Eat for Life offers alternatives to dietingDate: 12/22/2015 LONGMEADOW – The Mindful Awareness Practice Center and Leslie Smith Frank PA announced the Western Massachusetts launch of a groundbreaking program, Eat for Life.
This educational, researched course leverages mindfulness, intuitive eating principles, and relevant research to bring about change in one’s relationship with food and the body. Among the goals of the program are to end reliance on diets, and to decrease body image distress.
Eat for Life offers an alternative to diets, which have been proven ineffective for sustained weight loss. In fact, diets often lead to weight gain and the phenomenon known as “yo-yo” dieting.
Frank, a physician assistant and faculty member of the University of Massachusetts Medical School Center for Mindfulness, will teach the 10 week course. Understanding the pressing need for such a program, Baystate Medical System is offering this course to its employees with a tuition rebate.
Currently, one in three U.S. adults is obese, contributing to disease states including high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Another third of Americans are overweight. The average adult weighs more than 26 pounds more than they did in the 1950’s, according to the CDC. Eat for Life addresses these statistics with sustainable, educational approaches to the mind-body connection.
For the epidemic of obesity and disordered eating, Eat for Life offers an effective alternative to diets. A study published in the American Journal of Health Promotion for July/August 2014, has shown that participants in Eat for Life demonstrate significant shifts in body appreciation, intuitive eating, mindfulness and decreases in disordered eating. Will you lose weight by bring mindfulness to cooking and eating?
Jan Chozen Bays, author of Mindful Eating said, “What you could lose is the weight of the mind’s unhappiness with eating and dissatisfaction with food. What you could gain are a simple joy with food and an easy pleasure in eating that are your birthright as a human being.”
Eat for Life has been developed to help individuals change their relationship to food, so it can become a source of pleasure rather than a source of conflict or shame.
Frank is working closely with the author of Eat for Life, Lynn Rossy, PhD, health psychologist, researcher and mindfulness teacher, of the University of Missouri.
An orientation/introduction session on Jan. 4 or 11, 2016 is free and required to register for the course.
The class meets Jan. 18 to March 21, 2016 on Mondays from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Tuition of $300 covers home practice materials, including guided audio files and individualized instruction.
The orientation and 90-minute weekly classes will be at Glenmeadow, 24 Tabor Crossing, Longmeadow. For more information about Eat for Life and to register online: map-center.org/mindfuleating. Or you can register by emailing Leslie at mapcenter.org@gmail.com, or calling 853-3108.
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