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.

He Said, She Said

The political race is degenerating. It is increasingly a matter of he said, s/he said. Palin says she said no to the bridge to nowhere. Obama says she said yes. Biden says he is for change. McCain says he is not. The list goes on and on. Back and forth. A tennis match, but hardly as enjoyable. There is so much at stake. Whom do you believe?

I think again. For whom are we voting anyway? Or more to the point—for what? We are voting for the candidates, yes, but really, for the parties who have nominated them, fund them, back them, and cheer for them. These candidates are where they are, in the public eye and on the public stage, because two very large networks, with critical nodes throughout our country, have put them there.

Each candidate is merely the tip of an iceberg. The race is about which conglomeration of people—which cadre of experts and advisors, rising stars and time-tested sages—will have the edge in the ongoing scrum of political debates at all levels of government. We are voting for a team, or a horde, and the candidate who wins is the one who can best sell the dream—a victory vision of who we are, who we want to be, and what this party can help us be.

This is the issue, even more than the issues. We all know that when candidates get into office, they don’t always make good on their campaign promises. The reasons are many. Sometimes acts of nature or terrorism transform the terrain; sometimes the larger political machinery blocks attempts at change; sometimes advisors prevail in a different direction, and sometimes candidates tell the people what they want to hear, knowing everything will be different once they are in office. But we who listen and seek to discern hope that the candidates are making their promises with the intention of trying to carry them out. We trust them at least to try.

Which brings me back to the dream--and the bridge. It is what some Democrats still don’t seem to get. Simply opposing McCain or Palin’s claims won’t work to deflate the Republican fervor. The opposition only serves to strengthen the terms of their arguments. For example, opposing Palin’s claims about the bridge to nowhere simply strengthens the notion that what matters is reducing government, ending earmarks, and winning a reputation as a reformer.

The opposition to her position, in other words, reinforces the very standards of value that Republicans are selling. If you buy into the Democratic rebuttal of Palin, your opposition plays right into the Republican hand, for the Republican party has succeeded—despite the facts of history—to solidify an image of itself as promoting small, fiscally-responsible government. Resistance is futile.

It is a great irony: the Republicans in office, due to their failures and excesses, have stirred in us a deep desire for Republican values of restraint and conservatism. The Republicans in office have set up the Republican candidates perfectly to make the age-old criticisms of Democrats, however off base, as guaranteeing bigger government and higher taxes. The barbs stick.

I am not taking sides here. On the contrary. My point is to understand how arguments by both parties are reinforcing the ways of thinking that have failed to provide us with what we, as citizens, most want.

So what more is possible? We must displace the discussion by offering an alternative vision of the dream. We need to honor the failures and excesses of the current administration as what our movements towards small government and low taxes are themselves creating. We need to ask which party will give us the tools that we need, the new vision we need, to learn from the pain of our current situation how to move differently. We need an experience shift, so that we can find, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire for more.

One way to begin is to note that the value we accord to small government and low taxes hinges on the idea of individual freedom and what it takes to sustain it. Yet the fact is, as Obama has stated, the kinds of individual freedoms we prize in the United States are given to us and enabled for us by a vast network of relationships. We are free because there are people in our lives who educate us, manufacture for us, protect us, heal us, and raise us. In this light, in order to ensure our freedom, we need a government then that will support individuals in creating the relationships they need to support them in unfolding what they have to give.

Such a government may or may not be big or small, in the war or out, drilling or not. It may or may not offer earmarks. But what that government will do is evaluate all such policies based on whether or not they support individuals in creating the relationships that will enable them to thrive. It will maximize the opportunities for individuals to participate consciously in the rhythms of their bodily becoming, naming and bringing into being a world they love that loves them.

In this light, what matters about Palin’s comments on the bridge is whether she is providing us with a criterion of governing that serves our vision of the democratic good. Simply abolishing earmarks is not enough. A government without them will not necessarily guarantee our freedoms. We need to know what will.

Next week: A harder case