Learn how to use Joyful Eating in real-life situations.

In the Joyful Eating Step-by-Step strategy, you learned how to joyfully eat a single bite of food. The next step is to learn how to use Joyful Eating in everyday real-life situations. It’s not always obvious how to make the best use of Joyful Eating. To learn how, we’ll first cover the steps used to apply Joyful Eating and then we’ll run through several scenarios showing how to use them.

The Four Steps for Using Joyful Eating

There are four steps to apply Joyful Eating in any situation:

1.      Decide which foods you want to Eat Joyfully.

2.      Decide on your portion size.

3.      Eat Joyfully.

4.      Stop eating on reaching your portion size.

One way I remember the steps is using the mnemonic “double DES” based on the first letter of each step. When you enter any new situation, you can follow these steps and you should be OK.

Step 1: Decide which foods do you want to Eat Joyfully.

In every situation, decide exactly which foods you will eat joyfully. Is it pasta? Is it steak? Is it ice cream? Is it chocolate? Is it fruit? Is it bread? Is it a glass of orange juice?

Normally you will joyfully eat the food you have to be careful with. Typically these are high calorie foods like dessert; or as a diabetic I’ll eat bread and pasta joyfully, but you can choose to eat any food joyfully. Just make a choice before you start eating or you will probably forget and end up eating too much.

Step 2: Decide on your portion size.

Now that you’ve decided what to eat joyfully, you have to decide how much you should you eat. Is it a spoonful of ice cream? A square of chocolate? Two bites of pasta? A serving of steak?

Without knowing how much you intend to eat, you won’t know when to stop eating. How much should you eat? We’ll talk more about portion sizes and calorie estimation in The Honest Calorie Estimation Method strategy.

Step 3: Eat Joyfully

Eat all the food you decided to eat joyfully by following the instructions in strategy Joyful Eating Step-by-Step. Here are a few points I like to keep in mind:

1.      Really let myself enjoy the food. Often I am my own worst enemy by being in a hurry.

2.      If I am eating more than one bite, I wait between bites and clear the taste buds with a sip of water. Both practices taken together ensure I get the maximum taste from each bite.

3.      Make a special effort to smell the food. The majority of taste is in our sense of smell. Really smelling food kicks in our primal systems and can summon pleasant taste memories from the past.

4.      Do the mental comparison steps. A lot of instructions ask you to compare sensations with your past experience. Don’t skip these steps as they bring a valuable mindfulness to eating.

Step 4: Stop eating on reaching your portion size.  

When you’ve reached your predetermined portion size, stop eating. When you are in the middle of eating, it is oh so hard to stop! This is where the Weight-Proofing strategies come to the rescue. They will help you put yourself in situations where it is hard to eat more than you planned. Your best bet is to only ever serve yourself the amount you intend to eat.

What happens when you don’t want to stop eating? I examine the reason. Some common reasons I have found for wanting to eat more are:

·        Poor food selection. Perhaps the food wasn’t rich enough to be satisfying. Next time I’ll try a different food.

·        Poor Joyful Eating technique. Sometimes I hurry through the Joyful Eating steps and I don’t get as much out of the food as I should. Next time I’ll slow down and follow all the steps.

·        I am in a mood. Sometimes no amount of food will satisfy. I could eat a moon full of cheese and that wouldn’t be enough. I try to recognize these situations and just stop eating. See the Put the Brake on Automatic Eating strategy for more help.

·        I am still hungry. If after dessert I am still hungry, then next time I have to make sure I am getting full by the time dessert rolls around. Getting full on dessert is a great weight gain plan, but that’s not what we are going for here.

·        I am on a biochemical roller coaster. Eating a lot of sugar can cause me to need a sugar fix to get me back up when I am feeling down. During the peaks and valleys of a sugar craving, I can’t think about what I should be eating, or how much. I do my best to recognize these situations when they are happening. Then I get off the roller coaster by following my diet. This can be hard.

How much to eat is always your choice. You can always decide to eat more. But focus on making all your eating decisions consciously, don’t accidentally eat more than you would like.

Scenarios for Using Joyful Eating in Everyday Situations

Let’s see all the steps for using Joyful Eating in action. To show them, we’ll run through several common scenarios:

1.      Dinner Out. This scenario will show how you can Eat Joyfully while dining out at a nice restaurant. This is one of the scariest scenarios because the temptations to overeat are so great. It is the longest as most complex scenario, spelling out each step in detail. The other scenarios are shorter and more informal.

2.      Reward. You’ve done something worth celebrating! This scenario shows how Joyful Eating can help you control your weight while rewarding yourself with food.

3.      Birthday Party. You are going to a birthday party or other social event. How can you use Joyful Eating to help you avoid temptation?

4.      Going to Grandma’s House. Social pressure to eat more than you want can be hard to ignore, especially when it comes from your Grandma! How do you deal with it?

The advice in all the scenarios is available to you at all times. You can mix and match strategies to handle any situation you face.

Scenario: Dinner Out

Your relatives have come to town. One of the benefits of having visitors is you can splurge, so we decide to eat at a nice steak house. Good for me because I know I can easily eat low-carb at a steak place.

A fine dinner is a difficult situation. You face large quantities of wonderful food. How will you handle it? Before every “dinner out” situation, ask yourself: how will I stay on my diet?

My position is that to stay on a diet for the rest of your life, you need to think of food as a pleasure to be enjoyed, not a poison to be avoided. The poison theory of food leads people to suggest eating the most boring, safest food on the menu. You don’t need to do that, unless you’ve determined that’s how extreme you need to be.

Order a dish you will really enjoy. Don’t order a boring old salad unless that’s what you really want. Enjoy your meal. Take pleasure from it.

Isn’t that dangerous? Won’t you get fat? Won’t the world end? It could, but it probably won’t, especially if you eat joyfully. Let’s apply the steps to your dinner out.

Here’s what the steps would look like during dinner. Remember the steps using the “double DES” mnemonic.

Step 1: Decide which foods do you want to Eat Joyfully.

After browsing the menu and thinking about what I want to eat, I decide that I’ll joyfully eat bread, potato, and dessert. These are the high-carb items I love and are the foods I need to be most careful about. For dessert I also have to worry about calories, but Joyful Eating small portions naturally limits calories.

A large steak can have a lot of calories because of all the fat. I often try to pick a smaller steak. If I am not worried about calories that day, maybe because I had a long cardio workout, I’ll go ahead and order a large steak. I always eat steak joyfully because it just tastes so good that way. You can also divide the steak in half and put some in a doggy bag for later.

I can usually share my wife’s potato and dessert. You may need to ask around at the table and see if anyone wants to share. If nobody will share, you can get a whole order and just eat your portion. Take the rest home or just leave it.

These days, I make a conscious effort to eat spicier foods. Being from the great Pacific Northwest, I was raised to consider salt and pepper exotic spices. Now spicy dishes excite me because they are an opportunity for a new taste experience. Plus, spices are low in carbs, fat, and calories. They add variety and excitement to your diet for almost no cost. A lot of people already know the secret of spice, but I thought slow people like me might want to give spicier food a try.

Step 2: Decide on your portion size.

After deciding what to eat joyfully, it’s time to consider how much I’ll eat.

If the bread doesn’t look truly excellent, I’ll usually decide not to eat it. I’d rather spend my carb budget on dessert or have a little more potato. One test for good bread is how it smells. A rich complex smell usually means a bread worth eating. If I did eat the bread I would make sure my one bite was covered in real melted butter. Yum.

I’ll have one big spoonful each of the potato and the dessert. On a good exercise day, I may choose to have two bites each. This is actually a good part of the system because it encourages me to have good exercise days!

I love a fully loaded potato. I add sour cream, chives, butter, salt, and pepper. Joyful Eating is perfect for eating potato because potato has a very subtle flavor.

Choosing a dessert takes some real thought and that’s part of the fun. A lot of desserts are just layers of sugar. As tempting as loads of sugar may sound, sugar-only desserts won’t satisfy. Sugar is just one of our tastes. Combining other tastes into your meals, like bitter, sour, salty, and savory, enriches your taste experience.

Cheesecake with a strawberry topping is often my choice. I find the aroma of cheesecake uplifting. It has a smooth creamy texture with good mouth feel. Cheesecake is both sweet and sour, which gives it a complexity I like. Even a single bite of cheesecake can take a while to eat. If you add nuts in the crust or in the topping, then you also have a pleasurable contrast in textures. The fat in cheesecake gives it a rich deep taste. The flavor of cream cheese is mild and forms a good backdrop for a sweet topping. The contrast between the sweet strawberry flavor and the mild slightly sour cheesecake can be very pleasing. And because cheesecake has a lot of calories, eating just one bite keeps down the calorie count.

I think about all of these issues before I order. If I don’t, I stand a good chance of eating too much and I can’t afford the health risk. If you don’t plan ahead it won’t work. The temptations are too great.

Step 3: Eat Joyfully.

As each food is delivered I eat it joyfully, following the strategy Joyful Eating Step-by-Step. In this case the bread wasn’t very good so I passed on it. The potato and dessert were excellent.

Step 4: Stop eating on reaching your portion size.

I served myself the foods I was going to eat joyfully using the Weight-Proofing strategies to make sure I only ate as much as I planned to eat.

I shared my wife’s potato. I cut off the amount I wanted and brought it over to my plate. I had two big bites of potato because I didn’t have any bread.

I also shared my wife’s dessert. I served myself one big bite of her chocolate cake. Following the recommendation of the Joyful Eating steps, we talked about our experience of the cake as we were eating and I think that helped bring out the best taste from the cake.

Scenario: Reward

In this scenario you've done something good and you want a reward. A lot of people say you shouldn't use food as reward because it's too dangerous, you might binge and fall off your diet. If this is a problem for you, then be extreme as you need to be.

But if you think a food reward is OK for you then use Joyful Eating to ensure you'll get the most pleasure without overeating.

Before Joyful Eating, when it came to for a reward, I would eat too much. What the heck, I deserved it, didn't I? Inevitably, after eating far more than I ever should, I would manage to both gain weight and feel guilty. Some reward.

Use Joyful Eating to keep a reward a reward. Don't make it another opportunity for you to fail and feel bad about yourself.

Don’t chase satisfaction. Dig deep inside and explore what is truly satisfying right now. It may not even be food. Settling for less than exactly what you really want will just encourage you to eat more.

The problem is knowing what you want. We don’t normally know what we want because we don’t listen to ourselves. Take some time and listen.

Scenario: Birthday Party

In this scenario you are attending a birthday party or other social event. What can make you fall of your diet faster than a birthday party? Everyone is happy celebrating a milestone in a friend’s or loved one’s life. There’s delicious-looking food everywhere. And unfortunately, little of the food conforms to your diet. Everyone around you is eating freely, unaware of your torment. It’s likely that you’ll feel frustrated and say what the heck, and start digging in. And here your diet ends and the weight gain begins.

But wait...it’s Joyful Eating to the rescue!

At a birthday party I am not thinking woe is me, I can’t have anything, my life sucks. I am thinking about what looks truly excellent to eat. I am asking myself, what can I have that will be worth eating joyfully? There’s always something I like to eat. I am anticipating a pleasurable eating experience as part of a pleasurable event. I can have one bite of any food I want; I don’t feel the cravings and the pressure I felt on denial-centered diets.

Of course, I would like to eat anything and everything, but I can deal with these feelings through Joyful Eating. What I couldn’t deal with, in the past, was thinking I would never ever eat the foods I love again. My resolve would dissolve and I would eat and eat and eat. Now I can eat in moderation while still having fun.

Scenario: Going to Grandma’s House

In this scenario, you are going to Grandma’s house. Soon after you take your shoes off and get comfortable, she says, “Here, have some apple pie. I made it just for you.”

This is a tough one for me. Grandma makes me melt. So I eat a bite joyfully and then say that’s all I can have. Then, if she makes me feel bad for not eating more, I just have to keep saying no. I explain to her it’s not her pie, which it isn’t because her pie is always excellent, but that for health reasons I can’t have more.

Good luck!