Nicole Christina, a clinical social worker and local psychotherapist, had different kinds of dietary advice for the small crowd gathered in front of her.

“You can’t hate yourself thin, you can’t hate yourself happy,” said Nicole Christina. “That puts you into a fight-or-flight stress mode.”

She and dietician Lisa Thomas led the final meeting of the “Simple and Satisfying” nutrition series on Tuesday in Bird Library. The series was advertised as changing people’s relationship with food, but the session’s philosophy focused less on dietary commandments and more on advice for de-stressing and relaxing during midterms.

Being offered to students for the first time, the final seminar only drew five students and one staff member. But the audience, despite the small turnout, was highly invested in the workshop’s topics.

Carl Fisk, a sophomore drama major who was at the meeting, said he’s struggled with his weight, and put “a lot” of emphasis on diet and monitoring his weight. After attending the seminar, he said he now sees how other factors can affect weight.

Now that students are living on their own, they need to better understand how to take care of themselves, he said.

In the fall, students face stressors such as illness and exams, Christina said. The Tuesday meeting weighed the effects of all these on student health.

Making time to eat, let alone eating wisely, was a big discussion topic. Students offered instances of when they were too busy with homework and studying to leave their dorm room — which forced them to eat in front of their computer screens as they worked.

Thomas, the dietician at Health Services who also led the discussion, insisted students not give into the urge to multitask and instead delegate a time to eat in peace.

“In this country, it becomes about ‘hurry, hurry, hurry’, and I think we need to slow down in more ways than one, not just about eating, but in various ways,” she said. “Worrying about food and worrying about eating ends up causing more issues than food choices sometimes.”

Christina then led the group in a meditative exercise known as “guided imagery.”

For 10 minutes, Christina asked the group to visualize the perfect dining atmosphere: the room “in vivid detail,” who was preparing the dish, and, finally, the “celebratory” and “textured” qualities of a favorite meal.

Calming strategies like this were offered in place of more ubiquitous dietary strategies, such as tracking calories or the impulse to exercise constantly.

These, Thomas and Christina said, are examples of pressuring yourself into health, to which the body has adverse responses.

If eating causes one to have more anxiety, it slows digestion, Thomas said.

“Your whole metabolism changes – the way you process food, the way you process weight, all that stuff – is working against you,” he said.

Carol Hornstein, a receptionist at Career Services who participated in the course, said she had tried traditional dieting such as Weight Watchers for some time. Unlike those, she said, this approach promotes more self-awareness after eating.

“The idea is to be kind to yourself and to work towards a goal of wholeness as opposed to finding out another diet or another magic bullet to lose weight,” Hornstein said. “It’s more than that; it’s a personal approach to eating and good health.”

Published on October 2, 2013 at 1:08 am