Eat Less? Pass the chips!

Responses to the government’s recently-released recommendations for healthy eating, while varied, are circling around what observers see as a remarkable message. For the first time the report’s writers, withstanding the immense pressure of the food industry, actually recommend that Americans eat less. Why? The report begins with statistics chronicling the heavy toll of diet-related chronic illnesses, primarily those associated with obesity.

Is this difference remarkable? The difference can be deceiving. What might seem like a radical move is couched in a familiar philosophy. The writers assume that a human body is an input-output device, a simple machine, for which “we” as minds can and should make good, meaning “healthy,” choices.

On this mind-over-body understanding of the human self, the report stages its primary recommendation: balance calories to manage weight. It bears repeating. According to this report, the goal of eating is weight management. And the means to that goal: information for the mind given by the report in pie charts, bar graphs, and tables.

In this way the report is typical of our cultural responses to the obesity epidemic: it reinforces a way of thinking about a human self that is itself a contributing factor to the problems it purports to address.

Bodies are not machines. Food is not fuel. Eating is not about energy intake. Physical exercise is not just about energy expenditure. When we act as if they are, we systematically override the cues that our own bodily selves are giving us about what and when and how to eat.

Our relation to food is a matter of desire. This desire for food arises as a movement in our bodily selves that impels us towards what we believe will grant us the pleasure we seek. And that pleasure is not a function of calories or quantity or even quality. Rather, what we move towards is the experience of being nourished, the experience of being nurtured, and as we mature, the experience of nourishing and nurturing ourselves.

Of course, as the report implies, our desire for food is a problem. It is a force that “we” must control.

Yet, what the government and many of us have learned to forget is that our desire for the pleasure of being nourished is actually the most subtle and sophisticated ally we have for determining what eating patterns will benefit our health. This desire is our very own in-built instrument of discernment, guiding our thinking selves to work with our environmental options to secure what we need to thrive.

In order to liberate this ally, however, we do have some work to do. We need to dislodge the mind-over-body habits that cause us to ignore and even malign our bodily selves, and learn to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire for food.

In short, to make a really remarkable move, we need to ask a question that the report does not dare: how can we get more pleasure from what we are eating?

1. Move.

If we want to feel more pleasure, then we have to be willing to feel. If we want to feel, we have to breathe. In order to breathe, we need to move—move our bodily selves—not for exercise, not to expend calories, but to bring to life a sensory awareness of what it is we really want from food.

For what do we hunger?

2. Look for the signs.

When we open to feel what we are feeling, then we are bound to learn what we don’t want to admit. What we are eating is not giving us the pleasure we want.

Our food selections, while initially pleasing to the eye and even the mouth, too often produce unwanted effects in our bodily selves. Yet, we ignore the signs and keep eating. We take a pill to deal with the “side” effects. We distract our attention, or simply eat more to prove to ourselves that we can. We want so much the pleasure we know can come from eating that we override our sensations of displeasure in pursuit of it.

Yet these sensations of discomfort are allies and friends, guiding us to move in ways that will not recreate those sensations, just as the pain of touching the stove tells us to move our hand higher up the handle.

Every twinge of discomfort is a sign of a potential pleasure we have yet to discover.

3. Open to the arc.

Once we allow ourselves to feel our desires and our displeasures, then our sensory understanding of eating expands. We find that there are multiple pleasures waiting to be enjoyed in every moment of our lives, along an endless, oscillating arc of anticipation and fulfillment.

There is potential pleasure in the imagining, growing, gathering, and preparation of food. There is potential pleasure in the act of welcoming food into our bodily selves. There is immense pleasure as well in arriving at that sweet moment when you know you have had enough.

At every point along this arc, we have some sensory relearning to do, for we have so privileged the moment of sticking something in our mouths over all the other moments of our eating arc that we don’t even notice what we are missing.

Our sense of enough has been particularly hammered. The idea that we can and should manage our calorie intake or go on a diet operates by the same logic that impels us to eat more than our bodily selves are telling us we want. Ignore your own sense of enough. Distrust it. It has nothing to teach you about what is best for you.

The opposite is true.

4. Play.

It is not enough to practice mindfulness of what and how and when we eat. It is not enough either to welcome displeasures or know that our pleasure has an arc. We must also play with different food combinations. We need to try new things, learn as much as we can about what works for us, and experiment with eating patterns and habits and traditions and recipes to discover which ones allow us to feel and find that arc of our desire.

It is to this end that the guidelines like those offered by the government are helpful—as fuel for our imaginations. The report offers us ideas and information that can help us experiment with a range of possibilities, and find the freedom to sense and respond to the movements of our own desiring, discerning selves.
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While the eating patterns of Americans are not etched in stone, neither are they easily malleable at the level of rational choice.

If we are to eat less, we must want to eat less. And the only way we are going to want to eat less--as every marketer of a diet plan knows--is to know that we are getting more of the pleasure we desire from the act of eating.

Sure, there is pleasure to be gained from feeling healthy and lean, but when under pressure, pummeled by advertisements, and surrounded by colorfully-packaged delivery mechanisms for sugar and salt, we will inevitably and understandably move with our much more fundamental desire for an experience of being nourished and nurtured. It is this desire, then, that we must free from our mind-over-body control, and cultivate as the best resource we have along the path of health and well-being.

The goal of weight management will not fire our imaginations, free us from our self-destructing habits, or galvanize our desire in new directions. What we need is a vision of a greater pleasure whose side effect happens to be greater health and well being. And we need to trust in the wisdom of our bodily selves and desires as our best guides to it.

Obesity Is Inevitable, Or Is It?

When it comes to obesity, our solutions are perpetuating the problem.

Take the welter of posts in response to a NYTimes article this week. The range of comments was typical. The article could have been any one of a number of articles reporting on obesity facts or findings, causes or cures.

There is always some disagreement regarding: the name (is it an epidemic?), the definition of obese (how much is too much?), and the relationship between weight and health (too thin isn’t good either). In general, however, researchers have tracked trajectories of obesity-related diseases well enough to establish cause for concern.

Beyond that, suggestions for what to do fan out along a familiar spectrum.

At one end, commentators argue over which “lifestyle” factors are the most relevant. We read stories of how, when, what, and why people should eat, exercise, and sleep; we learn what he cut out and what she added; what she lost and what he gained. One refrain repeats with a rhythmic drone: eat less, exercise more.

At the other end of the spectrum, commentators blame the biological parameters of our bodily selves, citing genes, metabolisms and, as the Times article describes, the ever wily wiggles of our energy-storage systems. For those at this end, hope for a “cure” lies in finding the right drug or surgical procedure, in public policy changes or simply in a greater social acceptance of what are now the fat facts.

Despite the apparent range of these responses, however, all points on the spectrum share a common value that both drives modern western culture and renders obesity an inevitable component of contemporary life.

What is that value?

It is one that equates goodness with mental control over material bodies of various kinds, whether earthen, animal, and human. We want bodies to fit into whatever measurements and expectations “we” set for them. Whether we aim for health or wealth, achievement or invention, work or relaxation, art, entertainment or climate optimization, “we” want bodies to do what they are told. We value anything that serves, supports, or expresses such control as good. Mind over body is who we want to be, who we practice being, and who we come to believe we are.

Given this value that our culture places on mind over body control, obesity is inevitable. Why? When we practice ignoring and overriding our bodily sensations, we are “free” to develop patterns of eating that bear little or no relation to what our bodily selves actually need to function.

We come to believe that we can eat whatever we want regardless of how it affects our bodies. We want it to be true; we act as if it were. If the food we eat makes us sick, we take drugs to hide the symptoms—drugs that lower cholesterol, adjust blood pressure, speed digestion, or tamp down indigestion (a weight-loss pill still eludes).

In short, we want to be "free" to eat whatever we want to eat and have the results of our eating conform to whatever we want our bodies to look like. We equate this mind over body freedom with pleasure to such a degree that we can’t even acknowledge our own pain or discomfort until it is too late: the problem seems beyond our control.

I am not blaming people of any size. Nor am I blaming bodies or genes or desires or cultural habits for eluding our control. There is a deeper logic at work in which we all participate that is addictive and self-sustaining. When we think that we can think our way to health and wellbeing, whether through individual will power or scientific research, we perpetuate an ignorance of our bodily selves that finds expression in a disconnect between what we eat and what will give us the pleasure of being nourished. Whether we overeat or undereat, the logic is the same.

However, once we can recognize how embedded in our ways of living the problem is, we can also find seeds of hope. For we begin to remember how hard we practice to make our mind over body beliefs seem true. We discern how the movements that we make as we eat (or not) are making us into people who think and feel and act as if they are minds over bodies. We see the contradictions:

--Diets “work” to addict us to the idea that a diet will work.
--Biological determinism calls on the power of our minds to assert the powerlessness of our minds.
--Lifestyle changes appeal by promising that our sense of ourselves need not change: we can retain the same mind over body control we want to believe we are.

In each case, we may alleviate some of the symptoms, but not address the source.

However, because we see the power of our own movement in making us, we can begin to acknowledge the sources of our strength.

We are not who we think we are. If we are really interested in addressing eating practices and attendant health problems, we need a change that is both subtle and huge. We need to practice sensing and discerning what our bodily selves know. We need to engage in movement practices that help us do so (as I have been describing in recent posts 1 and 2). In relation to food, we need to learn to give ourselves an experience of being nourished, by following the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough. It is a life time practice.

This is not a question of “reconnecting” with our bodies, or being “mindful” of what we are eating, or even of “listening” to our bodies. All of these models leave intact the privilege of mind over (a now closer) body. Rather, we need movement practices that help us shift our experience of who we are and where our wisdom lies. We need to learn to find, trust, and discern the wisdom in our desires—and not just our desire for food. As I demonstrate in What a Body Knows, our desire for food is thoroughly entwined with our desires for sex and spirit.

From this shifted way of being, we will be able to create new values that express the care and attention to our bodily selves that we are practicing.
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The obesity epidemic is a recent social phenomenon, but that does not mean that its proximate causes are new. We have arrived at a point in history where values that have guided human enterprise and invention for centuries have generated a critical mass of technologies, habits, and practices that are tipping us into an untenable situation.

Where the physical actions of a day’s labor, the lived experience of art and entertainment, and the personal contact with family and friends used to provide a counterbalance to mind over body practices, now many of us are “free” to sit in front of screens all day. We are making movements that are making us. Again, it is not just a matter of a sedentary life, it is a matter of the values that our arrival at this sedentary moment in history is expressing.

Until we are free to do what we must for our health and wellbeing, we won’t be free.