisin to us in that moment. We were invited to sniff, feel, and even listen to the raisin. During this time, I was so hungry I could hardly stand it. I began to hate Pat. Were we going to eat the raisin or what? We were then invited to feel the craving directly and I realized with a start that the craving was coming not from my belly, but rather from a tightness in my chest and throat. As soon as I located the physical origins of the craving, it decreased. I still wanted the raisin, but I no longer felt possessed by the desire for it. This was amazing to me. Did other people know that a craving can be explored as mere physical sensations? And that, as soon as the cravings are located physically, their intensity decreases?

I came home from that retreat assuming that I’d found the answer and would never again eat compulsively. I felt like a convert and couldn’t wait to preach to the masses. Unfortunately, I found that I would still eat compulsively, just less often. Just as we can’t control whether the mind thinks—all we can do is create the conditions for it to settle—I couldn’t control how I ate. All I could do was set the conditions to support my pausing and breathing so that I might remember to find how cravings felt in my body and be with them with as much kindness as I could muster. This journey engendered a sense of humility in myself and a compassion for others who also want to change their own harmful behaviors, but feel unable to stop. I ultimately found forgiveness for my own inability to eat “perfectly” and even, over time, lost the desire to do so. In the place of this desire for perfection there grew a new desire: to never again shut myself out of my own heart.

Today, fourteen years after that walk past bread pudding, much has changed. For one, Marvelous Market shut down late last year. In its place now stands Willie T’s Lobster Shack, with nary a baked good in the window. I’ve been through a few relationships, started Visit Yourself at Work to teach Mindfulness Meditation at workplaces, and had life-threatening health issues from toxic mold in a former apartment (I’m 90% recovered, thank goodness). I also no longer identify as someone with a food addiction.

Sure, food is and probably always will be a temptation when my system gets overwhelmed, but self-compassion has been my saving grace. These days, it matters less what I eat and more how kind I am to myself. If I beat myself up for what I’ve eaten, it’s a setup for more out-of-control food behavior. If I practice self-compassion, then binges stop halfway through and there’s space to discover what I was using food to run away from.

When I talk about my old eating behavior in my mindfulness classes—how the kitchen used to become a vortex at night—I always see knowing nods. There are so many of us. To anyone who wants to change their behavior with food, I recommend three tools:

1) Notice “all-or-nothing” thinking. This might also be called perfectionism or even the “fuck its,” which is the phrase that often comes once we think we’ve messed up with food…and so might as well keep eating. Who said it doesn’t make a difference to stop mid-binge?

2) Self-compassion is always appropriate, whether you’re in the midst of overeating or it’s the morning after and your mind has already started churning up ideas about exercise or undereating to “make up for” the previous day (By the way, I recommend eating normally a.s.a.p. to get off the overeating/undereating roller coaster!). Find a way of communicating care to yourself, whether through words , such as “hi, dear heart,” or a gesture, like putting a hand on the heart or cheek.

3) Try an eating meditation with a raisin (or any piece of food). Take some time to notice how the raisin looks and feels. See what happens to your breath and inside your body if you put it close to your mouth, and then pull it away a few times before eating. You might sense a craving that has nothing to do with being hungry. The more you can get familiar with how craving feels in your body, the less power it will have because you’ll have learned that it won’t kill you. You can keep the craving company, like keeping an upset child company who’s convinced that a toy is vital to their existence. Indeed, the craving is coming from a young part of us that—due to being malnourished with regards to love—has been trying to cope with food as a substitute for love.

Childhood wounds may arise once the food fog lifts. If professional help feels like a good next step, it’s okay to try out different counselors. You might ask them about their experience with eating disorders. I’ve found the most growth with depth and body-oriented therapy (or bioenergetic) and also recommend somatic experiencing.

Find Klia in the following places:

Twitter: @visityourself – over 21,000 followers receive mindfulness meditation tips
Private sessions: Meditation Out Loud – personalized guidance in mindfully exploring challenging life issues (phone or Skype)
Group sessions:
Visit Yourself at Work – on-site classes in the United States
Live Guided Meditation – live sessions you can listen to online or via phone