Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (18 page)

If you find you've spent some time caught up in a string of thoughts, with one turning into another and another, your next step remains the same: Direct your focus back to your breathing. Try not to get frustrated or mad that you're doing it “wrong.” Your mind simply likes having your attention—sort of like a 2-year-old—and it'll make noise if it doesn't have it. With practice, you'll be better able to maintain your focus on your breathing. Then, as you're going about your daily routine, you may find that you're able to hold your focus
better on the present moment. The idea is to keep doing your special sessions of mindfulness meditation but also stay more mindful in real time.

As you progress, you'll spend fewer of your waking hours on autopilot or daydreaming. You'll make fewer eating and shopping choices while you're distracted (the choices you make on autopilot are more likely to take you away from your goal of fitness and tidiness). And when you stay more mindful, you'll be more aware of the factors that are trying to influence your decision. You'll have the mindfulness and presence to ask yourself:

Am I truly hungry? Or do I recognize that an emotion is setting off an automatic desire to eat?

Do I really want to keep that stack of magazines I haven't read? Or am I just reacting to the guilt I feel over the money I spent on the subscription?

Is my heart pounding and my face flushed? I could be anxious. Do I need to find a course of action to lower my anxiety?

Mindfulness helps you be more aware of
how your mind works
and
what's going on in your body and the world around you
. That awareness can help you tame your household, your weight, and your emotions.

Mindfulness in the Marketplace

If you want a fun companion to go shopping with—someone who will encourage you to fill up your cart and pull out your credit card—you probably shouldn't call Diana Winston. But if you want to get a better sense of how to separate your emotions from your purchasing behaviors, she's definitely your expert.

Winston, whom you met earlier, is also the director of mindfulness education at the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at UCLA. In the late '90s, you could have found her in a forest in Burma, where she lived for a year as a Buddhist nun. More recently, you might have seen her wandering the aisles of a major home goods store in Los Angeles, where she was teaching students about “greed management.”

The students could walk around, pick up items, read the boxes, and take in all the joyful colors of the store. What they
couldn't
do was buy anything. Instead, she wanted them to simply take note of the desire they felt for items and how the mind reacts when it doesn't get what it wants.

The urge to possess an appealing object starts off strong. “It's coming into you—it's grabbing you by the throat. We think that in order to get rid of that ‘I have to have it' feeling, we have to buy that object,” she says. Too often, people don't ever get the chance to see what happens if they notice the feeling without acting on it. They usually buy the item to make the uncomfortable feeling go away.

But as her students learned, an interesting thing happens if they pay attention to the urge. It may grow worse for a while. Then it fades. Winston calls this
urge surfing.
“The concept is used in mindfulness-based treatment with people with addictions—Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention—but it's also relevant for people without addictions,” she says. “When the urge comes, you feel it, you bring your self-awareness to the experience of having this urge, and you notice it like a wave. It has a crest and it passes through us.”

When she says to “bring your self-awareness,” she's merely advising you to be mindful. You need to be aware of what's happening in your mind and the effect it's having. You're not kicking yourself for wanting another pair of dress shoes. You're not building a logical argument against the purchase (“I can't afford a new lawn mower!”). You're not guilting yourself. You're simply observing the desire without judgment and watching what it does, like a bird you notice on a tree limb. Eventually, that bird will fly away on its own; you don't have to exhaust yourself chasing it away.

“Because it's hard to tolerate the uncomfortable feeling, whatever it is, we go straight to the behavior that numbs it out or the behavior that we think is going to satisfy the need. In a way, we're so often on automatic pilot,” she explains. “When we're at the bakery, we see a cookie, we reach in our pocket, we pay, and that cookie's gone and suddenly we wake up from that trance, right?”

But that “autopilot” action doesn't really make our wants go away. “We find out it never really works,” she says. “We're always hungry for the next thing, the next object. Bringing mindfulness into your daily life can intercept this automatic pilot and can really be helpful when you're dealing with cravings, whether it's for food or ‘stuff.'” The following are important observations that apply to your weight, your mood, and your home.

You are seldom going to be completely at ease. Frequently, you'll be tired, frustrated, worried, sad, bored, or unfocused to some degree. You will almost always have some type of itch that a snack or a purchase could relieve for a moment.

The things you buy will never provide you lasting contentment. That's because a new sensation of discomfort will come along soon enough.

You will never have
everything
you want. There will always be something new that you would like to have. Even if you look around and feel satisfied with what you own, a catalog can arrive showing you something you never knew existed but feel like you've
always wanted
.