“I can’t do yoga!” said the voice that clanged in my head. “I need to burn calories!”
There was a time when the voice ruled. I was convinced that unless I did some vigorous aerobic activity—running, biking, swimming, or walking—I was sure to balloon out. I needed to exercise and daily, so that I could eat without worry.
*
It is a familiar line—a causal link drawn between exercise and weight. We hear it and barely blink. It seems so reasonable, the flip side of the diet myth (Mar. 18). If the difference between energy in and energy out determines the heft of our fat stores, then all we need to do is add more exercise to our lives and the pounds we don’t need will disappear. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that we exercise to maintain weight. The American Heart Association and American College of Sports Medicine agree. Nutritionists say so too. Because science says so. Or does it?
Another diet myth is fading. The exercise-equals-weight-loss hypothesis took root in the late 60s, and since that time its veracity has been impossible to prove. (In preceding decades, it was assumed that exercise promotes weight gain or at best, slows the rate of loss.) When the myth hatched, it was based on two studies that have not been replicated. Still, it spread rapidly and for decades it has reigned, despite the lack of clinical evidence. A review of relevant literature in 2000 concluded that the relationship between exercise and weight is “complex.” While exercise may help some who lose weight keep it from coming back as quickly; it helps others who lose weight pack it on again. (See Taubes)
Why the lack of confirming evidence for what seems like common sense? A story line is emerging.
For one, experts say, the vast majority of us don’t exercise enough to make a difference. We overestimate our calorie expenditure—often forgetting to subtract our base metabolic burn off, for example—and then overcompensate in what we eat. We run a quarter mile (expending 25 calories) then “treat” ourselves to a piece of pie (for 400). (See Kolata)
Second, even when we do exercise strenuously, our hunger keeps pace, holding our body weight in place, if not immediately then in the next day. In the case of lean athletes, moreover, it may be that a biological propensity to spend energy propels them into extreme sports in the first place, rather than the reverse.
Thus, just as scientists are discovering that diets don’t work and offering an explanation based on a body’s weight-maintaining powers (Mar 18), so too they are discovering that exercise doesn’t work, and for a similar reason. Our bodily processes for metabolizing food are so crafty and complicated that they defy our efforts to control them, whether we diet, exercise, or both together. Desire is to blame.
Are we doomed to a fruitless struggle with a voracious desire and an expanding waistline? Is there no way to guarantee that we can and will have the bodies we want?
The questions betray the anxiety that our diet culture breeds. We are obsessed with food, with the pleasure we might have or miss, with the shape and size and look of our bodies, and spurred on at every turn by a sensory education that trains us to think and feel and act as if we were minds living in bodies. If our bodies defy control, what will become of us?
When we shift to the perspective of bodily becoming, however, these apparent “failures” appear in a new light: offering proof that our mind over body strategies for navigating our relationship to food are not giving us what we want.
How so? The movements we are making are making us. From this perspective, the apparent resistance of our bodies to diet or exercise is what we are creating. This resistance is not an unfortunate obstacle we encounter on our path to pleasure; it is what our practices are generating in us. We are creating ourselves into people who are addicted to diets, anxious about our fitness, and arduously at war with ourselves in the name of our own well being. The movements we are making as we attempt to reduce our energy intake or increase output are creating us into people who sense and respond to our desires with suspicion and dread—as if they were alien creatures, rather than who we are. We learn to believe that we can and should hold this stance over and against our desires for food, and feel guilty when we cannot. Yet doing so is like trying to hold our breath. If we go too long, we black out. Our bodies take over and we breathe—or eat—again.
The problem, then, is not that our bodies lie beyond our control. The problem is that we are creating a relationship with ourselves in which our bodies feel like they are out of control. We act as if they are, failing to cultivate their potential to guide us in eating in ways that will nourish our health and well being.
From the perspective of bodily becoming, our desires for food are us. They are who we are. And how we sense and respond to these desires, whether we move with or against them, creates us as the bodily selves we are.
We are born needing to eat, but not knowing how. The genetic potential is there, but not its expression. We know enough to suck and swallow, but not much more. Our sensations of pleasure and pain guide us in popping in and spitting out. Over time, as we move towards what gives us the pleasure of being nourished and away from what doesn’t, we create and become the patterns of sensation and response that focus and refine what it is we want. We not only learn what to desire, we also learn how to sense and respond to our desire when it wells in us.
It is this learning process that scientific methods have yet to map or measure. It is this learning process that has proven exceedingly vulnerable to the myths of our desire-denying diet culture. And it is this learning process that we can choose to participate in consciously by cultivating our sensory awareness. As we do, we can shift our experience of our desire for food, strengthen its powers of discernment, and learn to follow the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough.
*
It took a while, but the lived experience of practicing yoga finally won out. Yoga, I realized, doesn’t just exercise my muscles. Its value is much greater. Moving in and out of the yoga postures exercises a sense of myself that counters my mind over body training—and the voice that screams "burn calories!" My movement is making me (Feb. 13).
My experience of my desire for food shifts. Suddenly it is no longer a question of struggling to control calories in and out. It is a question of learning to honor and trust the rhythms of my hunger, the subtleties in my experiences of eating. Then I know too what good any "exercise" can be: an opportunity to move, to breathe, to open our senses, and to drop in to what our bodies know about how, when, and what to eat. This wisdom is the best resource we have in finding the satisfaction we seek.
Next week: what we desire from food, and why we can and should develop our capacity to trust it.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Myth 3: Diets (Don't) Work
In my first food post (Feb 26) I shared the latest scientific consensus that diets don’t work—that is, diet plans have not been proven a sure path to substantial, permanent weight loss.
Yet if we are to understand our options, we need to go further in figuring out why diets don’t work, or, in what sense that they do. For we keep dieting (or obsessing about why we aren’t), even when the small print of every before and after diet ad confirms: “Results Not Typical.” Why?
The logic of a diet seems difficult to assail. It is based on science, the law of conservation of energy, applied to the body as machine. A body takes in energy, a body expends energy, and the difference is stored as fat. All we need to do, it follows, is: 1) reduce energy intake, 2) for a limited amount of time, 3) during which the body will drop its extra stores. We assume that we must suffer (See Myth 1: Food Equals Pleasure), but only temporarily, as our bodies undergo a minor correction and get rid of what we aren’t using.
In response, a diet business booms. Diet plans, jumping into a glutted market, make a splash by promising that their strategies for reducing food intake will best soften the anticipated pinch of saying “no” to our desires.
So we learn to eat what we want (as long as we count calories); or eat as much of these foods as we want (as long as we avoid carbohydrates or fats, monitor glycemic indices, do so at these intervals); or eat normally at one meal (as long as we replace the others with bars, shakes, or bowls of cereal). We join support groups, keep food journals, and enlist the peer-pressure of family and friends. As a familiar cereal box says: It’s just this easy.
But it isn’t. Why not?
Look through the perspective of bodily becoming laid out in this blog. Our bodies are not machines. Food is not fuel. Our bodies are movement—the movement of creating and becoming the patterns of sensation and response that we are. And our desire for food is one moment of this movement. It is not something “we” can control at will. Rather, it is a capacity for discernment—a capacity for feeling pleasure—whose potential for guiding us to our maximal health we can learn to unfold. Or not.
When we go on a diet, the “not” rules. We practice denying our desire for food as the condition for sticking to the diet and succeeding. We practice turning to experts and authorities to tell us what to eat and how we should look. We practice getting pleasure from the pain we are causing ourselves. And with every pound we lose, we convince ourselves that Descartes was right (Jan 8)—I am in control of my body. My mind does know better than my animal-object-container-body about what is good for me.
When the diet ends, pounds return. Why? Because we have not learned how to find, trust, and move with the wisdom in our own desire for food. We can only imagine “it” as a “force” acting against our selves that we control (while on a diet) or not (now that the diet is over). Repress or indulge. That is all we know. And we simply cannot sustain a battle against ourselves forever. In most cases, our success weakens our determination—I deserve a reward.
Without an internal sense of what, when, and why to eat, we easily fall prey to the messages bombarding us. We develop patterns of sensing and responding to food that are determined by what advertisers, food companies, grocery stores, and consumer culture teach us that we want: MORE. More sugar. More salt. More pleasure.
Diets don’t work because their mind over body approach to eating prevents us from cultivating a sensory awareness of the rhythms and nuances in our desire for food. Diets thus reinforce the problem. They address the symptoms without touching the cause.
In this sense, diets are highly effective—though not in helping us lose weight. They work to sell more diets. They work to addict us to an illusory rush of self control that we can manage for a while. They work to train our attention away from ourselves so that we function as good consumers, buying (and eating) more than we want or need.
The movements we are making are always making us. Our persistent dissatisfaction with diets, food, and our bodies is letting us know that there is a deeper pleasure possible.
It is a pleasure to be found when we learn to tune into what it is we really want from food. We want more than cheap and plentiful calories. We want an experience of being nourished. We want an experience of following the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough.
A “diet” will only help us if it guides us in finding this wisdom in our desire for food.
Reflection:
Ever been on a diet? Think back to how it felt. Did you enjoy the feeling of resisting your desire for food? Many people do. It gives them a sense of power—a feeling that they can get what they want out of life.
As the diet progressed, how did that feeling evolve? How did your experience of your desire for food evolve? What were you creating in yourself? Were you creating a desire to honor your own sensations of eating for life—or a desire to eat what you are missing as soon as the diet ended?
Next week:
I take on the myth that complements the diet plan: instead of reducing intake, increase energy expenditure. Exercise to lose weight. The following week, I address the question of our desire for food itself. Can we really trust it?
Yet if we are to understand our options, we need to go further in figuring out why diets don’t work, or, in what sense that they do. For we keep dieting (or obsessing about why we aren’t), even when the small print of every before and after diet ad confirms: “Results Not Typical.” Why?
The logic of a diet seems difficult to assail. It is based on science, the law of conservation of energy, applied to the body as machine. A body takes in energy, a body expends energy, and the difference is stored as fat. All we need to do, it follows, is: 1) reduce energy intake, 2) for a limited amount of time, 3) during which the body will drop its extra stores. We assume that we must suffer (See Myth 1: Food Equals Pleasure), but only temporarily, as our bodies undergo a minor correction and get rid of what we aren’t using.
In response, a diet business booms. Diet plans, jumping into a glutted market, make a splash by promising that their strategies for reducing food intake will best soften the anticipated pinch of saying “no” to our desires.
So we learn to eat what we want (as long as we count calories); or eat as much of these foods as we want (as long as we avoid carbohydrates or fats, monitor glycemic indices, do so at these intervals); or eat normally at one meal (as long as we replace the others with bars, shakes, or bowls of cereal). We join support groups, keep food journals, and enlist the peer-pressure of family and friends. As a familiar cereal box says: It’s just this easy.
But it isn’t. Why not?
Look through the perspective of bodily becoming laid out in this blog. Our bodies are not machines. Food is not fuel. Our bodies are movement—the movement of creating and becoming the patterns of sensation and response that we are. And our desire for food is one moment of this movement. It is not something “we” can control at will. Rather, it is a capacity for discernment—a capacity for feeling pleasure—whose potential for guiding us to our maximal health we can learn to unfold. Or not.
When we go on a diet, the “not” rules. We practice denying our desire for food as the condition for sticking to the diet and succeeding. We practice turning to experts and authorities to tell us what to eat and how we should look. We practice getting pleasure from the pain we are causing ourselves. And with every pound we lose, we convince ourselves that Descartes was right (Jan 8)—I am in control of my body. My mind does know better than my animal-object-container-body about what is good for me.
When the diet ends, pounds return. Why? Because we have not learned how to find, trust, and move with the wisdom in our own desire for food. We can only imagine “it” as a “force” acting against our selves that we control (while on a diet) or not (now that the diet is over). Repress or indulge. That is all we know. And we simply cannot sustain a battle against ourselves forever. In most cases, our success weakens our determination—I deserve a reward.
Without an internal sense of what, when, and why to eat, we easily fall prey to the messages bombarding us. We develop patterns of sensing and responding to food that are determined by what advertisers, food companies, grocery stores, and consumer culture teach us that we want: MORE. More sugar. More salt. More pleasure.
Diets don’t work because their mind over body approach to eating prevents us from cultivating a sensory awareness of the rhythms and nuances in our desire for food. Diets thus reinforce the problem. They address the symptoms without touching the cause.
In this sense, diets are highly effective—though not in helping us lose weight. They work to sell more diets. They work to addict us to an illusory rush of self control that we can manage for a while. They work to train our attention away from ourselves so that we function as good consumers, buying (and eating) more than we want or need.
The movements we are making are always making us. Our persistent dissatisfaction with diets, food, and our bodies is letting us know that there is a deeper pleasure possible.
It is a pleasure to be found when we learn to tune into what it is we really want from food. We want more than cheap and plentiful calories. We want an experience of being nourished. We want an experience of following the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough.
A “diet” will only help us if it guides us in finding this wisdom in our desire for food.
Reflection:
Ever been on a diet? Think back to how it felt. Did you enjoy the feeling of resisting your desire for food? Many people do. It gives them a sense of power—a feeling that they can get what they want out of life.
As the diet progressed, how did that feeling evolve? How did your experience of your desire for food evolve? What were you creating in yourself? Were you creating a desire to honor your own sensations of eating for life—or a desire to eat what you are missing as soon as the diet ended?
Next week:
I take on the myth that complements the diet plan: instead of reducing intake, increase energy expenditure. Exercise to lose weight. The following week, I address the question of our desire for food itself. Can we really trust it?
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Myth 2: Food is Cheap
I am saving diet myths until next week. Something else has come up. Early this morning our cow, Daisy Mae, had her first calf. It occurs to me. We have such easy access to food in our culture. We walk through aisles stocked to overflowing with boxes, packages, and bags, and end our journey with a swipe of a plastic card, not knowing, really, where our food comes from, what goes into its making, or what it costs.
Yet if it is true that food plus desire equals the pleasure of enough, then part of what yields pleasure is the sense of value. We desire what we value. We value what we desire. Even when we get the thrill of a deal it is because we get more than we paid for. And when we convince ourselves that food is cheap, easily available, and made for us, we rob ourselves of potential pleasure—the pleasure of desiring something of value.
*
My eyes open suddenly. I am very awake. The time is 1 AM, sooner that I was planning the first of my nightly visits to our pregnant cow, Daisy. I have been doing this for a week. Nothing has been happening. I checked on her 4 hours earlier. Nothing was happening then either. Even so, I know I have to go.
I pile on layers, grab a flashlight, and leave my four sleeping children to trudge through half-frozen mud to the barn. As the beam crosses through the darkness, I catch my breath—three faces, six eyes, the calf is here! I creep closer, touch its wet and chilly fur, and run back to the house to wake the kids. My partner Geoff left for Germany hours before and will not be back for a week.
The two oldest wake quickly. Jordan and Jessica, 12 and 10, dress and begin filling a large bucket of warm water for Daisy to drink. The two youngest, Kyra and Kai, 6 and 2, are not amused at being called to consciousness in the middle of a dark and frigid night. I coo and cajole them into their coats, send Jordan and Jessica out to dry the calf, and wait for the rest of the water to fill. If that calf is wet for too long, it doesn’t stand a chance in this cold. It is born, like all calves, with no immunities of its own. It needs its mother’s milk, and this calf has not had any yet. How long has it been there?
I scoop Kai in one arm and haul the bucket out the door with the other. Kyra reluctantly carries the flashlight and we plod our way back to the barn. Jordan and Jessica are hovering, wiping, drying. What is it? Bull or heifer? Do you know? Not yet.
I give the water to Daisy and beckon Jordan. Milking Daisy is a two person job. One holds the bucket and pulls on one teat. The other pulls on two teats, rotating to the third. As we get into a rhythm, Daisy lurches her knee forward, nearly knocking over the bucket. Jordan whisks it away, and sets it back in place. It is dark. There is no light in the barn. Kai is crying in loud and persistent protest against this bad dream. Daisy kicks over the dim bead of our battery powered lamp. Flashlight beams bounce across the hay.
With each pull and squeeze on the teat, a thin stream of milk shoots into the pail, sounding out with a firm zing. A dash of white, an arrow's shaft, and then another. Slowly the level in the bucket rises. Kai is crying, I pull him into my lap, still crouching in front of the cow, calming Kai, milking the cow. One inch, two inches. Okay enough to begin feeding the calf. Daisy is getting restless.
I shift Kai to my side, and he starts crying again. He never liked the dark. I pour the milk from the bucket into the calf bottle. This baby, that baby. Whose baby? I hand the bottle to Jordan and he begins to feed the calf. I check. It is a heifer. I feel the button nipples on her soft belly. I am so relieved. A bull would be “worth” nothing. It would be unlikely that we could keep him.
The calf is still shivering, even with a belly full of warm milk. I keep drying, rubbing, turning to hug Kai. Kyra is crying from the corner. She is cold and wants to go inside. I reach for the sweater we have collected for the calf and put it over the calf’s head. The ends of her long legs keep bending one way or another, slipping every which way but through the arm holes. Finally I get them through. She tries to stand and trips, tying her sleeves in knots. I try to roll them up, one is easy, the other trapped under her belly. I can’t move her.
Kyra’s protests ring in my ears. I turn to Jordan and Jessica and offer to go get more warm water for Daisy, so we can milk her some more. I take Kyra and Kai into the house. Kyra has only pajamas on her legs. We locate her snow pants. Kai starts undressing. No sweetie! We have to go back out!
We go back out, back to the barn, water swishing in the bucket, Kai sinking on my hip, Kyra, warmer. The kids are with the calf, Daisy is waiting. We place the bucket of water before her, and begin our double-team pull and squeeze. This is where all of our milk comes from I think. We make these creatures in to milk machines so that we can be life long nursers.
The bucket begins to fill again. Daisy’s hoof moves too quickly, the bucket tips and we lose some precious colostrum. We begin again. The level slinks higher, clinging to the side of the pail. We give the calf another quart.
It is becoming clear. It is too cold in here for the calf. For any of us. What are we going to do? We have to take her inside the house. But how?
I bend down to pick her up. My arms can’t reach around her. I stumble forward then stand awkwardly. Maybe. Kai wants me to carry him. I can’t carry both. Jordan will have to carry you, Kai. He cries. I put him down and try to pick up the calf again. I am not going to make it to the house. We have to find another way. What about a wheel barrow? Great idea. Jordan wheels it to the fence. I lift the calf and heave her 25 feet to the fence. I barely get her over. Kai is by my side. Jessica and Kyra are trying to console him.
The calf drops into the wheel barrow and begins to scramble. We hold it down. I get behind the handles and start to push. The calf launches herself into the air and the wheel barrow tumbles into the mud. We try again. Jordan holds her legs. I hold her legs and he pushes. We make it to the house. Jordan helps me carry her up the stairs, into the laundry room. She tries to stand and her soft hooves splay left and right on the slippery wooden floor. More blankets, A rug.
We get her in, settle her down. She is still shivering. I help Kyra and Kai get undressed. They are awake now, and warm, and there is nothing more wonderful than the warm fuzzy creature before them. We surround her, petting her, warming her, comforting her, comforting ourselves. It is a miracle moment. All smiles.
I think of Daisy in the barn. Sorry Daisy. But this is your baby’s only chance. Hang in there.
So what is a glass of milk worth? That slab of cheese? That scoop of ice cream?
We are related by what we eat to all that is.
Action:
Here is one way to begin enhancing your sensory awareness of this fact, and the wisdom in your desires. It was described in the entries "Breathing to Move"--the cycle of breaths. It is an 8 minute audio version, accompanied by the music of Geoffrey Gee playing his virtual instrument, Plectrum.
Enjoy!
Click here: Cycle of breaths
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Myth 1: Food Equals Pleasure
There is no question that we can and do get pleasure from eating. We cannot eat without sensing, and our senses register pleasure in varying degrees. So it seems obvious, yes, food equals pleasure. We also believe, by extension, that more food equals more pleasure; and that, if we want to maintain a healthy body we must give up some of that pleasure for what our minds know is best. Our desire for food, we imagine, is a desire that always wants more.
There is some truth to this equation of food with pleasure, but not much. Some crucial variables are missing.
Scene 1. Imagine a room stuffed full with all the food you will eat over the course of your lifetime. Imagine gallons of your favorite ice cream; slabs of cheese; bags of pasta, fruit, and nuts ; mounds of cookies, crackers, chips, and candybars.
Now, imagine eating all of that food.
After an initial burst of delight, the thought is overwhelming. Pondered long enough, it may make you feel rather queasy. How could I possibly stomach all that?
This reaction is telling: pleasure we have in eating does not come from the food itself—not from the substance, its quality or quantity. Rather, the pleasure comes from a relationship to that substance that allows us to enjoy it and experience it as pleasurable. And in this case, what allows us to enjoy it is the rhythms of our lives day in and day out over long stretches of time. What allows us to enjoy food is not having it all at once.
Scene 2. A friend offers you a piece of chocolate cake. It looks delicious. Yet you are ill with fever and chills. Or perhaps you are uncomfortably full. Or you are angry with the friend and can’t pretend you are not. Or you are mourning the loss of something dear to you. Will the cake give you pleasure? Probably not.
Here again, the reaction is telling: it is not the sheer fact of food and ever more of it that gives us pleasure. In this case, what allows us to enjoy food is the health and well being—the sensory presence—that enables us to sense and receive it.
There is more. Not only is our pleasure from food dependent upon our relationship to it, that pleasure is more complex than our mind over body training leads us to believe.
Scene 3. Think back to advertisements you have seen for foods. You see a picture of a slender someone, lifting something delicious into his or her mouth—a piece of chocolate, a creamy drink—and basking in a sunlit smile. Invariably, the ad or image promises you pleasure. Put this in your mouth and you will be happy!
Is this pleasure? Most of the eating pleasure advertised to us is all about the mouth. It is all about taste. It is almost as if the mouth is the goal, the endpoint where the food stops. Is that all there is?
If you are someone trying to sell food, it makes sense to focus on the pleasure of the mouth. It if is all about taste, there is never a reason to stop, never a body or a self to consider. Only a mouth whose potential for pleasure is unlimited.
Given this logic, we find cases in our society where food companies make, promote, and market chips that taste good, while hoping and believing that you simply won’t pay attention to the burn, the gas, or the runs that occur further down the pike. The mouth is all that counts.
Yet our mouths are attached to bodies. They are gateways, not endpoints, and our taste buds are designed to help sense and censor what should and shouldn’t enter. It matters. Once it is in, we are generally stuck with it for a while. But when we eat food that tickles our taste buds so heartily that we cannot notice anything else, we lose the ability to want a wider, deeper, and longer-lived pleasure.
When we learn to equate food with pleasure, then, we not only drastically narrow the range of pleasure we expect, we prime ourselves to interpret every sense of discomfort as a cue to put something into our mouths. We make ourselves into people who consciously and unconsciously override the rhythms of our own desire. Result: a national oral fixation.
This scene, then, reveals a third important point about pleasure. Not only is our desire for it rhythmic and relational, our desire is also malleable. Teachable. Our desire for food evolves constantly over time in response to the images, experiences, and foods we consume. We have to learn what to eat. And this very same trait that has enabled human beings to adapt so readily to vastly different climates and diets renders us putty in the hands of advertisers who play a one note song about the pleasures of taste.
We can do otherwise. My movements are making me. We can cultivate a sensory awareness of our desire for food, using the cycle of breaths (or similar practices) to help us tune in to a fuller experience of eating. As we do, our desire for food aligns more and more with what will give us pleasure—not just mouthfuls of pleasure, but days and weeks and years of pleasure. The pleasure of a living a rhythmic, life-enabling relationship with food.
There is wisdom in our desire for food, a wisdom impelling us along an arc of pleasure to a sense of enough.
It is a different equation to try out and explore: food plus a tuned desire equals the pleasure of enough.
First however, we have a few more myths to debunk.
Next week: Diets don’t work—Or do they?
There is some truth to this equation of food with pleasure, but not much. Some crucial variables are missing.
Scene 1. Imagine a room stuffed full with all the food you will eat over the course of your lifetime. Imagine gallons of your favorite ice cream; slabs of cheese; bags of pasta, fruit, and nuts ; mounds of cookies, crackers, chips, and candybars.
Now, imagine eating all of that food.
After an initial burst of delight, the thought is overwhelming. Pondered long enough, it may make you feel rather queasy. How could I possibly stomach all that?
This reaction is telling: pleasure we have in eating does not come from the food itself—not from the substance, its quality or quantity. Rather, the pleasure comes from a relationship to that substance that allows us to enjoy it and experience it as pleasurable. And in this case, what allows us to enjoy it is the rhythms of our lives day in and day out over long stretches of time. What allows us to enjoy food is not having it all at once.
Scene 2. A friend offers you a piece of chocolate cake. It looks delicious. Yet you are ill with fever and chills. Or perhaps you are uncomfortably full. Or you are angry with the friend and can’t pretend you are not. Or you are mourning the loss of something dear to you. Will the cake give you pleasure? Probably not.
Here again, the reaction is telling: it is not the sheer fact of food and ever more of it that gives us pleasure. In this case, what allows us to enjoy food is the health and well being—the sensory presence—that enables us to sense and receive it.
There is more. Not only is our pleasure from food dependent upon our relationship to it, that pleasure is more complex than our mind over body training leads us to believe.
Scene 3. Think back to advertisements you have seen for foods. You see a picture of a slender someone, lifting something delicious into his or her mouth—a piece of chocolate, a creamy drink—and basking in a sunlit smile. Invariably, the ad or image promises you pleasure. Put this in your mouth and you will be happy!
Is this pleasure? Most of the eating pleasure advertised to us is all about the mouth. It is all about taste. It is almost as if the mouth is the goal, the endpoint where the food stops. Is that all there is?
If you are someone trying to sell food, it makes sense to focus on the pleasure of the mouth. It if is all about taste, there is never a reason to stop, never a body or a self to consider. Only a mouth whose potential for pleasure is unlimited.
Given this logic, we find cases in our society where food companies make, promote, and market chips that taste good, while hoping and believing that you simply won’t pay attention to the burn, the gas, or the runs that occur further down the pike. The mouth is all that counts.
Yet our mouths are attached to bodies. They are gateways, not endpoints, and our taste buds are designed to help sense and censor what should and shouldn’t enter. It matters. Once it is in, we are generally stuck with it for a while. But when we eat food that tickles our taste buds so heartily that we cannot notice anything else, we lose the ability to want a wider, deeper, and longer-lived pleasure.
When we learn to equate food with pleasure, then, we not only drastically narrow the range of pleasure we expect, we prime ourselves to interpret every sense of discomfort as a cue to put something into our mouths. We make ourselves into people who consciously and unconsciously override the rhythms of our own desire. Result: a national oral fixation.
This scene, then, reveals a third important point about pleasure. Not only is our desire for it rhythmic and relational, our desire is also malleable. Teachable. Our desire for food evolves constantly over time in response to the images, experiences, and foods we consume. We have to learn what to eat. And this very same trait that has enabled human beings to adapt so readily to vastly different climates and diets renders us putty in the hands of advertisers who play a one note song about the pleasures of taste.
We can do otherwise. My movements are making me. We can cultivate a sensory awareness of our desire for food, using the cycle of breaths (or similar practices) to help us tune in to a fuller experience of eating. As we do, our desire for food aligns more and more with what will give us pleasure—not just mouthfuls of pleasure, but days and weeks and years of pleasure. The pleasure of a living a rhythmic, life-enabling relationship with food.
There is wisdom in our desire for food, a wisdom impelling us along an arc of pleasure to a sense of enough.
It is a different equation to try out and explore: food plus a tuned desire equals the pleasure of enough.
First however, we have a few more myths to debunk.
Next week: Diets don’t work—Or do they?
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