Diet Culture

Who among us hasn’t fantasized about dropping a few extra pounds? Who hasn’t read through the ten sure-fire tips on how to LOSE WEIGHT AND LOOK GREAT? Who hasn’t, at some point or another, gone on a diet?

It is nearly impossible to find such a person. Young and old, religious and not, female and male, all of us are regularly goaded by media moguls, health experts, and self-help stars, to watch what we eat. We will look better, feel better, and be healthy too!

Ours is a diet culture. We are obsessed with food—with what, when, how, and why to eat. We are equally obsessed with what happens to our bodies when we do—with what they weight, how much fat they carry, and how they look. Caught in the pincers of these dueling obsessions, we turn to diets to save us.

So pervasive is this diet culture that its many myths and rituals shape our experience of food, regardless of whether we are dieting or not.

What are those myths? We believe, for example, that food equals pleasure, and that more food equals more pleasure. We believe that our desire for such pleasure makes us fat. We believe that our best response is to harness the might of our minds over and against our desiring bodies. We believe that all it takes is will power.

As we believe, so we practice. We tighten our belts. We exercise all our frugal, practical, puritan restraint, and deny ourselves eating pleasure. With such faithful practice, we believe, we will have the lean and mean bodies we want.

The dream soon morphs into a nightmare. For the harder we work to control our desires, the stronger they grow. The more obsessed with food we become. We grow weary of the struggle against ourselves, and, in a moment we aren’t fully alert, we give up the fight. We eat what we know we shouldn’t. We blame ourselves and vow to try harder next time. It is a vicious cycle. And it is addictive. The rush of self control we experience at the beginning of any diet is impossible to sustain.

The illusion is crumbling.

Diets don’t work. As Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin reports, such is the conclusion of obesity researchers. To date, scientists have not been able to isolate a simple fat storage mechanism. The pathways are not only plural and variable, they are thoroughly entangled with the circuitry wiring our emotional, social, and intellectual selves.

So too, it seems that there are biological cues for regulating weight regardless of whether we are obese or not. People who lose many pounds manifest signs of starvation even when still overweight; while people forced to gain lose the weight again quickly. Some scientists argue that the expanding girth of Americans is a genetic capacity akin to height that our resource-rich environment is allowing us to express.

Kolata hopes that this information will liberate her readers from the tyranny of dieting myth and practice. However, it leaves a strange taste in the mouth. If we aren’t happy with what we are eating or with how we look, it won’t do to stop dieting and embrace our bodies as they are. How are we supposed to eat?

Cooks and commentators are jumping into the diet vacuum to tell us how, when, what, and why to eat. We should eat slow food (Maxine Waters), local food (Barbara Kingsolver), whole food (Michael Pollan), fresh and organic food (Anna Lappe, Nina Planck).

Yet, these efforts, as valuable as they are in raising awareness, don’t go far enough in challenging the myths of our diet culture. They serve our minds with alternative plans to impose upon those Twinkie-loving bodies of ours. The struggle continues.

We need more. We need a shift in our experience of eating. We are not information-rich minds fighting ignorant bodies. We are bodily selves. Our movements in thinking, sensing, and ingesting food are making us. And the movements we are making as we battle fat are making us unhappy.

There is an alternative. We can learn to find wisdom in our desire for food.

This task will be our focus for the next two months. This blog will discuss everything food. We will revisit the myths and rituals of diet culture one by one, and investigate how they fail us. In these failures, we will find new possibilities for thinking, feeling, and acting in relation to food that do not pit “us” against our desire for food.

We can learn to follow the arc of our eating pleasure to a sense of enough.
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Our desire for food is fundamental. Without food we cannot live. As with the movement of breathing, the movements we make as we choose, purchase, reach, chew, swallow, churn, absorb, and metabolize make us. Literally. And they not only make our bodies, they make us into people who think and feel and act in relation to food as we do. Eating is infused with emotions, enabled by a matrix of social relationships, and inflected by the dieting myths we have ingested along with our chips. It cannot not be.

The key to finding wisdom in our desire for food, then, lies in cultivating a sensory awareness of how our diet myths and rituals are making us. When we do, we will find in our patterns of frustration and disappointment the clues we need to move towards our eating pleasure.

Action: How do you feel about eating? When you sense a pang of hunger, how do you respond? How does that sensation register? What is it about food that gives you the most pleasure? Think of all the ingredients—taste, timing, hunger, availability, company, sustenance, source, price, quantity, feeling in your mouth, belly, and blood. What is it about food that makes it so enjoyable--so seductive--or not? Next time you are eating a meal, move through the cycle of breaths. What happens?

Next week: Food equals pleasure—or does it?

Breathing to Move 4: Water

There is pleasure in being moved by something outside yourself—boat or bicycle, skis or skates. A power-stirring gust of space rushes past.

There is a pleasure too in being moved by something you welcome into yourself—a rose hued scent or a mountain view, a jolt of coffee or bright burst of ice cream, the flash of a painting or a lover’s touch. The impressions scrub your sensory surfaces alive.

The greatest pleasure, however, is the pleasure of moving yourself—of being the beating breathing unfolding of your own capacity to do and be. It is the pleasure of discovering and creating new sensory shapes—stretching, bending, and twisting; running, skipping, and leaping; writing, building, or playing. It is the pleasure of making the movements that are making you.

It is for this pleasure that I dance.

I breathe to find and flow with life enabling currents coursing through me. What movements can I make? What is possible in this moment? What am I capable of thinking, feeling, knowing? What am I becoming?

I dance to practice the most fundamental, life enabling challenge we face as human beings: bringing sense to life. This task is not an abstract pondering of purpose-making reasons to live; it is a concrete exploration of the possibilities enfolded in our bodily movement. It is about breathing to move, moving to breathe.
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I go into the living room where a span of rug and floor awaits, cleared of the body-binding couches, tables and chairs so often crowded into living spaces.

Lying on my back, pulling my knees to my chest, I begin the cycle of breaths. I inhale and then release down into the earth. I feel where I am. My back is a block. I am stiff and groggy, scattered and numb. I breathe again, releasing all effort, tension, and strain, all worries and preoccupations, into the ground. I still don’t feel the points of my connection to the earth. It is cloudy, bumpy. I breathe again, down. Let go.

Unexpectedly my right hip drops into the floor. The move is slight, yet my right knee now floats loosely in my hand. It is as if a fist in my lower back released. I can feel my hip touching the ground. A second ago I was oblivious.

An air breath. I breathe in and exhale my attention open and out through my skin into the surrounding space. I dissolve in white light. My internal gaze boomerangs home, lodging suddenly behind my eyes. My jaw hums. The beads of my spine settle along the floor. Riding an impulse to unfold, my right heel presses to the sky. A fire breathe (2/13) plunges deep into my belly, finding the strength to sustain the stretch. Then, with the fourth in the cycle, the water breath (see below), currents of energy shoot upward along the leg path skyward.

Suddenly I am tumbling into my body, shifting sideways and down. New angles of sensation, new flows of energy come into view. Who I am is this pleasure in moving. My movement is making me. I attune fiercely to the pleasure, following its firm, gentle guide.

I begin a new series of movements on my back, lowering my lifted legs to one side and then the other, passing through the cycle of breaths again. A pang in my hip prompts me to stretch up through my lower back, turning a bit farther than I have before, digging deeper into the ground with the opposite shoulder. I breathe into the new shape: earth, air, fire, water. A gasp of release. Something surges. I ride it through my finger tips. Lovely.

I stand up. I feel completely different. My head floats. My breathing glides in and out. My sense of weight gathers in my lower abdomen, off my back and thighs, freeing torso, shoulders, and arms. My rooted legs sing with anticipation of movement yet to come.

It happens, maybe once, for a few seconds. I can’t will it or force it. But there it is—a moment where I am nothing but the flow of the movement making me. Lost. Found. Present. Becoming. Vivid.

I arrive at the end of my dance time. Limbs tremble slightly. Every breath washes through me, cleaning bright. Pockets of strength break open; courage streams out. Thoughts crackle in the horizon of awareness, snapping with intention and understanding. I greet my new self with relief. With joy. Time to feed lunch to the kids.
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People live day in and day out, not knowing that there is more of them—more in them—more breath, more movement, more vitality, more wisdom. There is.

Action: Water breath

The final in a cycle of four, the water breath gathers the first three (see 1/29, 2/5, 2/13). Earth, air, fire, we are also water. Mostly water. Lapping around our island eyes, beneath our lips, everywhere under our skin, in our blood, our lymph system, our flesh. We are like sponges. Squeezed out, all that would be left is a small pile of dust.

The water we are is warm water. Water cooked in the fires of our cells and center. It is this water that washes through our bodies, streaming through shapes of sensation.

Breathe in through your open heart. See the air, feel the air, streaming in, illuminating the heart. Exhale, sending air down through your points of contact with the earth and out through the surface of your skin, leaving a clear flame in the fiery hold of your belly.

Breathe in again and as you exhale imagine your glimmering belly fire caught in waves of fluid. Imagine this light flecked fluid, warmly flowing from your center through arms, legs, and out the top of your head, rushing out the limb-lined trajectories into space.

Breathe in again, filling your heart, and then breathe out, spilling the fire of your desire through your extended self. Feel it moving through you, moving you.

Let whatever you are doing flow. Even if you are sitting to read these words, let your spine straighten, your eyes open, your attention clear. Come to life.

Next week: Finding wisdom in our desire for food

Breathing to Move 3: Fire

As much as I love it, I don’t walk everyday. I can’t. As much as I need to breathe myself into this time and place and open to the shock of its relentless creativity, I need something else too, and just as regularly. I need to sink my awareness as deeply as I can within the folds of my sensory self and discover what this beating, bodily becoming can know within.

For this I do yoga.

The postures of hatha yoga represent a science, thousands of years in the making, of bodily movement. It may seem ironic to say so. A pose is a pose, still and quiet. Yet each pose systematically massages the pathways through which energy moves through our bodily selves—food, water, air, electricity, and awareness. As the poses draw our attention to organs and systems, tissues and skins, bones, muscles and nerves, we practice releasing into the flow of the movements that are making us. We ignite a fire within.

Really?

It begins with the breath. To enter a pose, you breathe your bodily self into a bend or stretch, balance or twist. The shape tugs at your awareness, pulling your sense of self into the bodily form of the pose. The pressure in your hip, the squeeze in your back muscles, the unbuckling of a hamstring trains your focus on these places—as points strung along a possible trajectory of movement.

As a felt sense of the pose comes into view, you notice too whatever is preventing you from feeling ease in the pose. Your breath finds such places when it stops at them, unable to pass through. While the pain may be physical, it is often not, infused with emotional hues as well. It is not that there is some abstract connection between emotional states and bodily parts. Rather every sting you have ever felt, every zoom of excitement, every flash of fear, registers in you. Whenever you cringe, shrink, freeze, flail, or brace yourself for the worst, your bodily self remembers those shapes—patterns of sensation and response. Over time, you become them, they become you. Rigid. Unmoving. Your enduring habits.

Moving through the postures, you find such frozen places. The pose may trigger feeling of frustrating at your limitations, doubt in your ability to do what you want. Distrust of your bodies, your desires, your self comes rushing in—the patterns you mobilize in response to challenges in life.

So too, moving through the poses, you find your freedom. It is the freedom alive in your capacity to drop into the creative flow of your own sensory existence, and make new patterns of sensing and responding. Each pose invites you not only to assume the pose but guides your attention towards the source energy and strength, coordination and balance you need to sustain it. The arc and fold and reach of these poses points your awareness into the bowl of the pelvis, the cradle of our vital energy, roughly four fingers below the belly button.

Here, at the root of our spines, is where the fire of life ignites and burns. It is the fire that rises through you, animating your senses, feelings, thoughts, and actions. It warms skin and soul; it radiates through pores and projects.

As you learn to breathe into this fire, fanning its flames, you fuel an ever-expanding array of sensory creativity. Your senses open beyond whatever pain you are feeling. You can imagine alternative ways of being in the posture—alterative pathways for the energy to flow through you. Alternative arrangements of limb and thought appear in your opened awareness, and you move with them. Over time, with practice, effort-full places release into the stronger, enabling flow of your creative bodily self.

After 22 years practicing yoga, through books and performances, pregnancies and nursing, often surrounded by kids climbing on and over and under me, I am constantly amazed. Every time I practice, I discover something new. Every time. A span of awareness, an arc of intention, dawns in my sensory self and floods me with joy. I touch the places that hurt, gently, and release into the movement that is making me.

No, I can’t do every pose perfectly. Far from it! But I am better able to sense what that pose has to teach me today, about myself, about where I am, about how the movements I am making are making me, about how to move in ways that will open me to the flow of enlivening life coursing through me.

The process is infinite. Ecstatic. What flows through, really, is love.

Action:

Fire breath: (Are you breathing?) Follow that breath into your heart, and through your heart to the places where you are touching the ground (see 1/29/08), to the surfaces where your skin dissolves into air (see 2/5/08). Feel your weight against the earth, your light oneness with space.

Now as you exhale, release all of the air out of your body. Empty yourself down to the very bottom of your belly. Push the air out for a second more. Wait in the emptiness until the urge to breathe opens you again.

Breathe all the way in and exhale again. This time, follow the breath out even further, sinking your awareness deeper into your internal cavity, the bowl of your pelvis. At that moment of greatest emptiness, push your diaphragm down and squeeze the muscles along the bottom of your pelvic floor up. In this pulled circle of muscular sensation, light a fire.

Release the effort. Take another breath in through your heart. As you exhale, activate that same muscular sphere, sending fuel to the burning fire. And again. Feel the fire blaze. Feel its vitality, your vitality, coming to life.

Breathe in again. This time, without contracting any muscles, activate a sense of them. Feel the strength and the length of the lower abdomen, its width and breadth and depth. Feel that fiery core rooted into the ground and warming the airy volume of your physical space.

Try this breath, with the earth and air breaths. Try it whatever you are doing--walking, driving, swimming, or doing yoga! What happens?

Next week, the final breath: water

Breathing to Move 2: Air

It was a grey chill of a day here on the farm. A dull sky leaked icy drips. Grey stubble pecked through chunks of snow stubbornly bunched against the rain. The forest brown seemed spiky and unkempt. A creeping cold seeped into bones where it pooled in cooling reservoirs.

I went for a walk. With the right wrapping, there is never a reason not to, short of a blinding blizzard or hail by the handful. Then again, it wasn’t really a choice. I didn’t just want to go for a walk. I had to. In the open air. Several times a week at least. Why?

It is not about firing up muscle tissue and burning calories (as if my body were a machine to maintain). It is not about putting my body through its paces (as if it were a large pet). Nor is it about seeing the scenery, though I have had memorable viewing moments on such days (as when a grey shroud focused my attention down to a Queen Anne’s lace shriveled tightly around a gleaming tear drop, or when ashen trunks appeared before me, tracking skyward, their vertical rails receding into the mist).

The need to walk comes from somewhere else—from what walking awakens in me. The movement of walking, legs and arms, fingers to toes, shifts my experience. It releases me from the rooms of my mind, and into the sensory reaches of my bodily being. Something wakes up, and I know: I am not a mind living over and against a body. I am the movement that is making me.


How does this happen?

Walking I must breathe, more deeply than before. Oxygen rich pulses prod my senses to life. I start feeling what I am feeling. I notice the pain in my back. The ache in my shoulder. The cramp in my heart. As I notice, my breath follows my gaze, finding in that discomfort a span of awareness whose potential for enabling my walking I am about to discover. It is a call to move.

Breathing down into the earth (see last week’s Action), I feel the press of the ground on the soles of my feet, up through my legs, resisting me, releasing whatever discomfort I am feeling into the waves of my walking.

Swinging, landing, rolling through, with each step I breathe again. Into the earth and then, from that grounded place, I open up to the world around me. I breathe myself wide, out beyond the surfaces of skin, filling and spilling over the outline of my bodily self. I pass through my senses, uncurling them into a world rich with possibility. I come to life. Life comes to me. I smile.

What do I see and hear and smell and taste and touch?

I live in a rural place, known for its rolling meadows, forested hills, quiet ponds, and gurgling brooks. We moved here two years ago to live farther from the clamor of consumer culture, in closer contact with the rhythms of the natural world. Yet it soon became clear. Nature is far from the pastoral balm we imagine it to be. The natural world is brutally alive, hurling itself moment by moment into the future. It is constant birth and death and becoming. Unrelenting creativity.

This is what I sense as I walk: movement. The self-creating movement of all that is. There is no one sense for it—but it is all I sense, in every sense. Every day here is different. The very same spots and sights look, smell, taste, sound different than before. I am struck by these changes, and as my senses come to life, I notice more of them. The tracks in the snow, the matted clouds, the trees thinning day by day against the arc of hillside, preparing for the instant they will shade into auburn tones then explode in color.

I am shocked by this great green growing, even when locked in the grip of winter. And shocked once again by the blast of recognition that soon follows. I am a part of this great green growing. It is alive in me, in the movement of my senses, in the movement of my walking. My movement, walking-breathing-beating-attending, is making me.

Walking, awake to my movement, I find that I am no longer rearranging old ideas. New thoughts shoot up from below, from within. Every surface, organ, and limb is creating images, patterns of sensation and response--possibilities for thinking and feeling, understanding and acting that I did not have before my walk. Knotty problems loosen, threads unwind. I learn from them what that have to teach me about how to untie them. My movement is making me.

This is why I walk. I walk to know that I am part of this great growing green—and to know it not only in the sense of thinking that I am, but to know it in my sensory awareness, as I participate in it, thinking new thoughts, feeling new feelings, following the impulse to move in song or dance. I walk to find my freedom—to cultivate a sensory awareness of my ability to respond to the challenges in my life. I walk for this shift in experience. To know I am, becoming.

Without such movement, what we can imagine shrinks to an imitation of what we have already thought.

We cannot will such a shift; only invite it. And one way to do so, whatever we are doing, is by moving through the cycle of breaths. 

Action:
What kinds of activities do you do that bring your senses to life?
What kinds of movements awaken you to a heightened sense of your own possibility?

Whatever they are, experiment with the following breaths as a way to enrich your experience. 

Where the earth breath (last week) grounds you in the present, helps you drop your sensory wraps, and allows you to feel what you are feeling, the air breath opens up the sensory dimensions of yourself so that you have space to unfold what you are feeling and thinking, turn it over, examine it from different angles, allow it to grow into new shapes.

Try it. (Are you breathing?) Begin with an earth breath. When you breathe in, follow your breath in through your heart, flooding it with white light. As you exhale, let all tension, hope, fear, and effort you that are holding drop onto the ground. Release your sense of weight. Allow your limbs to hang loosely. You are plumbing for a deeper strength.

Breathe again. This time, sense air streaming into the nose and mouth, throat and chest, and rippling through your bodily core. As you exhale, imagine that air expanding to fill every cell of your bodily self. Every organ, fiber and fold is filling and spilling over with clear, clean, cleansing air. Feel how light you are. How empty. How full.

Breathing in, follow your breath into your heart, and out through your body to its edges. Allow an image to form of this length of skin, the surfaces where the air filling you spills over into space.

As you breathe out, imagine this skin as porous mesh, a translucent web of tissue connecting inner and outer, self and other, sense and world. As you breathe in and out again, allow this sense of skin to dissolve in currents of air passing through you. Sense how open and light you are. Free. All that exists are the soles of your feet, pressing down against the ground, and up against this light. Trust that ground to support the vulnerable expanse of skin. Watch what unfolds within.

Move back and forth between the breaths. What do you discover?

Next week: fire breath