Newsrooms are amazing places to work. The open-plan working space has its ups and downs.

Often you are made to listen to conversation that have nothing to do with you or work. You get advice even when you did not ask for it.

We call our newsroom a squatter camp (giggles) – a story for another day.

I remember a conversation over food one sunny day in February.

Masego Seemela (don’t kill me for this) had forgotten about her diet (but most of us do, so no one will judge) and wanted to have pasta that day.

“No,” Emmanuel Tjiya says. “Pasta is heavy. It’s summer. Why would you want to eat that...” Last words from Emmanuel: “We eat salads, it’s summer.”

I hide in shame (rolls eyes) because I also wanted the delicious creamy chicken and pasta with extra Parmesan cheese. It is filling and besides, I love pasta because it's quick to make. I hate kitchen slavery.

So, if we eat light food in summer, what do we eat in autumn and winter? Again, I’m hiding because it is the season for samp, dumplings, stews... Yum!

As temperatures drop and the nights get colder, what should we indulge in and how do we ensure the food we consume do not affect our health? How do we distinguish between stomach and head hunger?

Dietitian Kim Hofmann says by listening to our bodies, eating intuitively rather than emotionally and practicing common sense, we can relearn how to find balance in what and how we eat.

“Our eating behaviours have been greatly affected by diet culture and our busy lifestyles and have further deteriorated during the global pandemic.

“The answer to balanced eating behaviours lies in listening to what our body wants through intuitive eating that focuses on stomach hunger rather than head hunger [or emotional eating],” says Hofmann.

“This kind of intuitive eating also allows us to eat all kinds of food, while indulging in a moderate amount of snacks and treats from time to time without feeling guilty.

“Intuitive eating is also about being easier on ourselves and our relationship with food, while using our learnings as points of reflection to see us along our lifelong journey to health, wellness and happiness,” she says.

Hofmann gives useful techniques to help you listen to your body as you get into the habit of eating intuitively:

• Distinguish between stomach and head hunger. We need to relearn how to distinguish stomach hunger from head hunger. The latter is driven by our mouth and emotions, which crave eating for the sake of pleasure, to self-soothe uncomfortable emotions or situations we may want to avoid, due to boredom or as a form of procrastination.  

When you find yourself in any of these situations, ask yourself: Which part of my body wants the food? Is it stomach hunger driven by the need for energy because I am hungry, or is it head hunger that is driven by the mind and my emotions? Sometimes it may even be thirst. 

• Be gentle with yourself. Many of us may overindulge when we try to self-soothe by eating. By learning to identify and process these difficult emotions, we can learn how to disengage from emotional eating. It may also be helpful to explore these emotions and their triggers through journaling or in therapy.

Try to find other ways to feed these emotional cravings by doing something else or something you love, whether it’s stepping away from your desk for a few minutes, doing a breathing exercise, calling a family member or friend. Keep a list of the activities that you could do instead to distract yourself from eating. 

• Practice intuitive eating by listening to your body.  Eating correctly and regularly, every three to five hours, encourages a rhythm that will teach you how to distinguish real hunger – it is an emptiness in the stomach that is driven by low blood sugar levels.

Extreme hunger may also include a headache, shaking, dizziness and irritable moods. You should always eat when you feel stomach hunger and wait for at least 10-15 minutes after finishing your meal before taking seconds. This will give the signal of fullness (satiety) time to reach your brain from your stomach, in which time you may no longer be hungry.

• Take a balanced approach. Diets often rely on cutting out certain foods or food groups and require immense will power, which is why they are very seldom effective.  Diet culture and punitive eating plans make us feel deprived and are likely to only last a few days or weeks, ultimately leaving us feeling dejected and demotivated as the weight creeps back to where it was when we first started.

Diets that are too low in calories will damage our physiology and may cause us to bounce between one diet and the next as we try to find the silver bullet to achieving our specific goals.

The truth is that we need to embrace a more wholesome approach to eating, by allowing yourself to eat every single kind of food, as long as it makes up part of a balanced, portion-appropriate meal that includes all the macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins and fat) from various food groups. When snacks and treats are eaten mindfully and occasionally, they also serve a purpose by giving us pleasure and satiating head hunger. 

• Treat yourself occasionally. If you’re craving a treat, ask yourself: “Do I want it or do I need it?” and then decide if you’re going to eat it. We need to learn to say both yes and no to snacks and treats an equal number of times. The key is to realise that we can’t use food to self-soothe all the time, as this can become addictive, and so we need to find other nurtures to take the place of food nurture. 

• When you indulge, do so in moderation by practicing portion control once in a while, and do so wholeheartedly. Take the time to savour it slowly by using all of your senses to experience what it looks like, how it smells and tastes, as well as what the texture feels like in your mouth.

And when you indulge, do not allow yourself to feel any guilt. We also need to learn how to untangle our thinking and vocabulary around the perceptions that certain foods are bad for us or naughty, and that we have cheated if we ate something delicious for the sake of taste rather than nutrition. Every kind of food can play a part in our life when we eat mindfully.

• It’s a lifelong journey. Changing habits is a challenging and time-consuming process because they are so ingrained in our lifestyles. It’s an ongoing commitment that we need to make daily. If you do happen to overindulge, see it as a learning experience for the future. If you do happen to overindulge it doesn't negate all the hard work you’ve done until that point – it doesn’t take you back to square one.

Remember that the road towards health and wellness is not linear and that there is no such thing as perfection – this is merely a construct of popular culture. Instead, focus on the positive changes and progress you have made so far.

Once you manage to get your eating pattern right by listening to your body, your physiology will also improve. This will allow you the space to work on the emotional aspects of understanding why you eat to self-soothe.

mashabas@sowetan.co.za