It's Not (Just) About Food

I just read a book by a colleague of mine, Michelle Lelwica. Her book, Religion of Thinness, is brimming with insights on the sources and supports of eating disorders, including one I want to highlight here.

You can’t (just) think your way out of an eating disorder.

Lelwica explains why. By using categories drawn from the study of religion (myth, icon, ritual, morality, community, and salvation), she is able to document a set of phenomena in contemporary culture that function as a self-reinforcing system, what she calls a “religion.” People with eating disorders believe that by engaging in rituals of food manipulation (whether dieting, binging, purging, obsessing, calorie counting, or some combination of all), they will find the happiness and acceptance they desire.

The system works because the practices have real physiological effects that provide those who perform them with immediate feedback and concrete measures of success. People lose (or gain) weight; experience all manner of chemical rushes, sugars to endorphins, and in the process, cultivate a sensory awareness of these effects as proof that they are OK. The effects of the practices make the beliefs seem true.

Moreover, this net of beliefs and practices is not only self-reinforcing, but as Lelwica suggests, the needs it serves are real. Her discussion about what human “spirits” need resonates with what I describe in What a Body Knows as a “desire for spirit”: humans desire a sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that allows them to affirm their lives as worth living.

Manipulating food is one way to pursue the sense of satisfaction, and it is particularly powerful because it enlists another primal desire—a desire for an experience of nourishing ourselves. As I discuss in WBK, nourish and nurture are forever entwined. Eating disorders extend a mind-over-body diet mentality to life as a whole: if I were thin, if I could attain perfect control of my body, I could get the life I want.

For these reasons, then, you can’t think your way out of an eating disorder. It is not enough to develop a critical immunity to cultural images of thinness. It is not enough to modify behaviors. Nor is it enough to deal with whatever fear, pain, and stress might prompt you to buy into the “religion of thinness.” While all of these interventions are helpful to some extent, none work at the level at which an eating disorder functions as a(n unhealthy) religion. Its patterns of belief and practice, icons and values hook into a set of basic physical and emotional needs and provide tangible, if deadly, life-depleting results.

Healing from an eating disorder requires that you lose your religion. Losing your religion means finding a new one.

The path to doing so is challenging, for it requires shifting your most basic experience of being in the world at the level where you sense and respond to your own bodily self as well as the bodily selves of others; and from this shifted place, embracing or creating the beliefs, images, practices, values, and human communities that will support you in that care-full attention to your bodily self. It’s risky. Scary. The results aren’t guaranteed.

So how do you do it?
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Leif, 8 months yesterday, is standing. For the past month he has been pulling and pushing himself up onto his tiny feet at every turn and resting there for ten or twenty seconds at a time. His smile curls his cheeks into ruddy mounds; he waves his hands joyfully. Yet he has absolutely no interest in moving his feet. He will reach forward to the floor, sit backward on his rear, and even twist sideways to land on his hands, but his feet, rooted to the earth, won’t budge. It’s as if he is living up to his name, and trying to be a tree.

He reminds me: if you want to walk, you have to be willing to fall. Every time you take a step, for a fraction of an instant, you are aloft and moving through space. In that moment you must trust that the ground is going to be there for you, that your spine will connect to it through your legs, and that your center will hold you up.

How do we ever venture to take such a risk? There comes a moment when we are able to feel a pulse of energy that rises in ourselves and takes shape in our muscles as a desire to move. There comes a moment when we are willing to trust our bodily selves and allow new patterns of sensing and responding to walk us into a new world--a world of walking and walkers.
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In counseling her readers to lose the religion of thinness, Lelwica identifies alternative resources across a range of religious traditions, and guides readers through specific practices of mindfulness for heightening awareness of their sensations, and promoting inner peace.

All good. I would add as well that we need to engage in bodily practices that help us cultivate a sensory awareness of the movement that is making us. We need to remember what it takes to walk.

Sometimes practices of sitting and stillness can serve to reinforce the sensory education we receive in perceiving our bodies as material objects, there for us to control. To shift this experience at its root, we need practices that provide us with an experience of our bodily selves as something other than the mind over body self that the religion of thinness itself exemplifies. We need practices that help us learn how to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom of our own bodily selves—such as those I described in my last entry.

Such movement practices yield a network of energizing, vitalizing pleasures that are capable of holding their own against the immediacy of eating practices. They put us back into our bodily selves, so we are more able to feel and follow the arc of our eating pleasure. They provide us with a lived experience of discerning, trusting, and moving with impulses that arise in us. They thus provide us with an experiential ground that can support a matrix of beliefs, icons, and values that affirm this rhythm of bodily becoming.

As I explore in WBK, humans look to religion for the opportunity to exercise their ability to name and make real the world in which they want to live. It is by participating consciously in this process that we find the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging we need in order to affirm our lives as worthwhile. It is not so much about identifying the right belief or the right practice or the right vision of life as much as it is about the willingness to take the risk of finding ways of being that support us in becoming who we are and unfolding what we have to give. It's not just about food.

We can learn to launch ourselves forward into space, willing and able to inhabit space, take up space, and move through it, because we are alive. Step by step, we walk into a new world.

See my 5-star amazon review of Religion of Thinness!

Who’s In Charge of Me: You or Me?

“What does everyone want for lunch?” I turn to my kids one by one, making sure to ask Kai last. Kai is four. We all joke that his middle name is “I want what you’re having.”

If Jordan is having pasta, Jessica a grilled cheese, and Kyra oatmeal, Kai will want some of each. All together. Sometimes mixed. If there are five cereal boxes in the cabinet, he will want some of each, in the same bowl. If there are four cartons of ice cream in the freezer (our record is eight), he will want some of each. And if you refuse, you will regret it. It takes longer to quiet his response than to honor his obviously reasonable request.

Options on the table, I focus on Kai: “OK Kai, what will it be?”
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There is much discussion these days about social influences on human behavior. Spurred by the publication of the book Connected, we are being asked to consider whether happiness is contagious and whether our friends make us fat (as in this NYTimes Magazine article). Books on the food industry by David Kessler, Michael Pollan, and others are teaching us how food is manufactured (with high levels of salt, sugar, and saturated fats), marketed (as the ultimate pleasure), and sold (in packages with promises placed at eye level) in ways that cause us to buy and eat more than we should of foods we think we want that are not good for us.

The message reverberates: you are being deceived, manipulated, or otherwise adversely influenced by others.

We greet the words with a measure of relief. It is not just me. For too long we have been led to believe that whatever is wrong is our individual fault. If I am fat, I should eat less. If my relationships don’t last, I should commit more. If I am depressed, I should pull myself up and decide to be happy. Yet, as the record reveals, in all of these cases will power doesn’t seem to work.

Now, however, given the new evidence, we can blame someone else. Perhaps more to the point, we can now turn to someone else to help us achieve the results we want. So we rely on the city council to ban soda machines from schools, or a pharmaceutical company to pop us a mood-altering pill. Someone else will take care of me.

Is it true?

No, but the answer is not to swing back to blame the individual either. For these strategies for curing a problem—whether targeting will power or external influences—are flip sides of the same coin. Both perpetuate the same way of thinking about our human selves that lies at the roots of the problems themselves.

How so? Both approaches assume that our minds—our thinking, judging, executive selves—are the strongest resource we have for getting what we want. Both assume that our minds are in charge, or at least should be. Both assume that our minds work by exercising a power over our bodies, mastering or controlling our desires for food, for sex, or for happiness. If our individual mind is not up to the task, then we can rely on a collective mind to limit our choices.

Whether we place our faith in the individual mind or the collective mind, the logic is the same: mind over body. Yet this logic itself is part of the problem. We have learned to think and feel and act as if we were minds living over and against bodies. In the process, we have learned to ignore what our bodies know. We have cut ourselves off from the sources of wisdom in our desires--wisdom capable of guiding us to make decisions that will enable our health and well being.
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Kai looks at me. He pauses, feeling my question hanging in the air. He looks around at his siblings and back at me. “I want a grilled cheese with tomato.”

“Please,” I reply.

“Please,” he repeats. I smile. No one else asked for a grilled cheese with tomato. Kai is finally making his own request. He is learning to discern for himself what he wants: he remembers having it on a day when Geoff had one too. Now the desire is his.

I start making the sandwich and decide to make half. Even though he was quite clear in his request, it is likely that he will begin to eat the sandwich and then see something around him that he wants even more. I will have to remind him that this is what he wanted; and he will reply, "But Mommy, it isn’t what I want!"
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Kai is teaching me about our desires—about how malleable, teachable, and ultimately creative they are. For the fact that we can be and are influenced by what surrounds us—however frustrating it might be for a meal maker—is precisely what enables us as individuals to discover and become our singular selves.

We are connected, and we are singular. We are singular because we are connected. For what defines our singularity is the unique mesh of bodily relationships we are and create with the people, places, and things that are supporting us in becoming who we are.

How then are we to find our way?

It is not by blaming ourselves, nor blaming the social influences upon us for our actions. It is not by revving up our mental will to master our bodies, nor seeking external solutions.

Rather, we need, as best we can, to open up the sensory awareness that the unique matrix of relationships that we are has enabled us to develop. We need to feel what we are feeling so that we can learn over time to make decisions that align with the trajectories of our health and well being.

We need options. We need information, and we need to be willing to participate consciously in the process of finding the wisdom in our desires. It is the process of doing so that yields the greatest possible pleasure.

In following posts, I will describe how.

Making Connections

A crispy edge cuts the air. Red hues creep across the leaves. School begins today. The seasons are changing, and so is this blog.

Over the summer I have done interviews about my book What a Body Knows with radio personalities around the country—men and women, Christian and new age, conservative and liberal, credentialed and not. Many times I have been heartened by the words: People need to hear this. Some people. Some where. I am starting to listen.

Not a day goes by when I don’t hear some report or read some news piece and think about how my work could offer a different perspective and enrich the discussion.

Hence the new focus of this blog: I plan to make connections with articles and authors, books and blogs that are concerned with issues raised in What a Body Knows. It is time to map the range and reach of my emerging philosophy of bodily becoming, and provide a place for others to do the same. Chime in! Here goes.
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On August 18, Natalie Angier, one of my favorite science writers, published a fascinating column in the New York Times about how the “Brain is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop.” In its August 17th issue, Time magazine weighed in with a cover story by John Cloud on "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin."

Both stories miss what links them together and what What a Body Knows teaches: that bodily movement is the key to helping us find wisdom in our desires.

Take the stress loop. As Angier reports, researchers have discovered among deliberately-stressed (i.e., shocked, bullied, and nearly-drowned) rats, that the rodents were “cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over.” The centers of the brain governing habit formation bloomed. Provided with a bar they could press for a food pellet or a squirt of sugar water, the stressed rats “had difficulty deciding when to stop pressing the bar,” even when they no longer wanted to eat.

Angier links these findings back to the allostasis of our dynamic stress response system, which is designed to maintain control by causing marked changes in blood pressure, heart rate, muscle activity, and the like. As she says, we “dance to the beat.”

Meanwhile, Cloud reports that exercise does not lead to weight loss. The reasons are many, but one rises above the rest. Most exercise does not burn enough calories to make a difference. Even when we burn some calories, we tend to overcompensate for whatever we have burned, rewarding ourselves for our efforts and eating more than we otherwise would have done.

Angier characterizes the stress loop as “vicious” and “sinister,” though she admits it might be helpful in a crisis for shunting as many behaviors as possible to “automatic pilot.” Cloud laments that exercise is of little value in the fight against obesity, though reminding us that it is still good for our general health.

What is missing from these discussions, and what links them together, is what our bodies know.

In the case of Angier, for example, heightened habit formation is not the problem. Nor is stress itself. The problem is that we get stuck in stress because the habits we form are ones that reinforce the causes of the stress. In What a Body Knows, I call it cereal box logic. In responding to our sense of frustration or dissatisfaction, we resort to the same strategies that got us into trouble in the first place.

The fact, then, that our stress responses are making us more stressed is a sign of our bodily wisdom not stupidity. For this finding indicts the mind-over-body thinking, feeling, and acting that most people raised in American culture rely upon to cope. As I have described in earlier posts, this mind-over-body sense of ourselves is what we are taught, what we master, who we believe we are. It is one way of sensing ourselves, but not the only one.

If we were to adopt a stress response that shifted our experience of ourselves away from a mind-over-body sense, then the repetition of it would work to release us from the self-reinforcing stress cycle.

Doing so, however, is not a matter of willpower. Nor is it simply a matter of "relaxing." It involves cultivating a sensory awareness of our bodily selves regardless of what we are doing. It involves moving to breathe and breathing to move (see posts in Jan-Feb 2008), engaging in the kinds of bodily movement that draw our attention down and out and through our sensory selves.

Here is where exercise comes in, and its crucial role in our relationship to food. The value of exercise in this relationship has little or nothing to do with burning calories. More important is the bodily movement itself. Bodily movement has the potential for drawing our awareness out of our minds and into our bodies, and so that the loops of our mind-over-body stress responses loosen and fall. When they do, we stop pushing the bar for that extra squirt of sugar water. We don't have to--we don't want to--for we know a deeper pleasure, the pleasure of feeling and finding our own sense of enough.
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I spent last week at the Washington County Fair. My three older children were there for the week, showing their Jersey cows. The fair overloads the senses. Barn fans whirr with an incessant, fly-chasing drone. Milk-machine-powering generators hum. The screams of truck and tractor engines pulling harder than they should punctuate the afternoon. Voices crest and collide. Dust and dirt swirl and stick. It is a stressful situation for a new mother, namely me, with infant in tow. I empathize with Angier's rats.

After a few hours, a feeling of disease slides over me. I start retreating from my sensory self. I start thinking about the caramels in the candy tent. I can’t stop thinking about the caramels in the candy tent. And the butterscotches. The coffee treats. Then I know. It is time for a walk.

I leave the fair grounds, striding hard through the surrounding fields packed with parked cars. The attendants look at me strangely, wondering where I am going. No where. Just around—around the largest perimeter I can make. Striding. Breathing. Releasing. Being. Becoming. Feeling. Knowing. Dropping into my bodily self.

Suddenly my thoughts shift. I am the movement that is making me. Visions of caramels fade into pictures of what I really want. To write that article. To connect with this friend. To make plans for the school year. Back in myself, I head back to the fair, reconnected, ready to begin again.
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What connections can you make?

Make Hay When the Sun Shines

One of our first tasks when we arrived here in July of 2005 was to find a local farmer to hay our fields. There were two reasons. Not only are those acres of rolling green hillside absolutely gorgeous to behold, there is money at stake. Taxes. To secure an agricultural discount, worth lots of dollars, we must either rent our fields to someone who does $10K of farming business a year, or do that business ourselves. Renting was our better option.

We soon met Farmer Larry who lived across the way. The stories that tailed him were legendary. He let his dangerous bulls wander onto everyone else’s land. He milked his cows when the cows felt like it—or not. He would give you the shirt off his back. Fact was, Larry told better stories than anyone ever told of him. And he was happy to hay our fields.

To hay a field is the farmer’s equivalent of mowing the lawn. Hay is grass—cut and dried and bound into bales. It can be alfalfa, timothy, orchard, fescue or any mix and match that grows. And though we had yet to discover it in those early years, this basic grass is the foundation of the whole farm economy. The grass feeds the animals who work the land, give meat and milk, and fertilize the soil again. It is a solar-powered cycle interrupted by the use of fossil fuels, as when farmers use tractors to pull their mowers and grains to feed the cows. Still, if you trace that fossil fuel back in time, it all comes down in some time and place, to sun-fed grass.

This year, for the first time, we realized for ourselves how crucial hay is to the farm family. All it took was imagining ourselves in the dead of winter, staring down our four thousand-pound beasts, and trying to explain to them that there was nothing left for them to eat. Our milk production, not to mention our well being was at stake.

As May ripened, so did the stalks of grass. Walking in the fields, I was up to my armpits, swimming through heads budding pink. It was time to hay. The sun was shining high in the sky. Where was Larry?

All the good weather was making me anxious. When the grass is grown, it needs to be cut, else it starts shedding nutrients, preparing to die and be reborn. When the grass is cut, it needs to dry, spread out on the field, else the balls or boxes into which it is baled start to mold. When the cut grass is drying, it needs a good 24 hours of clear sky to do so at least, for any rain that falls washes its nutrients right into the ground. The sun was shining. Where was Larry? I was feeling like a farmer.

Larry, we heard, had stopped worrying about the weather long ago. Where other farmers had internet connections to follow the satellite forecasts, Larry hardly even looked at the sky. You hayed when you could. You took your chances when you did. It would rain or not. And by the time winter came, whatever hay you had to offer your animals, Larry said, would be better than a snowball.

The sun was still shining on the spring day when Larry died in a logging accident. He was out in the woods, doing what he loved, and quickly felled. It was tragic. We missed him and still do. We miss his unfailing smile, his generous ways, and the stories he told at our kitchen table of wild moose and rangy bulls and the pony he used to ride to school. The line of people waiting to enter the funeral home for his calling hours in this rural town topped 800 people. We had thought we were his only friends. He was buried in the most beautiful cemetery I have ever seen, at the foot of a pine tree too big to hug. What would he think, I wondered, looking up at that tree?

Our hay was still standing. The sun was still shining. We talked to Larry’s sons who agreed to hay for him, as they had been doing with him, for years. In their hay days growing up on the farm, they processed over 10,000 bales a year. We would have several hundred.

Then it began to rain. Day after day, one week, two weeks, three weeks. You can’t cut hay in the rain. There was nothing to do but wait. June seeped into July. The grass thinned; its buds darkened red, and we waited some more. Those snowballs were looking pretty good.

Finally the sky cleared. Finally the hay was cut, rained on, turned and combed again, baled, and loaded safely into our barns, still green and crispy good, despite it all. Smells delicious. Our animals love it.

Make hay when the sun shines. In general use, the meaning of the words have softened into something like: take advantage of your opportunities when you can. But we have learned they mean far more than that. To make hay is be the link in the farm economy that enables the life of every member. To do it when the sun shines is to honor your obligation to let others live, by aligning your actions with the productive, creative work of the natural world.

To make hay when the sun shines is to do what you can and what you must to be a life enabling link in the universal rhythms of bodies becoming.

I know that next year, as we are making hay when the sun shines, I'll be thinking of Larry, at the foot of his tree, taking heart that whatever we make will be better than a snowball.

Next week: The cream of the crop

Food Finale

Daughter Jessica (age 10) was sicker yesterday than I have seen her since she was 2. Her head hurt. Her stomach ached. Curled on the couch, she refused all food, and slept on and off throughout the day. When she woke up this morning, seemingly two inches taller, she asked for cornflakes and milk. Then slices of pear. Then a piece of pizza. Then some frozen corn. Not long after she asked for a granola bar, insisting all the while that what she really needed was blueberries. She probably did.

What do our bodies know?

Often it takes being sick for us to turn our attention to our bodily sensations. At such times, our bodies, tired of whispering, explode with a snarl. Listen to me! And we do, for a while, wanting and eating exactly what will nourish us, until the glow of health returns and with it, our illusions of being a master mind. Once again we are vulnerable to suggestion and willing to override our sense of enough for a good time, in search of a comfort that eludes.

What do we really want—from food?

Concern over an increasingly international obesity epidemic, while well meaning, has thrown our relationship to food out of whack—or revealed just how out of whack it is. We want to eat whatever we want, look however we want, and be healthy—all at the same time. What is missing is the sense of our desire for food as having anything to teach us about any one of them.

Our bodies register the effects our persistent lack of attention, and then we blame them for not doing what “we” want. But the movements we are making are making us.

I have been reading a book called Why We Run: A Natural History that plots human evolution as driven by the desire to hunt. We are endurance predators, author Bernd Heinrich argues, whose physiology and metabolism—most notably our ability to sweat—qualifies us to outrun much faster animals in the heat of a prairie sun.

Most interesting, however, is Heinrich’s claim that our capacity to fall out of shape represents an evolutionary advantage—“neuromuscular flexibility.” Unlike some other animals, we easily lose muscle tone. Yet because we can fall out of shape, we can also get back into shape—a different shape—that will serve us in the quarry of new prey.

We evolved with the capacity to remake ourselves.

We can fall out of eating shape as well, moving far from our internal sense of what is best for us, and the reasons are similar. Our gastronomical flexibility enables us to remake ourselves. We can adapt to surpluses and shortages. Season to season, climate to climate, culture to culture, we cultivate a taste for available edibles.

Heinrich goes on to suggest that we not only can remake ourselves, we must. We are creatures who need to move: our own health and well being requires that we be working ourselves into shape. Whether the goal we are chasing is an antelope or a scientific proof, a book contract or a product’s sales, the process of pursuing it feeds us psychologically and physically, releasing cascades of internal nourishment. It primes our health—again not just the goal itself, but the acts of vision, persistence, and endurance that getting it requires.

It might seem that in contemporary culture, we no longer need to hunt for food. All we can eat is ever present, round the clock. However, the same work must be done—not the work of running and spearing, but the work of discerning what will nourish us and consciously going after it. We are born not knowing. As we grow we cannot not learn. We can deny that we are learning and eat what is offered, however, we will only find the pleasure we seek when we do the work that our adaptive, evolving desire requires.

We no longer have to change our menu season to season, but we still need to learn to follow the arc of our pleasure to a responsible, renewable sense of enough.

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Every day, we eat. With every mouthful, we engage our senses. As every pattern of sensing and responding registers, it primes a desire for more or less of it, now or in the future. And over time, our desire evolves. We cultivate tastes. We learn what to want and not want. We adapt.

It might seem that this malleability is a reason not to trust our desire. The reverse is true. This malleability is what there is to trust.

Why? Because desire is not an end in itself. Desire is always reaching for what it wants. Desire is movement—a movement that is actively seeking information that will guide us to the pleasure we hope to secure.

The wisdom in this desire, then, lies in the reaching, grasping, sensing, and responding to what we think will nourish us. The wisdom is what erupts in sensations of discomfort and illness, obsession and unease, calling us to attend. We want more. There is more to want. More pleasure. More health.

As we participate in this process, our food becomes more than it is—fortified with ingredients that satisfy our deepest desire to be constantly creating our selves.

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All along the way I have been railing against a mind over body approach to our relationship to food. Yet I don’t mean to disparage our minds—just our illusions of mastery. Mental activity is essential to the process of discerning wisdom in desire.

For minds remember. Minds predict. Minds attend. And in all three ways, minds help open up a space in us where the wisdom of our desire can emerge.

Minds remember to call on the cycle of breaths. Minds predict what will happen when we do. Minds attend to whatever movement the process stirs in us in response to the moment.

Minds remember what we have read and heard about nutrition, food quality, sources, and effects. Minds predict what will happen if we eat as we do. Minds attend to the shifts in our desire that occur as we learn, honoring and enabling them to be what they are.

Minds remind us: we are bodies first.

Next week: desire for sex

The Food Chain

Seventy dollars. That is how much more than usual our grocery bill was this week. Seventy—and we aren’t even buying milk, cream, butter, ice cream or eggs thanks to Daisy (our cow), our four faithful chickens, and our kids who milk and gather and feed. Why?

Last week’s headlines of food riots around the world suddenly feel closer to home. How vulnerable we are—dependent for our food on a vast network of relations, whose many fragile links reach all they way back to seeds in the earth. The fall of rain. A shaft of sun. A waft of air. The plants that make themselves. The animals who eat them. The food we buy relates us to all that is.

Shocked, we sit down to study the receipt. Yes, the kids are growing. We are buying more fruit and vegetables, more cereal and juice. We also do our best to buy goods that are either local or organic, and preferably both. Then there are those big ticket items—vanilla for our ice cream making (at $9. a bottle), maple syrup as a sweetener ($14.), and of course, diapers.

Even as we lament, I am thinking. The merchandise in our overflowing cart still costs much more than the ample sum we are shelling out for it. We aren’t paying—not directly or fully—for so many enabling factors: the roads on which our food travels to us, the crop subsidies that keep the farmers solvent, the immigrant labor that picks most produce, the topsoil lost on overly-farmed fields, the pollution of air, water, and earth caused by machinery, pesticides, transportation, and manure. I am trying to feel grateful.

A local farmer brings by a large bag of potatoes—culls from a local operation. Cheap. I get creative. What can you make with potatoes, milk, and eggs?? Custards, quiches and soufflés are right out—too “eggy” for my crew. So I am whipping up bread, pancakes, lasagna, brownies, muffins, and oatmeal bars. Try some!

It is how a cultural diet evolves, via such creative constraint. What do we have in abundance (think wheat, corn, milk)? What food can we make with it (think aisles of cereal, crackers, bread, and snack products; cheeses, butters, and ice cream)? How can we preserve what erupts once a year and have it year round (think tomato sauces, jellies, pickles, frozen everything, and pasta)? And then there is meat.

Our diet is derivative. Economic, political, and geographic forces, not to mention culture and tradition, set the menu. We learn to want what we know we can get.

Food prices soar, and we reexamine our choices. It is not only health concerns that prompt us to do so, though they can as well. We reconsider whether we should buy organic or local; whether we should splurge on the freshest fruits or go for the cans; or whether we should believe the claims made for oats, live bacteria, low fat content, hormone-free meat. Pushed out of our comfortable, comforting rut, the options are bewildering. How are we to decide?

There is an ethic implicit in the approach to desire described here whose reach extends far beyond the contours of our bodily space. What can our bodies know?

When we cultivate a felt sense of our desire for food—when we practice following the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough—it is not just ourselves we are serving. When what motivates us to eat or not is pleasure, and when the greatest pleasure comes from an experience of nourishing ourselves, then any information that comes to us about our food hits us in a new way. The news from experts and scientists, journalists and commentators, strikes us in the gut—right where our attention is, and right where our sensations of pleasure register.

As I tune into the sensation of eating grapes, for example, the knowledge that their presence on my tongue represents the sweat on someone’s exploited back dulls the pleasure. Or, as the square of chocolate melts in my mouth, knowing that it was traded fairly heightens the pleasure.

Here, the advice of experts in science, politics, and nutrition does help—not by telling us what we can and should eat, but by providing us with information that allow us to make informed, attuned decisions on our own. There is no formula. Only an ongoing practice of heightening our sense of what we are doing as we eat. The movement I make is making me….

Yet, when we shift to this experience of ourselves, ironically enough, we also realize that our relation to food is not just about ourselves any more. The moving bodies we know ourselves to be are mere moments in an endless rhythm of becoming that is enabling us, alive in us, making the world as it is through us.

The cycle of breaths reminds us. We are earth, air, fire, water. So is the food we see, smell, taste, absorb and become. So is the world in which we live. What we take in to ourselves not only makes us who we are, it makes the world into what it is—and it can be a place that supports us in nourishing ourselves, or not.

As we cultivate a felt sense of ourselves as the movement making us, our desire evolves. It will; it can; it must. Our desire will grow in line with whatever we believe will give us the pleasure we seek. As it does, we no longer want foods that overwhelm and deceive our senses; we no longer want foods that require oppressing other humans or animals. We want what will allow us to find a sense of enough.

This is no temporary correction of calories. No willed deprivation. No feat of self control. It is permanent pursuit of the wisdom in our desire—the wisdom guiding us to the health and well being we seek. It is the only way that we can create a relationship with food—with ourselves and with our world—that will express itself in the health we want.

It takes time. Desire did not evolve in a day, nor will it. But even so, there is pleasure all the way.

Next week: Summing up food

Using the Cycle of Breaths

It goes against all common sense.

How can you say that if I cultivate the pleasure in eating, I will find a sense of enough? If I am feeling the pleasure, won’t I want to keep eating, to get more pleasure? Shouldn’t I rather work to decrease the pleasure I feel in eating and rely instead on meal replacements and protein shakes to divert my desire?

No. If we open ourselves to feel the pleasure of eating, the rhythm and arc of that pleasure, then we will also be acutely aware of the moment in which our pleasure starts to wane. And because we are, in that very moment, attending to our sensations as the source of our pleasure, we are more likely than ever to feel our fullness as a desire to stop. I can eat again later. Or tomorrow. At that moment the pleasure of eating morphs into the pleasure of knowing when to stop and doing so. We taste the pleasure of giving ourselves the experience of being nourished. Of getting what we need. Of having and being enough.

When we cultivate a sensory awareness of the movement making us, then, the desire to override what feels good in our bodies or stuff ourselves silly falls away. It does not fall away because our will power establishes its dominance, but because we realize that we want something else more. We realize that the pleasure we desire is not one we will find by denying or indulging our desire. We want the pleasure of moving with the wisdom in our desire, and following its arc to a sense of enough.
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All well and good. But can practicing the cycle of breaths (see Jan 29, Feb 5, 12, 19, & audio version in side bar) really help?

(Are you breathing?)

Yes. As we practice the cycle of breaths, breathing to move and moving to breathe, our experience of our desire for food evolves. Desire is movement. It is movement in us that moves us toward whatever we believe will give us the experience we seek. So too, as we are ever getting new information about what works for us, our desires have the potential to change constantly.

When we move through the cycle of breaths then, its different perspectives help us release the potential of our desire to evolve in line with our rolling revelations of what will bring us the pleasure we seek. More and more we find ourselves wanting to eat what nourishes us, and wanting to do so as the condition for our greatest pleasure and health. We move with the wisdom in desire. Really?
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Imagine yourself consuming a package of oreos. Imagine how delightful it would be. You will let yourself do it—release into your desire and get the sweet satisfaction you crave. All of it. You will become an oreo-eater, someone who nourishes herself this way.

With that tenth cookie, however, you begin to feel too full. Your stomach aches. You deny the ache. You want the satisfaction of eating the entire package. You begin to feel nauseous. A headache crops up. Your mind starts to blink. Listen.

What is happening? You want the pleasure of eating. Your desire has taken shape in the form of an ideal of what you need to do to get it: eat the oreos. More oreos equals more pleasure. It is an ideal that coordinates the impulse in you (for eating pleasure) and the options available in your world (oreos). Yet as you eat, you meet resistance in your sensory awareness to satisfying your desire. Pain! Discomfort.

If you experience this discomfort through a sense of yourself as mind over body, you may be tempted to interpret this pain as an obstacle to your full satisfaction. A nuisance. You will want eat another oreo just to prove that you are master of your body and can get what you desire. Yet every time you override your own resistance—in the name of greater pleasure—you dull your ability to sense what will give you the pleasure you say you want.

There is another way. If you can release into your sensory awareness, your experience of this discomfort will shift and the resistance will make sense to you as something to trust. You will know that your own discomfort is expressing the wisdom in your desire. The idea you have (more oreos) is out of sync with what will actually produce pleasure (stopping). The movements you are making to satisfy your desire are making you sick! Your best wisdom is crying out for you to stop.

Even so, it is not that easy. Even though you know that eating another oreo will make you ill—and you can feel it—you still want to eat it. The sensation of displeasure you anticipate cannot compete with your desire to taste now. What then?

If we rely on coercion and denial—regardless of how fine our intentions—we will inevitably crack, gobble up what we denied ourselves, and then eat more to compensate for our sense of deprivation. If we make our relationship with our self into a battle, we always lose whether we eat or not.

Alternately, we can call on the cycle of breaths (see side bar). Practicing the cycle of breaths enhances our vulnerability to the persuasive power of our own sensations. It helps us tilt the balance toward the side of pleasure that comes with a sense of enough. With every breath we are more able to sense and respond to our discomfort as moving us to make it stop… to stop eating.

Breathe to move and move to breathe.

Breathe and release the tension in your wanting into the earth. Let it go. Let it settle. Feel yourself sitting, standing, from inside yourself. Connected. Breathe again, and open up a space traced by the edges where skin meets air. Fill the space with oxygen and invite the reach and roots of your sensations to appear. Breathe again and plug the energy of your desire into your fiery core. What is it you really want? Where does your greatest pleasure lie? Breathe again and kindle that fire into fluid, flowing through you. Open to impulses to move that bring your senses back to the arc of your pleasure.

When you engage the cycle of breaths in this way, the feeling of fullness will grow stronger in your awareness than the watering in your mouth. As you breathe some more, remembering and recreating your connections with the elements, your desire will move in line with the sensations of fertile, free, fiery, flow you are awakening in yourself. It will spread out and gather again, along a trajectory of the respect-full attention you are practicing in relation to your own self.

Do you want that oreo? In the time space of breathing you will realize that it is not the oreo itself that you want—what you want is for the oreo to taste good. But the oreo won’t taste good if you are overriding your own sensation of fullness. It won’t give you the pleasure you want. The taste in your mouth deteriorates. It will only be the oreo I want if I am hungry.

A decision forms: I won’t eat it. Not now.

The move away from the oreo may be tinged with sadness, it is true. I am missing out! But that edge of sadness will be followed immediately by a gush of relief. You avoided the violence of overriding your bodily sensations and the inevitable pain that would follow. You lived through the moment in a way that nourished and nurtured you, creating the possibility in you for greater future pleasure than you would have had now. Honoring your sensations in this way, you create yourself as someone who can do so, wants to do so, and knows she can do so, for her own health.

The relief is delicious.

Next Week: Why this practice is a social, political, and economic act

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

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.

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?