Mindless Eating Quotes

Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…

The best diet is the one you don't know you're on.

How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding - escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience - maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who're afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jacklet humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of Liar's Hell. Some folks hide, and some folk's seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look and won't turn tail should they find it - and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of Earth's sweet gas.

She pictured herself running from a hoard of ravenous zombies on a hot day eventually collapsing from heatstroke and getting devoured. Then she imagined Hal giving a rousing eulogy at her funeral explaining how Kendra's death was a beautiful sacrifice allowing the noble zombies to live on delighting future generations by mindlessly trying to eat them. With her luck it could totally happen.

When feeling lonely or anxious, most of us have the habit of looking for distractions, which often leads to some form of unwholesome consumption -- whether eating a snack in the absence of hunger, mindlessly surfing the Internet, going on a drive, or reading. Conscious breathing is a good way to nourish body and mind with mindfulness.

There's only one thing that's strong enough to defeat the tyranny of the moment. Habit.

In other words, volume trumps calories. We eat the volume we want, not the calories we want.

People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period.

it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn't have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you'd fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks. That must be what was meant by fallen women. Fallen women were women who had fallen onto men and hurt themselves. There was some suggestion of downward motion, against one's will and not with the will of anyone else. Fallen women were not pulled-down women or pushed women, merely fallen. Of course there was Eve and the Fall; but there was nothing about falling in that story, which was only about eating, like most children's stories.

Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.

As long as we believe it is food that causes us to overeat, we are lost. Television, friends, and weather seem pretty unrelated to what we eat. That’s why they have such a powerful effect on us.

In one study, people who listened to a lunchtime radio mystery show ate 15 percent more than those who didn’t. The basic rule: distractions of all kinds make us eat, forget how much we eat, and extend how long we eat—even when we’re not hungry.

By becoming aware of God’s Spirit, by slowing down and paying attention to the tastes and sounds and smells of the food we make and eat, we infuse our meals—and by extension our hearts—with a sense of awe, a depth of prayer that cannot help but transform our mindless eating into moving meditations.

the idea of eating better is do-able. While eating right is a long-term goal, eating better is something we can start today.

People were almost twice as likely to reach for a comfort food when they were happy than when they were sad.

It’s about as close to an established fact as things get in the social sciences: People who watch a lot of TV are more likely to be overweight than people who don’t.

If a wave of veganism washed over the land, in six months there would be Broccoli Kings, Taco Bell Peppers, and McTofu Drive-Thrus.

Our discomfort with confronting ourselves in the naked stillness of absolute quiet leads us to eat too much, drink excessively, socialize mindlessly, and engage in a host of activities out of a desire to simply avoid being still.

Disembodiment takes many forms—for example, mindlessly scrolling social media, forgetting to eat or drink water, exercising to the point of injury—but ultimately it leads to a lack of ability to make meaningful and productive choices for yourself.

Jamie leaned over. “And your perfect world?” “Mmm,” Helen smiled. “Perfect is complicated. Hard to explain.” “Give it a shot,” I prodded her. “It’s… beautiful is the best word to describe it,” she said. Jamie and I nodded. “Everything that isn’t necessary to getting what we want is gone,” she said, eyes closing, as if she was vividly imagining. “There’s an abundance of it all, thanks to science. Food is everywhere and it overflows and there’s nothing to worry about because we have and we want and we take. We’re, and by we I mean people, we’re everywhere and we spill over into one another and we’re all knit together, physically and mentally. It’s an exquisite landscape of things that don’t ever run out to see and touches and tastes and smells and mating and eating and mindless fighting and eating-mating and fighting-eating and fighting-” “Okay,” I said, interrupting. I paused, then when I couldn’t think of what to say. “Okay.” Helen reached down to her plate, used a fingertip to wipe up a bit of frosting, and popped it into her mouth, sucking it off. “Okay,” I said, still at a bit of a loss for words. “That’s a mental image that’s going to be with me forever,” Jamie said, dropping his head down until his face was in his hands. “I don’t see where ethics come into that world,” I said, more to see Jamie’s reaction than out of curiosity. “No,” Jamie said. “Don’t-” “The closer you get to perfection, the further you get from ethics,” Helen said, as if it was common sense.

Suppose you found yourself two miles from home without a ride. Although you could get home three times faster if you ran, most people would settle for walking. Running wouldn’t be worth the sweat and discomfort, and walking will get you there at a reasonable and painless rate. Each step brings you a little closer, and before you know it, you are halfway home and still moving forward. It’s the same with mindlessly losing weight. It need not be a sweaty, painful sprint. It can be a slow, steady walk that begins with removing unwanted eating cues and rearranging your home, office, and eating habits so they work for you and your family rather than against you. These comfortable steps will add up—one or two pounds a month. Before long you’ll find yourself at home. The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.

What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that it is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavours and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking - the real business of preparing the food you eat - is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way.

All our actions—eating, drinking, sleeping, working—are thus potentially Christ’s actions. But this potential must be actualized. Instead of a mindless drifting through the insignificant, apparently superficial and nonreligious events of the day, our passive union with Christ can be made active by creative acts of the will, intelligence and imagination.

Just as we can’t tell how much we’ve eaten simply by relying on internal cues, we can’t really tell how much we’ve gained or lost without some external benchmark.

Yet the heavier a person was—American or French—the more they relied on external cues to tell them when to stop eating and the less they relied on whether they felt full.13

We can turn the food in our life from being a temptation or a regret to something we guiltlessly enjoy. We can move from mindless overeating to mindless better eating.

Serving sizes start to make sense only when foods are individually packaged.

The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.

Hearing "can't" dares a person to find a workaround. It's a basic psychological theory called reactance - telling someone "no" just makes them want it more.

When we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more.

I will, I do, Amen, Here Here, Let's eat, drink and be merry. Marriage is the public spectacle of private parts: cheque-books and genitals, house-wares, fainthearts, all doubts becalmed by kissing aunt, a priest's safe homily, those tinkling glasses tightening those ties that truly bind us together forever, dressed to the nines. Darling, I reckon maybe thirty years, given our ages and expectancies. Barring the tragic or untimely, say, ten thousand mornings, ten thousand evenings, please God, ten thousand moistened nights like this, when, mindless of these vows, our opposites, nonetheless, attract. Thus, love's subtactraction: the timeless from the ordinary times -- nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine.

Is It Baby Fat or Real Fat? The answer partly depends on the parents. A study of 854 Washington State children under three years old showed that a child is nearly three times as likely to grow up obese if one of his parents is obese. If you’re overweight, your child has a 65–75 percent chance of growing up to be overweight. So, is that little paunch on your fourth grader baby fat? Not if you’re sporting the same paunch.

Even though I was appointed by the White House to be executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s agency in charge of the 2010 United States Dietary Guidelines, and even though I am a past president of the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior, I still don’t think most nutrition education is very effective. People know that an apple is better for them than a Snickers bar, but . . . they eat the Snickers bar anyway.

A healthy attitude to eating I am concerned about the current victimisation of food. The apparent need to divide the contents of our plates into heroes and villains. The current villains are sugar and gluten, though it used to be fat, and before that it was salt (and before that it was carbs and . . . oh, I’ve lost track). It is worth remembering that today’s devil will probably be tomorrow’s angel and vice versa. We risk having the life sucked out of our eating by allowing ourselves to be shamed over our food choices. If this escalates, historians may look back on this generation as one in which society’s decision about what to eat was driven by guilt and shame rather than by good taste or pleasure. Well, not on my watch. Yes, I eat cake, and ice cream and meat. I eat biscuits and bread and drink alcohol too. What is more, I eat it all without a shred of guilt. And yet, I like to think my eating is mindful rather than mindless. I care deeply about where my food has come from, its long-term effect on me and the planet. That said, I eat what you might call ‘just enough’ rather than too much. My rule of thumb – just don’t eat too much of any one thing.

But that’s not even what she’s asking. Cassie wants to know if I’ll still walk home with her after school every day, if I’ll watch movies with her that I miss hald of because I’m answering her bizarre questions; if I’ll still tolerate her mindless chatter and scattered conversations. If I’ll still be nice to her. This girl who speaks slowly and runs awkwardly, who can only manage short spurts of eye contact and stiffens under anyone’s touch, who struggles to match appropriate emotions with situations. Who finds joy in the simplest of things, who will never sit at a cafeteria table or in a bathroom and say mean things behind people’s back. Who understands more than most people give her credit for. Who’s heart can’t seem to hold animosity, even towards those who have been cruel to her. Who only ever wanted to be a friend to me since the moment she stepped out of her mom’s car with a bag of cookies. “Of course, I will,” I promise. “Yeah, okay.” She finally looks up to offer me a wide grin and a nod. “Are you going to eat those Junior Mints?

Beware of the health halo. The better the food, the worse the extras. People eating ‘low-fat’ granola ate 21 percent more calories, and those eating ‘healthy’ at Subway rewarded themselves by ordering cheese, mayo, chips, and cookies. Who really overeats—the guy who knows he’s eating 710 calories at McDonald’s, or the woman who thinks she’s eating a 350-calorie Subway meal that actually contains 500 calories?

We had exhausted all the common manners of distraction as well as some less common ones. No matter what ecstasy we might have achieved, a moment later the same old routine of eating, excreting and emoting demanded its right. Nature, mindlessly bestowing millennia of mayhem in her vast theater of wriggling decay, did not care, of course, yet seemed to mock us with every crooked tree, each one a megalomaniac weed, and every shrill cry of some idiot bird (is “Nevermore!” really that hard to get right?), with the deformed, torn clouds adding a distinct sense of clumsy kindergarten-level artistry to the scene. The impudence of a sickly moon I would be willing to forgive, perhaps even to enjoy as a sardonic quirk, but who could not take umbrage with the utterly random distributions of stars? How often must I tell you to clean up that mess in the sky?

Within a few generations, he had explained to Rudgutter, the Weavers evolved from virtually mindless predators into aestheticians of astonishing intellectual and materio-thaumaturgic power, superintelligent alien minds who no longer used their webs to catch prey, but were attuned to them as objects of beauty disentanglable from the fabric of reality itself. Their spinnerets had become specialized extradimensional glands that Wove patterns in with the world. The world which was, for them, a web. Old stories told how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act—to Weave—was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.

Unfortunately, my head wasn’t getting thoughts through to my mouth. “You aren’t . . . I’m not sure if I can . . . Karrin, I want this, but . . .” “It’s all right,” she said quietly. “I’m not sure,” I said again. I wanted her. But I wanted it to be about more than desire. I could have that if I wanted—mindless, empty sex is not exactly in short supply among the Sidhe of Winter. But that kind of thing can eat you hollow, if you let it. And Karrin was courage and loyalty and brains and heart and so much more than mere need and desire. I tried to explain that. Words just sort of sputtered out. I wasn’t even sure they were in the right order. She slid her hand over my mouth after a few faltering moments. I could hear the smile in her voice as she spoke. “I’ve had a year to think about this, Harry. And I don’t want to wake up one day and realize that I was too scared to take the next step.” She leaned down and kissed one of my eyelids, her mouth gentle. “I know that you’re a good man. And I’ve never had a friend like you.” She leaned down and kissed the other eyelid. “And I know you’ve been alone for a long time. So have I. And I’m right here. And I want this. And you want this. So would you please shut up and do something about it.

We can choose to resist these messages—but it will be easier if we mindfully choose to limit our exposure to such messages. Turn off the television. Stop mindlessly reading glossy magazines. Children especially need protection from the media, since their minds simply are not mature enough to understand that advertisers are deliberately trying to influence them.19 We also need to shield ourselves and our children from unwholesome films, TV programs, and video games, in addition to advertisements, because they can fill us with anxiety, violence, and craving. They can also fill us with stress, and stress may, in turn, contribute to weight gain.

Moods, however, do seem to influence what we choose to eat. People in happy moods tended to prefer healthier foods, such as pizza or steak. People in sad moods were much more likely to reach for ice cream, cookies, or a bag of potato chips.2

(In fact, “diet” comes from a Latin word which means “a way of life.”)

Unfortunately, deprivation diets don’t work for three reasons: 1) Our body fights against them; 2) our brain fights against them; and 3) our day-to-day environment fights against them.

But the real concern is with obese people. They typically underestimate how much they eat by 30 to 40 percent. Some think they eat half as much as they actually do.14

At high levels, all of us—normal weight and overweight alike—underestimate calorie levels with mathematical predictability.16

Big dishes and big spoons are big trouble. As the size of our dishes increases, so does the amount we scoop onto them. They cause us to serve ourselves more because they make the food look so small.

The beauty of impulse eating may be that you end up eating less—when you do eat—than someone who has been thinking about the food for hours. The more you think of something, the more of it you’ll eat.5

      Men shopping alone wanted all candy lines.                  Women shopping alone wanted more of the healthy food lines.                  Mothers shopping with children wanted more food-free lines.                  Fathers shopping with children didn’t exist.

While eating right is a long-term goal, eating better is something we can start today. Eating better entails small steps.

There’s only one thing that’s strong enough to defeat the tyranny of the moment. Habit.

The consequences of not serving chocolate milk are that many don’t drink milk at all. We discovered that when eleven Oregon schools banned chocolate milk, 10 percent fewer kids drank milk, 29 percent more of the white milk taken was thrown away, and 7 percent fewer kids ate school lunches.

The basic rule: distractions of all kinds make us eat, forget how much we eat, and extend how long we eat—even when we’re not hungry.

The tendency to use a clock to tell yourself when you’re hungry seems to be especially strong for people who are overweight.

We overeat because there are signals and cues around us that tell us to eat. It’s simply not in our nature to pause after every bite and contemplate whether we’re full. As we eat, we unknowingly—mindlessly—look for signals or cues that we’ve had enough.

In the meantime, here’s my advice. If an hour spent doing software drills, sitting alone in front of your computer or tablet, is an hour spent instead of walking, reading a book, or going to a show with your friends, then it’s probably not worth it. If, however, you choose to play these brain games instead of sitting in bed or on the couch mindlessly watching TV, by all means, play brain games instead. In this case, you might be surprised to learn that, among all the intellectual activities at our disposal, the human brain seems to actually have a favorite. It loves board games the most.

High-impact performers and genuine world-builders aren’t very available to whoever seeks their attention and demands their time. They’re hard to reach, waste few moments and are far more focused on doing real work versus artificial work—so they deliver the breathtaking results that advance our world. Other avoidance tactics from the pain of potential unexpressed are hours mindlessly surfing online, electronic shopping, working too much, drinking too much, eating too much, complaining too much and sleeping too much.

When we aren’t thoughtful, we do things we later regret. We say yes when we mean no. We overreact. We snap at people. We miss opportunities to connect more deeply with others. We mindlessly eat a whole container of rocky road ice cream. (Oh, is that just me?)

A diet that eliminates all your favorite foods is not a recipe for long term success. It’s a guarantee of rapid disaster.

Food enjoyment is a vital component of a vibrant life.

If mindless eating is the problem, then paying attention to what you eat through salient feedback will be a big part of the solution.

Other avoidance tactics from the pain of potential unexpressed are hours mindlessly surfing online, electronic shopping, working too much, drinking too much, eating too much, complaining too much and sleeping too much.

If you want to cut back on your junk food habit but notice yourself grabbing another cookie, say out loud, “I’m about to eat this cookie, but I don’t need it. Eating it will cause me to gain weight and hurt my health.” Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences seem more real. It adds weight to the action rather than letting yourself mindlessly slip into an old routine. This approach is useful even if you’re simply trying to remember a task on your to-do list. Just saying out loud, “Tomorrow, I need to go to the post office after lunch,” increases the odds that you’ll actually do it. You’re getting yourself to acknowledge the need for action—and that can make all the difference.

Shut up, Doc. This little piece of work thinks he’s not in zombie movie. Bontragers. Get ’em in the dark. How stupid are we? Well, guess what they did when the food ran out? A man gets hungry enough, the man next to him looks mighty tasty. And your little Bontragers? That ‘not so easy to get’ got a whole lot easier to catch when they started eating each other! And when their brains went all soft, the last thing they were thinking about was how hungry they were, and how nice a big ol’ chunk of human meat would taste.” McCaffrey shrank in his seat, visibly recoiling from the tirade taking place directly above him. “Take your ass across the channel and see what happens. They come out of the God damn woodwork! They get all amped up and they get you on the ground and they start eating you. They fucking eat you! There’s no mercy. There’s no quarter. There’s just a mindless killing machine clawing at your skin and tearing pieces out you with his God damn teeth!” “Artis!” Buehl stopped, not because of Dr. White, but rather because he was spent, breathing hard, his eyes welling with tears. “So, yeah,” Reagan finished calmly. “We’re in a zombie movie.

When you find yourself giving someone the once-over and making a critical comment, counter it with a positive observation. Genuinely compliment others.

I’ve been thinking that the Whole30 is great, but #Holy30 would be even better as wel ! The goal is that during the month of January I will not eat anything processed and only whole foods. To turbocharge the plan, I’m exercising daily as wel . This is good for the body, but it doesn’t real y do anything for the soul. What if we, as Christians, did a Holy 30 for 30 days, what would that look like? I think it would include waking up early, listening to God in His Word, praying to God and meditating on his words. But it will also take divorcing ourselves from the world and its influence on us as wel . Maybe no mindless TV for that time, maybe only listen to Christian music, watch wholesome videos (i.e. Rightnow Media) no newspaper, no magazines. Of course it would include diet and exercise too as our bodies are a holy temple. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (NLT) Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body. Doing the Whole 30 with my friends with MS has been encouraging. We text-email daily and encourage each other to stay strong. Wouldn’t that be a good plan for a Holy 30 as well?

It’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” “After five days of mindless training,” she replied quietly, all too aware that very few people were speaking in the hall, “I’m glad for a bit of excitement.” Nox laughed under his breath. “What do you think it is?” “Hopefully it’s a pack of man-eating wolves that we have to take on with our bare hands.” She looked at him fully now, a half smile on her lips. “Wouldn’t that be fun?

Before this Alaska trip, I don’t think I’d actually ever experienced a problem with hunger. Food’s always been available and I usually ate it because it was time for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Or because I was stressed or bored. Or because it was just…there. The Japanese call this kuchisabishii, which literally means “lonely mouth” and describes our constant mindless eating. I couldn’t recall the last time I experienced stomach-deep hunger lasting more than a day.

Human beings are contradictory, hypocritical, a mix of good and evil, selflessness and selfishness - and our countries cannot help reflecting that. Yes, the United States, as a superpower, has done many abhorrent things. It has also done many praiseworthy things. The first can also be said of the Soviet Union and China; neither merits the second. History and politics gave the United States responsibilities few would want. It accepted those responsibilities and the rest of us tagged along. And we in Canada were happy to tag along. We wanted to profit from their economy; we have. We felt free to reduce our military to inconsequence because they would protect us; they have. (In a military sense, do the Americans really need NORAD? Hardly.) We wanted to have the television and washing machines and dishwashers they have; we do. Yet we laughed at their simple-minded glitz, their ignorance of the world - all the while heading in droves for Las Vegas and Los Angeles. We wanted the American Dream - without the name and without the responsibilities; we have it, to a large extent - and it is this that allows us to caress our little sense of moral superiority. The number of Canadians who expressed sympathy for the victim while blaming him (and watching his movies and his TV sitcoms, listening to his music, eating his food and dreaming of Florida) attained, in a time of grave crisis, a level of self-satisfied hypocrisy that is usually found only in the NDP, those paragons of democratic values who have few good words for the Americans but much mindless applause for Castro. We're lucky in this country to have none of the international responsibilities the Americans do, because then we wouldn't be able to lord it morally over them - and then where would we be? Canadians have no problems anywhere in the world, we like to boast. What we don't realize is, it's not because we're likeable, it's because we're inoffensive. We're welcome by default.

Little is known about the love lives of the undead. Really, past the brain-eating, reanimated corpse angle, not much is said for the zombie’s perspective. So they ate brains—big deal! Sure, they were corpses—so what? Indeed, there was the smell, but whose fault was that? At first glance they were brain-hungry cannibals, (Mmm, brains. Maybe with a little cilantro or a garlic rub—mashed potatoes and brainsloaf—brains pot pie—penne a la brains...) but in reality, zombies were not the mindless man-eaters or virus-addled lunatics jonesing for human flesh depicted in the movies. Just like everything in life—or rather, unlife—things were more complicated. Zombies were, until very recently, people. And with that came wants, desires, longings. Needs. Asher had been troubled by the zombie loneliness until Brenda, the attractive corpse he’d met in a less animated state earlier, pulled him into the cemetery, threw him down on a slab and shagged him silly.

You have to be self-interested in order to be selfless. You have to put yourself first if you want to be of use to other people.

So we all ran around in mad, mindless, meaningless circles, as if we were in a cotton-candy eating contest where the grand prize was getting kicked in the face. We were oblivious to everything around us that no truly sane person would ever tolerate. And we needed someone else to tell us to stop it.

Your Mindless Margin. By making 100–200 calorie changes in your daily intake, you won’t feel deprived and backslide. • Mindless Better Eating. Focus on reengineering small behaviors that will move you from mindless overeating to mindless better eating. Five common places to look (diet danger zones) include meals, snacks, parties, restaurants, and your desk or dashboard. • Mindful Reengineering. To trim your mindless margin, you can use basic diet tips, but a more personalized approach is to use 1) food trade-offs, or 2) food policies. Both give you a chance to eat some of what you want without making it a belabored decision. • The Power of Three. Design three easy, do-able changes that you can mindlessly make without much sacrifice. • Mindless Margin Checklist. Use this daily checklist to help you move from mindless overeating to mindless better eating.

This is simply a piece of paper that has a month’s worth of days across the top (1–31) and your three daily 100-calorie changes written down the side. Every evening, you check off the changes you’ve accomplished. This small act of accountability makes you more mindful

It Isn't nutrition until it's eaten.

I used to envy people who could pick up a knife   and not think to themselves what if I stabbed someone? I watched them cut their steaks so mindlessly, so unafraid. Fork in meat, cut, cut, cut. fork in mouth, repeat. Sometimes I got soup just because I didn’t need a little weapon to eat it. Eating shouldn’t be this hard, life shouldn’t be this hard, and don’t even get me started with scissors. All of these people cutting their steaks and doing their construction paper projects; I must be crazy, because nobody else has these thoughts these bloody thoughts    these what if I killed my sister thoughts.

The good mom of a bad child is like a musician without an instrument. My Mimi was like a pianist, up nights, mindlessly tapping her fingers on an invisible keyboard, desperately trying to save a lost melody.

We painfully wake up to an annoying alarm and get ready in a hurry to rush somewhere we don’t want to go. We muddle through our daily existence and the mindless minutia that each day brings: from eating and sleeping, to working and waiting, to pissing and shitting—all ubiquitous tasks to keep us alive, yet ultimately revealing our frailty and the waste of time that is the human condition.

You know the way the world works?” Brian asked. It’s like that old Warner Bros. cartoon with Ralph the wolf and Sam the sheepdog. All day long, Ralph tried to eat the sheep, and all day long, Sam beat the crap out of Ralph. The sheep were clueless. They just stood around, mindlessly eating grass. And then the work whistle blew, and Sam and Ralph punched out and walked off for a beer: best pals, two sides of the same system.

I can see myself acquiring bad habits from living here. My little house is equipped with a TV, and I've watched a lot this week. At home I seldom switch on before 'The Nine O'Clock News', and usually it's later than that, for an arts documentary or a film. This week I've been watching TV while eating my solitary dinner, and leaving it on afterwards because when I switched it off the silence seemed so deathly, and I can't stand listening to music on my tinny transistor radio. I've seen all kinds of programmes I never normally watch, soaps and sitcoms and police series, consuming them steadily and indiscriminately like a child eating its way through a bag of mixed sweets. For simple mindless distraction you can't beat early evening television. No scene lasts more than thirty seconds, and the stories jump from character so fast that you hardly notice how cardboard-thin they are.

As he punched a hole in each ticket, the conductor shared the fact that a young girl once spent a fortnight on the train before it came to a stop. “What’s a fortnight?” asked Jack. “Two weeks; you know, fourteen nights,” responded Petucan. “Wow. That’s a long time to be sitting on a train. What did she find to do in a fortnight?” quizzed Jack. “She found plenty to do to kill time. Eat up and enjoy the ride,” smiled the conductor

As they slow down to savor the flavors and notice how their body responds, they will feel more satisfied and content. By eating what they think will make them feel good, they choose things that are nutritious and tasty. Thus, the yearning that fuels mindless eating no longer exists, resulting in less overeating and urges to binge.

Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink [Dieting

Left unsatisfied, the craving for sensations can become an actual hunger. A few years ago on a trip to Kauai, I noticed something funny. Five days in, I hadn’t had a single snack between meals. This was strange because, at home, I’m an inveterate grazer. There’s nearly always a packet of trail mix or a bowl of popcorn on my desk. But on this vacation, not a nibble. I realized that in Hawaii I was surrounded all day by the lush textures of the jungle, the whoosh of the ocean, and the smell of salt water. I had my feet in volcanic sand and a lei of plumeria flowers around my neck. I was satiated, head to toe. Sure enough, by 11:00 a.m. on that first day back in the office, I had my head in the snack cabinet, hunting for almonds. People are quick to blame habits, and to dismiss this as mindless eating, but I believe that ignores the root cause. In our humdrum environments, we live with a sensorial hunger, and without any other means to satisfy it, we feed it.

It felt somewhat like being in a zombie movie, only instead of our car being attacked by mindless brain-eating humans, we were being attacked by mindless, hostile barnyard animals.