MANY PEOPLE are uneasy talking about or even thinking about their habits regarding food. In this chapter, two members of Sravasti Abbey’s extended community share their experiences and thoughts about food. Bob Wilson is a longtime practitioner who is a dietician and who had his own struggles with food as a youth. Heather Duchscher is an enthusiastic Dharma practitioner who used to suffer from an eating disorder. To conclude the chapter, Dianne Pratt (a.k.a. Ven. Thubten Jigme), who was a nurse practitioner before she ordained as a nun at the Abbey, shares suggestions about healthy eating habits.
At certain points in my journey of life it’s been very challenging to be kind and loving to the being who lives inside my own skin. I’ve also seen that many family members have struggled with achieving and maintaining healthy choices in their lives. These internal battles caused immense suffering for them personally, as well as for others in my family. My heart was saddened by their distress, and I grieved that I couldn’t do anything about it.
In the eighth grade, I weighed 400 pounds. Finally, at age twenty-one I said, “Holy petunias! I’ve got to do something!” That’s when I lost over 240 pounds. I’m now sixty-six years old and have maintained that weight loss for over forty years.
That was the easy part. My mind was a mess. I had a deep need for a spiritual belief and guiding system in my life, and had tried numerous spiritual practices, but none had answered my deepest quandaries. That’s when I prayed to Life, “Please help. I don’t know what I need, but I need help.” That’s when I met Ven. Thubten Chodron and the Dharma, and this has been the most miraculous piece of my life. The teachings on mind training and the stages of the path to awakening (lamrim in Tibetan) provided a way for me to understand my life as well as my motivations and actions.
Early on I started going for counseling to explore how to create healthy relationships — I had never seen a healthy relationship in my extended family and wondered if they even existed on this planet. And if they did, what are their characteristics? Fortunately, my virtuous karma ripened and I met wonderful teachers such as Ven. Chodron, whose gifts and hard work for the world I deeply appreciate. Those teachers have helped me heal the wounds that my dear and precious family had never been able to heal.
I’ve been in a relationship for twenty years now. We’ve never had a fight in that time. This doesn’t mean that we always agree with each other, but when we notice that one of us is invested in a certain position and cannot see things the way the other sees it, we’re able to communicate about it using the nonviolent communication approach developed by Marshall Rosenberg. We don’t have to scream at each other, throw things, or slam the door and run out of the room.
We also have a common view about food, and we make healthy food choices, eating a lot of fresh food. We don’t bring any junk food into the house at all. Eating healthy food has completely transformed my life.
The Buddha’s teachings have also had a profound impact on my professional life. For the last twenty-six years I have taught health education, advising between twenty and sixty people every week. I asked Ven. Chodron if I could rewrite many of the meditations on the stages of the path and mind training to make them applicable for non-Buddhists. For example, the Buddha emphasized that all living beings are interconnected and interdependent. We depend on one another simply to stay alive and we continually receive kindness from others, even from strangers and people we don’t always get along with. After putting some Buddhist concepts and guided meditations into secular language, I posted them on my website to help people blend healthy living with these helpful concepts. In 2009 I published the book Lighter and Free from the Inside Out.1
I know from personal experience and from working with thousands of people over the years that these Dharma principles are effective in helping people change their lives. We become what we think. We also become what we eat and what we do. Our moment-by-moment choices shape our entire life. This is the Buddhist notion of karma — our actions influence who we are and what we experience.
Applying these ideas to my own life, I was automatically able to maintain normal weight when I listened to my inner wise self to guide my choices and actions. It became evident to me that if we say we love our family and friends but do not take care of ourselves, we’re out of sync. Our friends and loved ones are directly affected by our unhealthy thinking and our illnesses. It’s hard for them to bear seeing us ill. If we want to show our dear ones love, we must take care of our own physical, mental, and spiritual health.
After twenty-six years of teaching about healthy living, I retired with 750 hours of sick leave to spare. Regularly making healthy food choices was a great gift. Three days a week my spouse and I go to the gym to do strength training, and we offer it up as part of our spiritual practice. For me, exercising at the gym is as exciting as watching paint dry, so I try to transform it into a spiritual practice. I say mantra and do Buddhist visualization practices while exercising. I imagine sending healing energy to everyone who is sick or injured. I pray for the other people at the gym who are struggling in their lives and trying to keep their bodies relatively healthy.
Similarly, at the grocery store, I mentally offer all the food there to all living beings, especially those who lack food and those who are ill. I also imagine the sky filled with delicious food and mentally offer it to the Buddhas and bodhisattvas. I dedicate the merit and pray for the well-being of the other shoppers around me.
I do a regular daily meditation practice, taking time to contemplate, generate compassion, and send prayers and healing energy to everybody. This little practice has changed my life; I haven’t missed a day in forty-three years, and the quality of my life has improved dramatically now that I make an effort to follow Dharma principles. We never know what karmic seeds from the past will ripen, so we must continue to practice.
My urge to compulsively overeat has been completely transformed and has not returned in forty-three years. My urge to drink alcohol and take drugs has evaporated and hasn’t come back in twenty-eight years. This is due to living according to the Dharma principles that the Buddha taught and Ven. Chodron has passed on to us. With her guidance and support, my life is going in a good direction.
The Abbey’s motto, “Creating peace in a chaotic world,” is a phrase that came to me during one of the early meetings of Friends of Sravasti Abbey. I’m happy to have contributed that. As we choose to eat healthily, generate compassion, and pray for the healing of all those who struggle with their own emotional and physical distress, we plant seeds for healing in the world and in our own lives.
In our discussion about how we relate to food and eating as Dharma practitioners, I would like to offer my personal perspective on how the Dharma has influenced my relationship with food.
I was a pretty normal kid growing up in the 1970s. I was never overweight, but I was terrified of gaining any weight whatsoever. By the time I was twelve, I was pretty heavy into dieting, and at fifteen I was anorexic. Then later on in my teens, I became bulimic. I spent about two decades teetering back and forth between starving myself (anorexia) and binging, panicking, vomiting, and then throwing out all the food in the house (bulimia). Although ostensibly I was trying to control my weight and what I was eating, actually I was seeking love and trying to control what other people thought about me so that I would feel good about myself. Obviously, food was a central part of this.
What we think about translates into our words and actions. In those twenty years of suffering from eating disorders, I did a lot of harm because of the pain I was experiencing and the way I was reacting to it with jealousy, anger, and craving. These emotions, in turn, brought more mental pain. By the time I was in my early thirties I was physically ill and mentally depressed. I had pushed my family away, and my second marriage was headed for divorce. My life was crumbling, and I was immersed in despair and hopelessness.
I was still struggling with the eating disorder, and yet I didn’t know how to be any other way. I had done this for as long as I could remember. It was the way I coped with my feelings, the way I dealt with stress. It was something I did every day to some extent. I hated it and hated myself for doing it, but I didn’t know any other way to be.
I met the Dharma when I was thirty-three and immediately connected with what the Buddha taught. Of course, reading a book isn’t a magic wand that makes everything change overnight. Transforming our mind requires work and takes time. I was still struggling with my relationships and the eating disorder, but I was gobbling up all the Dharma books I could find. The public library had a few books on Buddhism that I read repeatedly. I found some podcasts online and listened to them over and over again.
Despite the fact that my relationships were still messy, and I was still struggling with the eating disorder, something was beginning to change inside me. I could feel it. There was a little less attachment, a little less aversion, a little less jealousy. My mind was calming down, and I felt less despair. I found that my self-esteem was tethered less to food and eating. My sense of self-worth depended less on what I looked like and whether people liked me, and more on the potential that the Buddha says we all have for change, the potential to eliminate all our suffering and develop all good qualities.
When I first met the Dharma, I was so miserable that all I wanted was a moment’s happiness. So I wasn’t really paying attention to the religious side of it. I just wanted a little bit of peace because I was so unhappy.
For three or four years I read books and watched podcasts. I didn’t know a single Dharma practitioner and didn’t go to any Dharma centers. Then, in very rapid succession, five of my loved ones died. Life throws these things at you; it’s part of being alive. One of those deaths was particularly devastating, and I was suffering a lot from the loss. All I could think about was how much time I had wasted — how much I had been consumed with counting calories and what I looked like, how much I had worried about being thin and being loved — and in the end these things didn’t matter. These loved ones were gone, and I could have spent that time loving them, caring for them, being with them. I couldn’t get that time back. It was gone.
I didn’t want to live like that anymore. I didn’t want to be controlled by food, by what people thought about me, by how thin I was. Again, progress is not like waving a magic wand. It would have been really easy to fall back into despair at that point, to retreat back into those bad habits, into harming myself and lashing out at other people due to the pain and loss. But by that time I knew enough Dharma to know that there was a way out of suffering and that I just needed to practice it to achieve the peace I sought. I knew at that point that I had to get serious about spiritual practice and that meant finding a teacher. I had no idea what that meant or how to go about it, but I knew it was important.
It took some time. Eventually I found the Bodhisattva’s Breakfast Corner online (https://www.youtube.com/user/sravastiabbey), started taking the Sravasti Abbey Friends Education (SAFE) courses, and visited the Abbey. This is when things really took off. In the first SAFE course, I learned how to identify the afflictions in my mind, how to apply the antidotes right there in the moment, and how to create space between what I was experiencing and how I responded. That gave me the in-the-moment tools that I needed to work with my mind and to start healing myself and my relationships. I’ve now spent years doing this, and it’s made an incredible difference. My identity is no longer wrapped up in food or tethered to what I look like. Rather, I focus on this beautiful potential that we have, not only to transform our own minds but also to create an environment for other people to transform theirs, too.
In short, the Dharma has given me the tools to work with my mind right in the moment — one day, one meal, one breath at a time. Practicing what I have learned has made a huge difference in my life. I hope my experience will be helpful for people who are struggling with the same issues or who know somebody who is. May the Dharma transform your mind and bring you peace and joy, as it has for me.
Eating behavior and food choice are extremely complicated. The study of eating covers a range of areas from choices about what food to eat and concern about our weight, to eating-related problems such as obesity and eating disorders. Many professionals study and discuss eating behavior and food choice from social, biological, health, and clinical psychology perspectives. These people include dieticians, nutritionists, endocrinologists, geneticists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and a range of psychologists
People in all of these disciplines have developed theories about food choice in an attempt to understand why people eat what they eat and how they can be encouraged to eat more healthily. We can understand food choice on a continuum from healthy eating, to concern about our weight, to obesity and eating disorders. Studying diet entails placing our eating behavior within its social context. Although the studies and theories on diet are often explored by different researchers and published in different genres of publications, many common themes and ideas in the literature relate to gender, conflict, control, biology, communication, social norms, family, and cognition
A developmental perspective, a focus on cognition, and a psychophysiological approach are central to understanding the complexity of food choice. However, these theoretical frameworks, with their focus on the individual, minimize the complex meanings attributed to food and body shape and size. What we choose to eat is influenced by the meanings different groups of people attribute to various foods, meals as a social and cultural experience, the societal importance of being thin, and the stigma attached to being overweight. Developmental models discuss these in terms of what we learn about food by being with our family and observing others in society in general. Cognitive models address these factors by looking at social and moral norms. Psychophysiological perspectives predominantly focus on the individual’s physiological makeup and how what we eat affects our body. While they can be helpful, most of these theoretical frameworks are limited and narrow in their focus. Eating behavior and food choice is a dependent arising, and there are countless causes and conditions that influence these behaviors.
Attempts to eat a healthy diet are complicated by the meanings associated with food and body size, which can result in concern about our weight. For many people, concern about weight takes the form of being dissatisfied with our body, which contributes to lower self-esteem and results in dieting and attempts to eat less. Dissatisfaction with our body can mean having a distorted body image, having a mistaken notion of the ideal body size and believing our body doesn’t fit that, or simply having negative feelings about our body. At first researchers believed that dissatisfaction with our body was a problem for those with eating disorders. Now they recognize it is a common phenomenon that exists in many different groups in society.
Many dieters end up overeating and experience mild depression and a preoccupation with food. In some cases, obesity is linked to a genetic tendency to gain weight, but it is also associated with activity levels and food intake. In those individuals with a genetic predisposition for obesity, these episodes of overeating may result in weight gain, which, over many years, can result in obesity. Returning to normal weight involves changing0 our eating behavior, which is also linked to eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.
Anorexia is characterized by weight loss and is associated with a high mortality rate and a range of psychological and physical problems. Most anorexics receive help in some form or another, as the problem is easily recognized due to the loss of weight. Bulimia is more common than anorexia, although how common is unclear since many bulimics remain unrecognized — the behavior can be carried out in private and may not result in any observable physical changes. Bulimia is also associated with a range of psychological and physical problems, although the mortality rate is lower than for anorexia.
Many theories describe the causes of eating disorders, and they vary in their emphasis. Physiological models focus on the role of genetics. Other models — such as a family-systems approach, cognitive behavioral approach, socio-cultural model, and a significant-life-events model — place the individual within his or her social context. For a family-systems approach, the most important context is the family, whereas for other psychological models the broader context consisting of social meanings and norms is also relevant. At present, no single comprehensive theory explains the causes of eating disorders.
Cultivating healthy eating behaviors with a mindful, balanced perspective is the most successful approach. This approach complements our Buddhist practice of the middle way. In his first discourse, the Buddha calls the noble eightfold path the middle way because it avoids all extremes in conduct and views. It is a path of moderation between the extremes of sensual indulgence and asceticism. This supports our goal of healthy eating behavior and food choice.
Most diets are deprivation diets. Unfortunately, deprivation diets don’t work very well because our body, brain, and day-to-day environment fight against them. It is estimated that over 95 percent of all people who lose weight on a diet gain it back.2 Our body’s metabolism is very efficient due to millions of years of evolution. When it has an abundance of food to burn, it increases metabolism and burns calories faster. When it has less food to burn, it burns it more slowly and efficiently. This efficiency helped our ancestors survive famines. However, it does not help today’s deprived dieter. If you eat too little, the body goes into conservation mode and makes it even tougher to burn off the pounds. It seems as if our bodies and brains fight against deprivation.3
Research has shown that adults can lose a half a pound a week without triggering a metabolism slowdown.4 The majority of obese people gain a pound or two each year. In a classic article in Science focusing on obesity, Drs. James O. Hill and John C. Peters suggested that cutting only one hundred calories a day from an obese adult’s diet would prevent weight gain in most of the obese in the US population.5 Anything a person does to make this one-hundred-calorie difference will lead those who are overweight to lose weight. One could also lose weight by walking an extra two thousand steps each day (about one mile).
Dr. Leann Birch at Penn State University and Dr. Jennifer Fisher at the Baylor Medical School have identified four ways we are conditioned to relate to food as children that impact our relationship to food and our eating behavior:
Food as reward: “If you get an A on your test, we’ll go out for ice cream.”
Food as guilt: “Clean your plate; children are starving in China.”
Food as punishment: “Finish your vegetables or you can’t watch TV.”
Food as comfort: “Eat this pudding, it will make you feel better.”6
Being aware of our conditioning — especially the four above points — can help us develop a healthy, balanced meal plan while being aware of our thoughts and feelings about eating. Food is neither punishment nor reward, but if we have been conditioned to relate to food in this way, we will need to create new behavior patterns.
What is a balanced meal? Generally, half our plate should be vegetables and fruits and the other half protein and starch. Improving our eating habits is done in small steps. The most successful method over the long term is training ourselves to approach food with a specific plan of what and how much we are going to eat as well as keeping our introspective awareness active to monitor our thoughts, feelings, and behavior as we eat.
Here are some research-based mindful eating habits that are balanced and successful for those who are overweight:
Decrease calorie intake by one hundred to two hundred calories a day so that you won’t feel deprived.
Focus on changing0 small behaviors that will move you from mindless overeating to healthy eating. Evaluate the snacks you eat, where and when you snack, and what you are doing when you snack.
Design three easy, doable changes you can make without much sacrifice.
Use a daily checklist to help keep track. Experts in modifying behavior say it takes about twenty-eight days to break an old habit and replace it with a healthy one. With a piece of paper that has a month’s worth of days across the top, write your three daily one hundred-calorie decreases down the side. Every evening, check off the changes you have accomplished. This small act of accountability will help you be more mindful throughout the day.
Although eating behavior is very complex, with intention, mindfulness, and awareness we can train ourselves to find a healthy balance without approaching food from the extremes of overeating or deprivation.