Altered eating: A definition & framework for assessment & intervention
Using multi-sensory ethnographic methods.
Dear reader,
My mission, should you choose to accept it, is to raise the awareness of the quality of our food lives during and post head and neck cancer treatment.
Before we get into it, if you are a paid subscriber I wanted to alert you to the opportunity to access my 5 Module Social Eating Method & I hope an opportunity to think differently about your food situation, perhaps trigger something small you could be doing to improve your current food life.
It is an abridged version (of sorts) of the full Mind Food Body Program. Abridged in the sense that I did this live with participants from all over the world and recorded the process for you.
These 5 links and downloadable work book are the materials we used.
There’s 90 minutes of video content over 5 modules & a recap at the end.
I have set them in the order I want you to do them, your first task is to download the workbook and or join as a paid subscriber if you have not already done so.
I have also added all the resources I refer to during the workshop and they are there for you to download too, helpful things like how to create meal plans and shopping lists when you are struggling to eat.
See you in there !
The link to access all this is at the bottom of this post.
Which unless you are a paid subscriber you can’t access. Just saying …
OK, you ready? Let’s get into it.
As a foodie and someone who likes to cut a rug or two, I zeroed in on this gaping hole in the multidisciplinary team care almost immediately upon waking from surgery, and the lack of knowledge about my own food life going forward.
I was not swallowing water or my own saliva at the time of this revelation.
I started researching, not the online group Q & A type of research so much, but the deep dive into science, food texture modification kind of research.
27 March 2018 - was the most up to date information I could find on such a study. Interestingly enough (or not) the same year I was diagnosed with a SCC (squamous cell carcinoma).
It was a culmination of 6 years collaborative work with HNC survivors, chefs, flavour experts (whatever they are) speech pathologists, oncologists etc etc.
Here was the detail of the study that caught my eye…
There wasn’t a way of assessing and addressing food related quality of life in cancer patients. Not specifically head and neck patients
The purpose of this study was to develop a framework for doing so.
There was a study undertaken by Burges Watson, D.L., Lewis, S., Bryant, V. et al. Altered eating: a definition and framework for assessment and intervention. BMC Nutr 4, 14 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40795-018-0221-3
The Altered Eating Framework provides a systematic approach for assessing how the patient's relationship to food has changed, the impact of this on their quality of life, and highlights areas for potential intervention.
I quite like the way they state potential intervention - like it’s an option.
Maybe I am wrong, maybe some HNC patients don’t need intervention. I find that hard to fathom, even if you don’t suffer from dysphagia or some other life altering food event as a consequence, you need (at the minimum) psychological help in my humble opinion.
I, like many struggled through on my own, trial and error, fail and success only to find it is different the next week or even sometimes the next day. To say it was and is exhausting is an understatement.
They used multi sensory ethnographic methods, ie they took into account intimacy, sociality, visual, sound, taste, smell & touch, via the four pilot “Food Play” workshops.
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology, there it was, lurking in the detail, my love of anthropology finding its home, although personally I’d have chosen a different title for the workshops. Something like “The Food Games” “The Hunger Games” currently banned in the US or “Food Poker” where there’s an element of risk in the hand you are dealt.
At no point is this play, but I guess I am taking this far too literally and personally.
Let’s move on…to save you reading the whole document I have sliced out the sections I found particularly relevant in my search for answers and by way of background.