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Sunny scrambled eggs. Smoky, savory home fries. Fresh fruit. Omelets cooked to order with your choice of cheeses, vegetables, and meats. Fluffy golden melt-in-your-mouth French toast. Perfect pancakes. Crispy bacon. Cold cereals of every variety. English muffins. Toast. Your choice of jams. Wholesome oatmeal with brown sugar and butter. Coffee, cocoa, tea, milk, icy orange juice -- as much as you care to drink. And best of all: cloud-soft flaky biscuits bathed in exquisitely creamy country gravy, as many and as much as you like.
Checking into the Embassy Suites in Lake Tahoe, California a few days ago, we learned with delight that the hotel offers all its guests complimentary buffet-style, all-you-care-to-eat breakfasts every day. (This is in addition to a "manager's reception" for adult guests every evening in the leafy atrium, featuring made-to-order cocktails -- delicious and generous and expertly crafted, also free.)
After waking up to a view of sapphire mountain skies, knowing that you're about to spend a glorious day hiking, swimming, and/or skiing, what more could one want?
Ah, but there's the rub: more. The presence of food in any quantity presents a challenge for many of us, whether we've ever struggled with eating disorders or not -- because the question of how much to eat, of when we're "full" and have had "enough," is less a matter of body than of mind.
At ordinary restaurants and with meals eaten at home, we might eat everything on our plates, but even then we'll stop eating when the food's gone -- because we have no choice. At buffets, we have a choice. We never need stop. Not after salad. Not after soup and salad. Not after one entree, or two, or three. Not after one serving of every different side dish. Certainly not after a single dessert. (When there's soft-serve ice cream with a choice of six toppings: Are you kidding me?)
The variety, the quantity, the potential combinations are endless.
Which is good. At the Embassy Suites in Lake Tahoe, it's good by way of piled-high home fries and eggs, a stack of buttered toast on the side and a bottomless cup of coffee with squirts of Ghirardelli chocolate sauce because you're on vacation and it's fun. And that's after only the first of three trips to the food line. But what happens when panic sets in, when after that eighth pancake you tell yourself in shame and fury that you've gone too far?
"Buffets bring up issues not just for binge eaters and people with bulimia but for just about any woman in this culture," says LMFT Signe Darpinian, founder and director of the My Weigh Family Therapy Center in Oakland, California. "People tend to feel out of control at buffets, so they'll take quite a bit of everything that's offered; they'll eat that, and then they'll get seconds even of things they didn't like -- just because it's there."
As those of us who have struggled with eating disorders know, feeling very full leads on one level to feeling ugly, greedy, and obese and on another level to feeling out of control and feeling like a total failure.
Darpinian helps clients learn to avoid reaching that panic state by learning techniques for intuitive eating, a system of body-size management that depends not on dieting but mindfulness. Buffets, she says "are great gauges" in which her clients can observe their own intuitive-eating progress.
The first step is to enter buffets only when you're genuinely hungry, because intuitive eating is all about learning not to eat for reasons other than authentic physical hunger: that is, learning to realize when you're eating because you're bored or sad or anxious instead.
"I call that mindless eating, and no matter how much you eat at those times, if you're eating for some reason besides hunger, you won't be satisfied because your actual emotional needs aren't being met -- no matter how much you eat. If you're trying to feed boredom, it won't work because you're pulling the wrong tool out of the toolbox."
Learning to discern one emotion from another is a big step, she advises:
"A natural state leads to a natural shape. The more balanced you are to begin with, the easier it is to make choices."
She recommends entering buffets -- or any type of eating environment -- with a set strategy rather than what she calls "a hollow plan." Decide in advance, for instance, that you'll take only small portions and eat only items you think you'll really enjoy, then get second helpings only of those you love. When her clients go to buffets, Darpinian arranges for them to stop eating every so often and text her. This allows the clients to assess their degree of hunger or fullness on a scale of one to ten at the time of each text.
"Level 10 is stuffed, level 8 is full, and level 6 is having just enough. After 6, your taste buds aren't really working anymore."
Texting also provides a bit of distance from the potentially impulsive behaviors of piling on more food and eating.
It also helps, Darpinian says, to "have a little something you say to yourself" - a mantra or jingle that brings consciousness back from the more-more-more chaos of the buffet environment: "This provides a sense of self-mastery."
At most meals but especially in buffets, she says, we tend to keep eating long after we've stopped being hungry.
"Your mind wants to keep going, but your body's done."
My mind, of course, is saying French toast.
