As obsessed as we are with food and diets, you’d think we’d be thin, healthy and happy with our bodies by now. So why are we Americans still universally stressing and fretting about food–or eating it mindlessly?

The fact is, diet tips, rules and tricks won’t work if we’re ignoring the mental and emotional side of eating. Why do we still overeat—or eat the wrong things? Most of the time, when we’re craving cookies, we’re really hungry for love, sex, friendship, peace, a sense of purpose and meaning. And when you’re gripped by that kind of hunger, all the tips and tricks in the world won’t save you.

Next time you’re ready to embark on the next fix-me-fast diet, try something different: instead of focusing on the food, tune in to address the emotions that make you stray. Here’s how to start:

1. Feel your hunger. After a lifetime of denying our hunger, it’s hard to tell when we really need food. But we’re all born with the capability to eat when were hungry and stop when we’re full. As children, we eat in response to our bodies’ hunger signals. As adults, we eat in response to the clock, the latest magazine article, or our uncomfortable feelings.

Get back in touch with your body’s signals by carrying a small notepad and charting your hunger before you eat, rating it on a scale of 1 (starving) to 10 (uncomfortably full). If you do this day after day, feeling your body’s cues will soon come naturally. You’ll know you’re on the right track when you start eating in response to your body—a rumbling in your belly, a slight lessening in your ability to concentrate—instead of your thoughts or emotions.

2. Stop counting. That means calories, fat, carbs, grams, portions—whatever number you use that keeps you out of your body and in your head. When you count, measure, weigh or calculate your food, you’re eating according to your intellect rather than your body’s cues. For a life-long food counter, the prospect of free-for-all noshing can be scary. Start small: eat one meal a day without counting anything. After several days, eat two meals without counting. Continue at your own pace until you’ve stopped counting your food—and start eating in response to your body, not the numbers in your head.

3. Examine your cravings. When you’re feeling the urge to eat, what are you really hungry for? If you’re craving chips, does your jaw want to chew and crunch, to relieve stress and tension? Does the noise the chips make drown out the racket in your head? When you’re aching for ice cream, maybe the soft, creamy texture makes you feel nurtured, or fills up some empty spaces. Once you have a better idea of what you’re really craving, you’re better equipped to make a conscious choice. Maybe you massage your jaw, minimize sources of stress, visit a friend who makes you feel nurtured. Or maybe you have a scoop of ice cream—but you do it as a conscious decision.

4. Practice mindful eating. There you are, in front of the fridge at 9 p.m., noshing on leftover Chinese right out of the container, with no recollection of how you got there. It’s called “eating amnesia,” where the unconscious, hand-to-mouth action of feeding yourself becomes so automatic that, before you know it, you’ve wolfed down a whole box of cookies.

Become fully aware of the act of eating. Always put your food—including snacks–on a plate. Then sit down at the table, remove distractions like television, and observe your plate. Notice the colors, textures, shapes and smell for 30 seconds to a full minute before you take the first bite.  As you eat, notice the chewing action of your jaw, the taste of the food, how it feels moving down your throat and into your stomach. It’s such a pleasant practice, it will soon become second nature.

5. Be in your body. Many of us walk around all day in a state of half-awareness, not really present in the room, on the earth, in our bodies. And when we’re not in our bodies, we can’t tell if we’re hungry or when we’re full.  How often are you aware of your body? Tune in right now, as you read this, and check in, starting your toes and moving up through your body. Pause at your stomach, and notice how it feels. Is it empty, or satisfied? Does it feel rigid and tense? Numb or dull? Or is it soft and relaxed?  Once you become intimate of your stomach’s sensations, you can begin to identify true hunger.

6. Pause. When you experience a craving for food, just stop and observe it. Don’t try to make it go away, but don’t indulge it. Sit with the discomfort of the craving. It may become intensely distressing, even painful; that’s okay. Stay with it, and notice what comes up. You’ll often find a vast ocean of emotions like fear, anxiety, even grief, under the craving for food. It’s a powerful exercise—but quite illuminating, and sometimes life-changing.

7. Be happy now. Maybe you’ve been postponing your happiness until you lose ten pounds, give up sugar or eat more greens. But the happier you are now, the more likely you’ll be to stick to your eating goals. The “do-have-be” mindset tells us that success breeds joy when, in fact, it may be the other way around. Once you’re able to accept yourself exactly as you are, you’re more likely to achieve your dietary goals, and less likely to eat from stress, depression or anxiety.   And anyway, there’s no point in postponing joy. Be happy now; the rest will come.,

One of the key pieces to understanding-and changing-compulsive eating, overeating, binging or any other uncomfortable patterns with food is being deeply and fully in your body. We call that embodiment. “But,” you might say, “I’m always in my body. Where else would I be?”

It’s a good question. The answer is, “In your mind.” That’s where most people spend the bulk of their lives. The mind is bright, witty, cunning; it spins a clever yarn, makes up exciting stories about the future, dramatizes the past. Meanwhile, we drag the body around all day like a dog on a leash, paying attention only when something goes dreadfully wrong.

But until you’re keenly aware of your body, it’s hard to change your relationship with food. By listening to your body’s cues and attending to its needs, you can learn to feel — not think — when you’re hungry, when you’re full, and what you really need. You can stop binge eating, shift the way you use food, and make peace with your body. Some practices to try:

• Allow sensation over form. Have you watched the way toddlers move? They jump up and down, tiptoe then sprawl on the floor, roll about in the grass, arch and stretch; they touch their noses, grimace, yawn, stick out their tongues. They look silly and bizarre and wonderful. And you know what? They could care less (even about looking wonderful). They’re completely enchanted with the process of sensation.

That’s not how grownups work. We are encourage to craft our bodies and our lives a certain way. We are celebrated for material triumphs, for thinness, for beauty and youth; we’re all about the form. A life lived this way can appear quite spectacular yet feel empty to its participants. Trading form for sensation is rarely a good deal.

What happens if you let go of form, if you just allow sensation? If you focus on how your body feels inside, rather than how it looks to your co-workers, friends, siblings, lovers? When we heap upon ourselves the worries and cares of adulthood, it’s easy to forget how it feels to be a toddler in a body. See if you can remember; just notice the sheer pleasure of being in a body — embodied — no matter what its shape or size. Sense the temperature of the air on your cheeks, notice the texture of your shirt against your shoulders, feel the strength of your legs. And the next time you pass a mirror, don’t heap judgment on them, or wish them thinner or longer. Like any toddler knows, the body is really just a place for the soul to live.

• Be still. In our culture, we have impatience for discomfort of any kind. Thus we react. When we’re sad, lonely, bored, frustrated, unsettled, we rush to fix it. But there, at the edge of the discomfort, is where magic can happen.

Many years ago, I was in a long meditation retreat at an ashram. It was in the middle of an especially hot summer, and the windows were flung wide in an attempt to coax a bit of breeze into the room. The only thing that entered was a drove of flies. They crawled on our sweat-slick skin, and we swatted and flicked until the leader of the meditation commanded “Be still!” So my practice at that moment became tolerating the considerable discomfort of flies crawling purposefully across the bridge of my nose or along the part of my hair, while remaining perfectly still. And in that stillness in the face of discomfort, I found something new, a vast and quiet field that lay beyond the momentary flurry of reactivity.

Try this practice: when you’re emotionally uncomfortable, can you let your discomfort just be there, instead of swatting it away? Instead of turning to food to soothe your discomfort, can you sit still and let things just be as they are, without needing to fix or change them? An embodiment therapist I know says she gives herself simple and clear directions in these times: “Sit. Stay. Good girl.” It works every time.

• Downshift. If you ask ten people today how they are, at least six of them will say “busy.” Most of us live in a state of busy-ness and perpetual arousal; hyper alert, we’re ready to spring into action as soon as the alarm clock sounds. We rush to work, race between appointments and carpools, dash to the grocery store to buy fast-and-easy meals for dinner. Meanwhile, we’re thinking and planning for the next thing on our to-do lists. But when you’re racing about in your car and in your mind, you’re just not in your body.

Try this: the next time you find yourself rushing from or to anything, stop moving, take a deep breath and close your eyes. Feel the soles of your feet. Let your toes and jaw unclench, and let your belly relax. Take five deep, slow breaths, and consciously downshift inside. When you open your eyes again, resume movement at a decelerated pace. Apply this practice as you go through the day, and especially before you eat. Then eat very slowly, paying attention to every bite. This practice alone can transform the way you eat, think and feel about food.

• Make friends with your feelings. Early this year, I had a sudden and terrible loss that left me reeling and forced me to actually feel in a way I’d never done before. Once I became willing and stop resisting it, grief and anger and fear and pain washed over and through me, without direction, carving its own pathway through my soul. It wasn’t pretty, but it was real. And that raw emotion left in its wake a sweet openness — like emptiness, but more peaceful and friendly. My muscles stopped gripping my bones. My jaw unclenched. I came more deeply into my body than ever before.

What happens when you encounter strong emotions? If you’re struggling with food, those potent feelings may lead you straight to the kitchen, in search of solace. But what happens if you don’t go, if you just let yourself feel? Find a quite place to sit and notice your feelings. What is the physical sensation of anger? Where does it live in your body? Does it have a color? A voice? Surrender entirely to the experience, and let the transformative power of pure, raw emotion work on you. You’ll know when you’re done. And you might not even be hungry any longer.

I recently spent a lovely week on the farm where I played out my childhood summers. Sitting in the kitchen, I was awash in memories of my grandmother stirring a pot of collard greens, putting up pickles, cutting peaches for a cobbler, shelling peas into the big tin pail that still hangs in the curtained pantry.

My cousins were there, and we spent our days as we had in childhood: riding down dirt roads on the tailgate of a pick-up truck, casting our lines into the local fishing hole, and gathering around the kitchen table in eager, puppy-like anticipation of dinner. My most beloved aunt now took the place of my grandmother, but the meal was much the same.

As I was waxing poetic about the field peas and hot cornbread, one of my beloved cousins looked at me and said, with genuine curiosity, “I don’t understand getting so worked up about food.” When I nearly dropped my forkful of fried okra, she explained “I think eating is a nuisance. It annoys me that I have to stop what I’m doing because my physical body requires fuel.”

Well.

I had to wonder: does it make sense to get worked up about food? Admittedly, my viewpoint is skewed. As a food writer and intuitive eating coach, I spend my days creating recipes, researching food, teaching cooking and nutrition classes, and helping people explore their eating habits. But still. I don’t think I’m alone. As a whole, we’re just generally all hot and bothered by food. We’re seduced by it’s loveliness, enraptured by its flavor and aroma, dazzled by its health-giving properties, and wistfully smitten by its rumored ability to make us wrinkle-free, toned and lean, ten pounds lighter by Labor Day and possibly immortal.

I went to the bookstore today, to browse the magazine racks. In the food section, the spreads were like centerfolds: lushly saturated with color, glossy with sauces, the food looked almost indolent. The cover lines read “Desserts to die for,” and “Decadent dinners.” Adjacent to this were the Healthy Living sections. These were the headlines on the magazines there: “Fat-loss formula.” “Your weight minus eight” “Be thinner in 30 days.” “Foods that fight fat.” “The best cancer-fighting foods.” “Blast fat.” “Fat-melting foods.” “Lose 10 pounds this month.” “Glycemic index for weight loss.” “Four-week slim down.” “Drop two sizes.” “Eat more, weigh less.” Later that evening, when I fed our household animals, I noticed that the cat food box read “What cat wouldn’t do anything to be set loose in a deli?”

For the most part, we Americans are just impossibly worked up on about food. It can “blast fat” and protect us from cancer, and a cheesecake is worth dying for. We are alternately tormented with food porn and then chastised for eating it. We would even sell our feline souls to have free run of a deli.

It wasn’t like that for my grandmother. Stewing tomatoes and okra, chopping mustard greens, shucking corn–she saw food as utilitarian stuff that just happened to taste good. She fed it to us children, so we would grow healthy and strong, and made blackberry pies because it was the best way to use the bucketfuls we’d collected during the day. There were no tangy pomegranate molasses glazes or pungent harissa sauces; it was good, solid food, fuel for the bodies working on the farm. As far as I knew, she never counted a calorie or tried to melt fat (except in her cast-iron skillet), and she hadn’t a clue about the glycemic index of collard greens. But almost everything she ate came from the farm, and she lived to be 96, in robust good health until the very end.

I wonder what would happen if we stopped being so worked up about food? What if we stripped our meals, our clothing size and the numbers on our bathroom scale of their supposed power to extend our lives, fix our problems, and make us thinner, happier or somehow better? I wonder if not getting worked up about food, and being more matter-of-fact about our meals, is one of the first steps on the way to eating intuitively.

Loving and enjoying food, truly appreciating the seductive pleasure of a well-crafted meal, is a vital part of life. But when we start obsessing about it, giving it disproportionate power over our health and happiness, that’s when we disconnect.

When we’re frustrated by the mundane troubles of our daily lives, food is the fastest, easiest, path to pleasure and gratification. It’s always available, it never says “no,” and it’s instantaneous: who wants to spend an hour in quiet meditation, when five minutes at the pastry counter will yield the same results? Food is pleasurable, but it’s not a spiritual experience. Whether you call yourself spiritual or not, there’s a part in each of us that longs for a connection to something beyond ourselves that we can’t name. And whether you see food as a nuisance or think a cheesecake is “to die for,” it won’t get you to that connection.

What’s your relationship with food? Do you see it as an occasional necessity, or as a route to health, self-love and your overall happiness? Be honest with yourself. And please comment; I’d love to hear what you have to say.

If you’re eating, out of your mind–and in your body–is the best place to be.

Think about your last meal. Were you actually there? Were you at the table, tasting your food, smelling its aroma, feeling its texture as you chewed and swallowed? Or were you in your mind, mentally lining up the next thing on your to-do list, composing an email, fretting over an argument with your spouse, or counting calories and grams of fat? Any time you’re doing anything but focusing on your food during meals, you’re in your mind. And even though the entire act of chewing, swallowing, digesting and assimilating food occurs in the physical being, we’re rarely around when it happens.

What does it mean to be “in your body,” and why is it so hard to do? I have spent much of my life in a formal meditation practice that teaches us to be present, embodied and in the moment, and sometimes it’s still hard. Sometimes, being in the body just isn’t as interesting as being in the mind. It’s quieter in the body. There’s less noise, no drama. The mind, however, is much more flashy; it’s cunning, clever and persuasive, and tells a fabulous tale.

We also feel like we’re more in control in the mind. We can spin our take on situations, weave stories that makes us feel comfortable and safe. And, if you have a body that was ridiculed, neglected, mishandled or otherwise harmed in childhood, in your body is a hard place to be. If your early physical sensations were unpleasant or painful, getting the hell  out of your body made way more sense than sticking around to feel.  When that happens, it can take time to come back.

Especially to the soft, squishy, most vulnerable middle of it–the belly. But when it comes to eating, that’s where the action’s at. Many traditional spiritual practices emphasize the hara, the area three fingers’ width below the navel, that’s often described as the energetic center of the self. No accident that it’s also the digestive center of the body.

But we don’t hang around in our soft, squishy centers, or the body in general. We spend most of our lives in our minds; we crash around in our arms and legs, then fling our torsos into bed at the end of the day, with little experience of what those body parts have felt through the day.

How do you get back in your body? If you’ve spent years fleeing from it at the first sign of trouble, it’s just a matter of creating a new habit. Some simple practices can help:

1.    Check in with your belly before you eat. Every single time. What does it feel like? A cursory glance will reveal only the most superficial of sensations–hungry, full–leaving the more interesting experiences buried deeper. Maybe your belly feels grateful, or lonely, or troubled. Take five full minutes before each meal to just sit quietly and sense what’s happening in your belly. Place your hand on the area below your navel, let your belly soften (even though that’s horrible and scary in our modern culture) and direct your attention to your breath. Your mind may quickly start jumping up and down, demanding to tell its story. Notice it, don’t react or respond, and keep guiding your breath back to your belly.

2. Eat with your senses. Look at your food before you put it in your mouth. Smell it; if appropriate, touch it. Become completely enchanted with the food on your plate. In most contemplative spiritual practices, eating is a sacred art. And when you think about it, the act of receiving sustenance from the Earth, and transforming it into flesh, bone, muscle and cells, really is pretty miraculous.

3. Meet your body. What does your whole body–every single part–feel like? Try this exercise: lying down comfortably, do a whole body scan. Starting with your feet, and working your way up, pay careful attention to each part of your body–the big and obvious parts, but also the parts that go unnoticed. What do your elbows and earlobes feel like? The spaces between your toes? The very center of your stomach, inside the actual organ? Focusing on the tiny bits helps get you out of a mental description of what your body feels like, and into a sensory experience. And you might be surprised to find that there are parts of your body you never even noticed.

4. Experiment with being in your body through movement. Thinking about your body doesn’t create embodiment. It’s purely experiential. Movement needn’t be elaborate or showy. Stretch your arms slowly overhead. Extend your legs. Arch, then flex, your spine, and see how quickly you come back to your physical being and its sensations.

5. Check in with your body throughout the day. Make it a regular habit to pause every hour or so, and do a quick scan of your physical self, from the part in your hair to the skin on the soles of your feet. In time, the habit of being in your body will come naturally and frequently. When I first started this practice in my early 30s, in the midst of a riot of mental noise, I was shocked to find that I spent well over half my life in my mind, while my body remained uninhabited. Now, it’s second nature, but it took years of practice.

The next time you eat, do it from your body. Be really, truly present, and notice how different the act of nourishment may seem.