Try this experiment at home:

Materials you will need: Your single most favorite food — chocolate, pizza, potato chips, whatever — on a plate.

Experimental conditions: You must be sitting at a table alone. You must not be too hungry. Your TV, computer, ipod, and cell phone must be off. No books either.

Procedure to be followed: Take a bite of your food and hold it in your mouth for a few moments. And think about pleasure. Does this bite of food - the taste, the texture, the creaminess or crunchiness - give you pleasure? Swallow. Repeat. With future bites, consider if the taste now is as good as it first was. What's different about it? Repeat process until the food no longer gives you pleasure.

Hypothesis: You will stop eating after only a few bites.

Case study: Me

I've been toying with a version of this approach since I took a six-week MEAL class - which stands for Mindful Eating and Living. The class is taught by Nancy Oestreicher at the University of New Mexico's Center for Life in Albuquerque. The course is based on research done by Dr. Brian Shelley at UNM, where participants lost about a pound a week, Oestreicher said.

The mindful-eating approach — which requires no calorie counting, food deprivation or super-secret plan — seems to be an answer to a prayer that I have uttered a few thousand times. You can eat whatever you want, whenever you want. Hallelujah.

You just have to eat it mindfully. And that is more terrifying than I could have ever imagined.

If I really pay attention when I eat chocolate — which is my own personal binge food — I can take only three bites before the tasty pleasure evaporates. And I'm left with a bunch of chocolate that's lost its flavor. But more than that, I'm left with all the emotions I was trying to cover up with the chocolate — all the anxiety and fears that I didn't have to face when I had the chocolate to push it down.

And while it sounds great that I'm facing my personal demons, and isn't that special, I'm freaking out over here because I can't calm down, and I'm feeling really hyper and really restless and really anxious, and I can't do the one thing that has always gotten me through feeling this way, which was eating mass quantities of chocolate ...

And this leads us to the meditation part of the program.

Because it is through mediation that we find true inner peace (imagine a gong sounding in the distance).

Now, I'm not one for weird new age stuff (and with that I've just alienated half of Santa Fe), however, mediation has been repeatedly proven though scientific research to be the one thing, besides medication, that can deliver us from anxiety and depression.

This is why it's included as a vital part of the mindful-eating program. In fact, participants in the class are given a CD with meditations, including one that walks you though how to eat mindfully.

The weight loss in the program is actually just a side effect of mindful eating. You simply eat less when you really pay attention. When you eat each bite, you make "an intentional choice to keep eating or not to keep eating," Oestreicher said.

It's not that I'm trying to eat less. I am just observing my own responses to the food and my own level of satisfaction. I consider all the physical and emotions aspects of that moment. Am I thirsty, full, empty, happy, sad, depressed, bored, etc.

Another key idea is that there is no good or bad food. A cookie is just the same as a carrot. You can totally eat MacDonald's, you just have to eat it mindfully (I have tried this. I ate three fries and three bites of the burger). And you quickly find that healthy food usually tastes better.

"It's all about observing and not judging," said Oestreicher, who has a master's in health education and is the only teacher of the course in New Mexico. "It's about stopping to notice. If you observe you've eaten two pounds of cookies, it's not beating yourself up, saying 'I'm awful, I'm awful.' Just observe what did it feel like eating two pounds of cookies - or one raisin for that matter."

Above all, it is about "kindness to oneself," she said.

Sigh. That sounds so nice.

And, boy, doesn't it also seem like a complete load of horse hairballs? And it might be, but it sounds so wonderful — and so full of possibility — that I have to try it. This is my new eating approach for the next four months.

Maybe there really is a Santa Claus, a peaceful solution to violence in the Middle East and a way to lose weight that doesn't include beating myself up.

To find out more about the MEAL class or mindful eating, go to Christine's blog at etastesantafe.com.

A pre-medical student at The University of New Mexico, Christine Barber has been a journalist in New Mexico for 14 years. Her mystery novel The Replacement Child, which is set in Santa Fe and won the Hillerman prize, is in stores now. Reach her at tlg@sfnewmexican.com or via her blog at etastesantafe.com.