Meal by Meal: 365 Daily Meditations for Finding Balance Through Mindful Eating

""Meal by Meal" is more than a book - it is a meal companion. The "daily meditation" format books have been around for many years now: go to any Goodwill or Salvation Army store and you'll find a handful. This one, however, in my prediction, will be on the self-help orbit for a very, very long time.

Here's why. Disordered eating - be it of compulsive/conditioned or emotional/coping type - is a habit. Any habit is a stimulus-response pattern. Big Ben (London, UK) chimes 12 pm - must be lunch time. Big Ben (Pittsburgh Steelers) is on the field - it's beer and nachos time. Whatever the habit, a stimulus (e.g. to eat) is conditioned to a response (e.g. eating). The only way to break an association is form a new one. Habits - as we are told by behavior modification gurus - can't be un-learned, but only over-learned.

And this is where the "daily meditation" format comes in handy. Altman - a former Buddhist monk and an author of "The Inner Meal" - is "channeling" the paradigm of mindfulness. You've heard all about it, of course: increase the presence (in this here-and-now), facilitate change (from an old pattern to a new pattern). Simple enough, heh? The challenge, however, is to go from knowing to doing. Altman's solution is to turn each meal into a meditative practice of mindfulness. To take it one meal at a time.

Altman has done the homework and come up with a year (!) worth of original meal-by-meal meditational recipes - each consisting of a quotation, a brief mindfulness-provoking vignette, and a "bullet point" to sum things up and to chew on.

A major strength of this "meditational guidance" is a uniquely soothing rhythm of Entry>Choice>Preparation>Ritual>Eating>Community>Departure. Altman himself, in the preface, refers to these as "themes." In particular, he explains: "Meal by Meal uses daily themes that target your real world experience with food. With a theme for each day of the week <...> you are guided gently and surely onto the path of mindfulness" (p. 3). The apparent effect of these rolling phases is a kind of conditioned internalization to treat each meal as a series of mindfulness crossroads: you enter into hunger, you make a conscious choice as to how to satisfy it, you mindfully prepare the food, with ritualistic mindfulness of the process you consume it, while appreciating social company or merely communing with the world at large by meditating on how this act of eating connects and unites you with the rest, and eventually exiting the moment of eating with mindful grace, without the baggage of disordered eating - a meal after meal after meal.

What Altman succeeds in doing with this book is somewhat paradoxical: he is helping you turn mindfulness into a habit. Why is this paradoxical? Habits - to be habits - have to be mindless stimulus-response associations. But here it's a different story. By reading a page from Altman's "meal by meal" once a day, you are gradually instituting a habit of remembering to wake up, to go off your autopilot whenever you sit down to eat - and the behavior of eating mindfully, with time, becomes second nature, an altogether different kind of auto-pilot, a kind of auto-pilot that reminds the pilot to get back in the driver's seat, and that, in turn, un-yokes the mindless eater from the shackles of mindless eating.

Altman's writings on mindful eating, in my opinion, are a staple for a weight management self-help library. Altman's "Meal by Meal" isn't a cookbook but it is a recipe book for mindful eating.

Pavel Somov, Ph.D.
Author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008)

"
~ Written on 2008-09-27

"I'm trying to change my relationship with food (from "evil, dangerous, failure after failure") to a healthier version, and this keeps bringing me back to my choices...food, attitude, relationship, emotions. "
~ Written on 2008-03-24

"I might not call this book meal by meal but I would call it day by day. I've been using it for about a month now as a guide for mindful eating. Some of the ideas are things I do, some of them are easy for me to implement, and some of them are a challenge. I like the idea of focusing on eating rather than dieting and it appears to be helping me make more concious choices about how I approach food."
~ Written on 2006-08-06

"I was familiar with the work of Donald Altman from his earlier 'Art of the Inner Meal' and was impressed how his writing has found a fresh and densely pragmatic new form. 'Meal by Meal' is a fluid read of inspiring quotes coupled with practical insights by the author. This book is extremely handsome, a beautifully laid out composition making this both useful and pleasurable to read. If you have the discipline to read a page at a time, you will find this helpful day by day. I personally had trouble putting it down and would read a month at a time... but the suggestions are valid and useful on a second slower read. Worthwhile investment for someone wishing to calm their compulsive behavior for a more reflective perspective."
~ Written on 2005-09-02

"I open this book up several times a day to get inspiration. It always gives me a big dose of compassion and acceptance for my food struggles. Best of all, it connects me to a deeper source of food that gives me strength for mind-body-spirit. Rarely have I read a book that improved and changed my life on a dialy basis, but this one does! Perhaps it can for you, which is why I highly recommend MEAL BY MEAL as one of the most caring and compassion-filled books that I have ever had the opportunity of reading! This book makes love part of your daily recipe for eating, and it removes the guilt of food! Forget dieting, because if you use this book each day you will apply your deeper awareness and soul to your food choices. This book is a real blessing, and I am thankful it is there for all who need it!"
~ Written on 2004-08-29