Last week, friend, colleague and writer Carolyn O’Neil, RD, contacted several “mindful eating expert RDs” (her words) to comment on food lessons that could be learned from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, a story of Gilbert’s search for self that started with an Italian food journey. What grabbed Carolyn’s attention (and she likely bet grabbed the attention of many, hence her decision to talk about it in her column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ), is that as Liz happily ate her way through Italy, she gained weight but didn’t worry about it. She’d “ get back on track ” later. While getting back on track isn’t a foreign concept to weight strugglers, truly enjoying the time before getting back often is. Or actually, what’s really foreign is understanding that enjoying times that aren’t all about eating in terms of calories, fat, weight, etc., etc., don’t have to be followed by “getting back on track,” at least in the way that phrase is generally interpreted. A lot of us don’t understand that eating like this can be healthy and doesn’t necessarily mean anything negative to our weight. Indeed, it’s part of a continuum of normal eating that addresses different aspects of why we eat. The outcome of this failure to understand, of course, is that so many of us can’t let ourselves enjoy eating when the eating truly calls for it, such as in Italy. Unfortunately, no one wins in that scenario. We not only miss the moment, we often end up creating more problems because of the guilt and self-loathing that can come from something seemingly as simple as enjoying food . Not surprisingly, this isn’t a foreign concept to us here at Green Mountain. Women come to us every week in the hopes of ending this cycle of negative thinking and behaving around food. Carolyn only took a few of my comments for her column so I thought I’d share more here to give some deeper insight into what we think we can learn from the eating — and weight — attitudes depicted in Eat, Pray, Love . Q: Are Americans especially ‘guilty’ of feeling guilty about eating what they consider to be indulgent foods? A: Many of the women who come to Green Mountain at Fox Run are for the most part overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. They believe they can’t eat indulgent foods without gaining weight , and then in an attempt to lose weight, they forbid those foods. Then they end up overeating them out of feelings of deprivation. Then, when they overeat them, they feel bad about themselves and continue eating the foods to cope with those feelings, or to beat themselves up.

Original Source of Eating Lessons from Eat, Pray, Love