What a Body Knows 2: The pleasures of eating

We are biologically hardwired, aren’t we, to want more food, always more? The failures of our massive efforts in dieting away the pounds or designing an effective drug are proof. Aren’t they? Look again. If anything, the human digestive system is designed to maximize our ability to move, not our ability to take in food.

Think about it. Humans stand upright. As a result of our upright posture, we have a mobility that is rare among animals. We do not hibernate. Our transformation from infant to adult does not involve a cocoon or chrysalis stage. We are constantly moving. We are not the fastest or strongest. We are not the most agile or deft. What characterizes our movement is its novelty: we are constantly learning to make new movements, new patterns of sensing and responding that guide us in thinking, feeling, and acting. As a result of this ability, we have proven ourselves capable of finding food and making ourselves at home in nearly every climate on earth.

At every point, our digestive system enables us in making these movements. Our manner of processing what we consume provides us with a steady stream of energy so that we can keep moving. We do not eat one meal a week and sleep it off like other carnivores. Nor do we spend a third of every day grazing like the large herbivores. Instead we move through recurring cycles of hunger and fullness over a 24-hour period. We stomach small, dense meals, mostly cooked, preferably several a day. These rhythms of digestion allow us time between meals to hunt, gather, and grow food, while still providing us with the steady stream of nourishment we need in order to do so. Even when we are in a position to eat more energy than we are burning, we store it all over the body, in patterns that, until we are extremely obese, maximize our ability to keep moving. We eat to keep moving so that we can eat to keep moving from environment to environment, season to season, continent to continent, meal to meal. And in order to move, we must stop eating.

Further, in making the food-finding movements that our digestive system enables and requires, we have evolved to rely on our sensory awareness as a primary guide. Unlike many of our animal siblings, we can catch and cook, chew and digest almost anything. Our food needs are not determined by instinct or climate. We have to make choices about what to eat, how to acquire it, and when and how to eat it. We have no choice but to choose. While culture and tradition and habit do constrain these choices, the surest guide we ever have is our senses. We are creatures who can and must use all of our senses — taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing — to guide us in identifying, pursuing, and securing what will nourish us and rejecting what will not. The foods we are primed to sense as pleasurable, then, are those that support us in the ongoing project of moving, sensing, and responding to food. Our survival depends upon it.

Gathering the pieces together, this picture is suggestive. The pleasure we derive from food does not come from the quantities of vitamins and minerals, or the salts or sugars present in a chemical substance. The pleasure we seek comes from participating in the process of learning how, when, what, and why to eat so that we can keep moving. The pleasure we seek comes from the experience of finding our way to a sense of enough so that we can stop eating, as we must, and keep moving.

The problem is not that our desires run rampant in the field of abundance; the problem is that we have lost touch with the desires that are and remain our best guide wherever we are. Our dissatisfaction is calling us to tune into our sensory awareness, and to find our way to a sense of enough.

Excerpted from What a Body Knows, chapter 5, "A Sense of Enough"

Can We Trust Desire?

(I was planning to post pictures of spring-coming. It is April! Then, over the weekend, it snowed—a solid six plus inches. White soupy splotches pock the barren ground. Next week!)

The last four posts have unraveled myths of diet culture, revealing how our ideas about the pleasure and value of food, and about how to control our desire for it serve to reinforce a common suspicion of desire. Our desire for food, we learn to believe, is to blame for our issues with bodily health and size. The myths form a carefully woven noose around desire’s neck. We have believed that they are true, and we have made them true by acting as if they were. Desire is a problem.

Nevertheless, we can wake up and note how these myths are not delivering on their promises. We are not happy struggling against our bodies, against our selves (and eventually giving in). We are not finding the pleasure that we seek. We long for a way out.

As the noose loosens, the relief is palpable. For a moment. Then fears those myths have propagated creep up from behind. Now we really will be fat! Desire is to blame and there is nothing we can do! Fantasies of the perfect drug or custom surgery flit through our minds.

The fear must go too. And once the noose loosens, we can breathe it away: we realize that the desire we have been blaming is not what we thought it was. That desire, as we have seen, is not a desire for endless quantities (Mar 4) of cheap food (Mar 11). Nor is our desire for food an entity that exists somehow apart from us that “we” can manipulate via diet plan (Mar 18) or exercise (Mar 25).

Our desire is us. It is a movement that is making us—we are what we eat. Literally. And whatever we desire to eat in a given moment is a result of the movements we have made—the patterns of sensation and response we have created and become—in the past, over time.

When born, we cannot eat without a set of arms to hold us. We cannot take warm pleasure-stirring nutrients into our bodies without also smelling, touching, tasting, hearing, and feeling another person’s body. The body of one we usually come to love. On whom we depend for our very lives. Nourish and nurture are forever entwined.

Every time we sense a desire for food arising in us and every time we respond, we create or reinforce in ourselves a pattern of sensation and response. We remember it. We become it. Over time, we refine our patterns. We not only learn what to eat, we learn what and how to feel when we eat. We learn what it feels like to be nourished.

Feed her one bottle every three hours, no more, no less. Get him on a schedule. Don’t spoil your appetite. Eat everything on your plate. Don’t disappoint your host. I never eat saturated fats. I never eat carbohydrates.

In the process of perfecting and refining our desire for food, the loudest voices are often those coming from those around us—those we love or those we revere; those we idolize or those whose lives we follow. For we, given our mind over body training, are obedient listeners. And as we train ourselves to listen to such authorities, we are cultivating our sensitivity to desire-triggers outside of ourselves.

You are walking down the street. You see a picture of an ice cream cone in a store window. You can smell it, taste it, hear the crunch, and feel the cold melt on your tongue. Your father used to buy you ice cream cones. You and your friend used to share them. You feel lonely now. Suddenly, you have to have one.

Desire for food is not really for food at all. What we want from food is not food, but the experience of being nourished. What we want is the experience of knowing and feeling that we have had enough. That we are enough.

You eat like a pig. She looks like a cow (or an elephant or a hippopotamus). He wolfed down his food. They have no control.

Desire is one moment in complex metabolism carefully calibrated to help us sustain a steady weight, regardless of what we consume on any given day. It is a metabolism designed to make energy accessible to us in a constant stream. We do not eat one meal every three weeks and sleep it off. We do not store up fat reserves during one season and hibernate through the next. We don’t spend a third of our lives grazing and another third chewing cud. We do best with small meals spread through the day. The animal bodies we are are designed to move.

Our desire for food is a desire, first and foremost, to move. It is a desire to stop eating—to reach that point where we can stop eating—and move on in our lives, so that we can find more food, and eat again.

Once we realize that we need not fear our desire for food, then our experience of it can begin to change. We can begin to work with it, to evolve it further, by attending to the sensations of eating pleasure and pain we have learned to ignore and override. We can begin to interpret the signs of our own dissatisfaction as clues guiding us towards the patterns of eating that will deliver the sense of enough we seek.

Any dissatisfaction we feel with our bodies or our eating selves tells us that we are not too far gone. We can bring our senses back to life. We can learn to follow the arc of our eating pleasure to a sense of enough. And we can create and become patterns of sensation and response that will guide us in doing so.

Next week: We find out how.