Wanting More

Change your life! Ten steps, eight weeks, five principles to a new lighter, thinner, happier, more successful You! We hear such voices all the time, urging us to exert a mind-over-body self-control as our path to getting what we want. We traffic in illusions. Our will power is limited in its power and reach, especially when it comes to food, eating, and our bodily health. Pitted against ourselves, we never win.

Then again, even if we can’t impose change on ourselves for long, it is also true that who we are is always changing. With every bodily movement we make we become someone new. We are constantly creating and becoming ourselves. Knowing this, we know what we can do: we can learn to participate in the changes that are already happening in us. We can learn to align our intentions with the currents of growing and healing alive in us. And for this, we glean vital cues from the sensations of frustration and longing, irritation and despair coursing through us: our pain is a potential for pleasure we have yet to unfold (Jan 8).

We want more from food. More pleasure, more health, more well-being. We want the experience of being nourished—of nurturing ourselves. And that desire for more is guiding us to move in ways that will make it so. We want change, and we will have it—not by inducing a temporary deprivation intended to correct our caloric stores—but by cultivating a sensory awareness of our own desire for more.



I have been reading a terrific book, Spark, about how exercise (of the complexly-patterned aerobic kind) builds better brains. Across the board the results are clear: more new neurons, more connective proteins, more possible patterns for neuronal organization. As the author claims, exercise creates an internal environment “in which the brain is ready, willing, and able to learn” (10). He goes on to argue what I also believe: humans have evolved to move. We humans must move in order to realize our cognitive potential.

Moving our bodies, however, can do more than boost our braininess. When we breathe to move and move to breathe, we open a space inside ourselves for feeling what we are feeling. We notice the sensations of our bodily becoming, and the frustrated, fragmented and flailing shapes of our desire. Moving opens new perspectives on these desires. We begin to discern their wisdom.

Specifically, moving our bodies can help us learn to find wisdom in our desire for food: we can learn to follow the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough. A sense of enough is that felt sense that frees us to stop eating and move (Apr 1). It is not a chemical switch acting on its own; nor a lever we can shift at will. It cannot be determined abstractly or in advance in terms of calories or grams. Our sense of enough is rather a capacity for discernment that develops in us over time. It is a capacity that grows stronger and more precise as we attend to the arcs of our pleasure, or more rigid and inert as we practice overriding them. It is what lets us know that we have had the experience of being nourished that ultimately satisfies. For what pleases changes in response to what we are doing and feeling. As we begin to pay attention, we find that our desires evolve: we create and become patterns of sensation and response that align more and more with the pleasure we are capable of experiencing.




Eating dazzles our senses. All of them. We see our food, its shape, texture, color. The air pockets opening in bread, the drizzling of frosting on a bun, the red and white of a bitten apple. We hear our food. It crunches and crumbles, bubbles and drips; it resists the knife, squeezes against the edge of a fork, or eludes the scraping spoon. We feel our food with our fingers, our lips, our tongue, the insides of our mouth, our esophagus, our stomach. It is impossible to eat without seeing, hearing, and touching, even when thickly congested to the point where we cannot smell or taste.

So too the sensory experience of eating does not stop with the usual five. There is a sense of movement at work. I stretch my arm and reach for food. My fingers grasp a morsel, close around it, and draw it near. My hands pry meat from the bone, skin from a grape, seeds from an orange. A fist lifts the cone of ice cream to my lips. My mouth opens and shuts to cut and bite, tear and grind. Jaws lift and lower. I swallow mush, moving the pressure through a channel in my chest, to a quiet thud in my belly.

There is also a sense of time. A bite that pleases in one moment does not give the same sensation in the next. Our pleasure oscillates between eating and not eating, sitting and moving, forming arcs in our experience. I anticipate and await; I replay and remember, feeling the spread of nourishment through my cells. I beat pathways to my earliest movements of surrender in the arms of those who fed me. It is only human.
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When we move, we breathe. When we breathe, we open our senses. When our senses open, we register impressions more acutely and notice more of our bodily selves. When our bodily selves appear, our experience shifts and we sense how our bodily movement is making us. When our experience shifts, so does our sense of eating; we sense how eating foods affects not just our noses and tongues, but the whole spectrum of our bodily becoming. When we respond by moving with this sensory knowledge, our capacity for discerning what will nourish us best grows. Our pleasure grows too. We know we are and have enough. 
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What is your sensory experience of eating?

What foods give you the most pleasure? Why?

What qualities do they have? Are they heavy or light, noisy or quiet, safe or risky, settling or quickening? Are they creamy or juicy, chewy or dry? Do they stick to the roof of your mouth, or land softly in your belly? What color are they? What consistency? Do they have a strong smell, a loud crunch, or a mouth-filling resilience?

What makes the food you most like to eat good for you?

Next Week: using the cycle of breaths to arrive at a sense of enough