Conason describes mindful eating as being fully aware and present in your relationship with food and your body. "It's based on mindful meditation and brings the same skills cultivated there, like non-judgmental observation, to our eating experiences," she says. During my very first session, she explained to me that eating mindfully as a strategy to get thin negates the entire point of the practice and simply doesn't work. There's always a catch, I remember thinking to myself back then, when I still hoped mindfulness could be a fix to help me lose weight.

My troubled relationship with food and dieting went back decades. I tried my first diet my freshman year of college. After that, I was always either on a diet or planning to start one. All foods were labeled good or bad in my mind, and my behavior was categorized by the same measure. What I actually wanted to eat rarely crossed my mind. But this is where mindfulness comes in, Conason tells me in a separate conversation we had outside our therapy sessions.

"To truly eat mindfully, we have to trust our body, which for most of us is a major leap of faith," she explains. "It is nearly impossible to hear what our body is telling us when we are working against it to lose weight. We come equipped with an internal navigation system to guide our eating. The problem is that we spend so much of our lives trying to override this internal GPS that it becomes very hard to hear what our body is telling us."