MINDFULNESS WITH EATING BEGINS AT THE beginning, with hunger. You may have heard the famous Zen question, “What is the sound of one hand [clapping]?” In mindful eating we might ask, What is the sound of hunger? What is the taste of hunger? Where does hunger reside in the body? What causes hunger to arise?
There is also a Zen saying, “When hungry, just eat.” It sounds simple, but it’s not. For most of us, when we were children it actually was that simple. Studies show that infants and young children have an intuitive sense of what and how much to eat. When babies are given a variety of foods on the tray of their high chairs, to their parents’ dismay, they may eat only one food and ignore all the rest. Their mother may despair, thinking, “How will they grow up healthy if all they eat is mashed potatoes?” If the mother panics and begins to spoon pureed chicken into her baby’s mouth out of fear that he must have more protein, it is the start of subversion of the infant’s bodily wisdom. If we are able to convince the mother to relax, wait, and watch, we can show her that over the course of a week her baby will eat just right, as if prompted by an inner nutritionist. Babies are tuned in to the messages from their body. Given enough choices and time they will eat in a balanced way, just the right amounts of calories, vitamins and minerals, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. This is a skill, an inner listening, that we all were able to do at one time but forgot as we grew older.
Have you watched healthy young children eat? They run in from a morning of playing hard, sit down at the table, and with obvious appetite they eat just enough. Then off they run to play again. Maybe they had to be called several times to come in and eat. Meals are short but necessary refueling stops in between times of play. Eating is secondary to the business of being a child.
As these intuitive eaters grow older, eating is no longer a fueling stop. Food begins to serve many purposes. It is used to sooth, to distract, to procrastinate, to numb, to entertain, to seduce, to reward, and even to punish. The once straightforward relationship between hunger, eating, and satisfaction of our childhood becomes tangled up in all sorts of thoughts and emotions.
As adults we may find that we have to call ourselves away from dinner and coax ourselves not to eat. The business of eating has become a primary focus, an over-the-kitchen-counter medicine for the many pressures and anxieties of our busy lives. Our eating has become driven by many different forces, many kinds of hunger.
What happened as we grew into adults that turned our natural hunger and our easy ways of finding satisfaction in eating into complicated problems? The answer has two parts. First, our environment taught us unhelpful habits related to eating and food. Then our minds took over from our bodies. The intelligence we had as infants disappeared under pressure from our anxious caretakers. As their affection for us morphed into anxiety about us, our innate wisdom about eating and our innocent pleasure in eating began to fade away. Out of love for us they ruined our natural appetite.
Perhaps your father’s family was poor and there was pervasive anxiety in his childhood home about whether there would be enough food on the table tomorrow. Your dad resolved that his kids would never go without, and thus he takes pride in serving steak every Saturday night. He told you, “When I was kid we were lucky to have any meat at all. There are plenty of children dying because they don’t have food, so eat your steak!” Never mind that you didn’t like meat, or that your leftover steak could not be sent airmail to Africa, or that your parents had served you too much food. You felt guilty for not being able to obey your parents, for not appreciating what they had worked so hard to give you, and for eating while watching the faces of starving people on the evening news.
In restaurants the pressure grew stronger. “I paid good money for this food, so you better eat it all!” The habit you developed in your childhood of cleaning your plate may have saved you a lot of grief then. But it can cause you a lot of grief if it persists into middle age. Unless you are a lumberjack or an Olympic swimmer, cleaning your plate in a restaurant these days can easily fill you with twice the calories you can burn in a day. Portion sizes for many foods in restaurants are two to five times larger now than they were when our parents went out to eat.
Here’s another example. Let’s say you reacted to your parents’ loving nagging by rebelling. Let’s say they told you not to drink coffee because it would stunt your growth, or that you must eat your vegetables before you had dessert. You decided that as soon as you left home you would drink coffee and eat desserts any time you felt like it. That kind of bouncing off of what your parents pushed you to do is called a reactive habit pattern. You leave home thinking, “Finally I’m free,” but you are not. When our behavior is controlled by reactive habit patterns from childhood, we are still tethered to our parents. We are not free.
Mindfulness practice has the potential to free us from the reactive habit patterns we carry around inside. It can liberate us from the unwanted voices and emotions that have taken over our eating and flavored our food, obscuring its taste and depriving us of our birthright, which is to simply eat and enjoy it thoroughly.
Zen teachings encourage us not to worry about who started all this anxiety and guilt, or who is to blame for our unwholesome habit patterns around food. We say that these kinds of difficulties are a normal part of growing up as a human. Everyone gets bumped and scraped and wounded in diverse ways as they grow up. You needn’t look around outside or inside yourself for someone to blame.
The questions we are interested in are, Can we change it? If so, who can change it? The answer to the first question is yes. It is possible, through the power of awareness, to unfreeze reactive habit patterns and shift in a very natural way toward health. Who can change it? Only you. You, just as you are. You do need a certain amount of courage to look directly at what is going on in each moment. You have that courage, or you wouldn’t have read this far in this book. You also need the support and encouragement of others who have decided to get on with the work of changing, too.
All of us want to move toward greater freedom, but the experience of freedom does not occur overnight. Often we overchallenge ourselves, as when making New Year’s resolutions. This results in frustration and more critical inner voices. We can get off to a good start by lowering our standards and initiating our mindful eating by having one conscious sip of tea in the morning. Take a moment to become aware of the color of the tea, its fragrance. Feel the liquid in your mouth and throat. Open your awareness to the presence of warm sunlight, cool rain, and dark earth in this one sip of tea. Everything will unfold from this simple act. Just being aware for a few moments seems like a small event. Don’t underestimate the power of mindfulness. It is through these small moments of mindfulness that we reverse old habits and initiate an inner movement toward health.
Before we work on mindfulness during eating, we need to become aware of what urges us to eat. Most people will tell you they eat because they are hungry. When you ask them to describe how they know that they are hungry, however, they become befuddled.
One of the reasons people are confused about hunger is that there are several different aspects to hunger. All of these aspects are actual experiences. They occur as sensations, thoughts, and even emotions within our bodies, minds, and hearts.
There can be many reasons for the feeling “I am hungry.” It could be that we have not eaten for two days. Perhaps we are tired or anxious or lonely. Some of our experiences of hunger are not hunger for food, but when we feel them, we mistakenly try to relieve them by eating. With mindfulness we can begin to untangle and separate these different experiences of hunger. Only then can we respond to each one in an appropriate and wholesome way.
The most basic type of hunger is physiologic. It is the request of our body for food. It occurs when our energy reserves are low and our cells ask for more fuel to keep us warm and alive. For example, when we are cold our bodies need calories to burn to keep us warm. Typically we become hungrier in the winter and put on a few pounds of insulating fat. In hot weather we lose our appetites, eat lightly, and keep cooler by shedding a few pounds. If we were able to perceive and respond just to cellular hunger, in the way wild animals do, we would feed ourselves in a sane and straightforward way. When hungry we would just eat. When not, not. Life would be simple.
The beauty of being a human is that we are made up of more impulses than those needed for bare survival. We take delight in food. It calls to us through our senses, our eyes, our sensitive nose, our watering mouth, our longing heart. When our senses are activated, we often respond in an automatic way, by putting food into our mouths. In order not to be fooled, in order to create some space for the possibility of change, we need to look carefully at what is happening inside our own being. We need to investigate our own experiences of different kinds of hunger. We need to insert a tiny moment of reflection before we bite into a hot slice of pizza or the gooey chocolate brownie. This sounds easy, but it can be an interesting challenge.
This chapter explores the nine kinds or aspects of hunger we have discovered in our mindful eating workshops. They are eye hunger, touch hunger, ear hunger, nose hunger, mouth hunger, stomach hunger, cellular hunger, mind hunger, and heart hunger. In addition to these nine, there is hunger that is actually thirst. After we learn to tune in to these different kinds of hunger, we can sit down and do a quick assessment before eating: On a scale of zero to ten, what is my level of eye hunger? Of mouth hunger? Of cellular hunger? Once we know this, we can eat appropriately and satisfy all the parts of us that are hungry. We can thoroughly enjoy eating.
You have just finished a large meal with a small group of friends in a restaurant.
The atmosphere has been happy and warm, the food delicious. The waitress approaches and asks, “May I show you the dessert tray?” You start to protest, “No, I’m really stuffed,” but find yourself saying instead, “It can’t hurt to look.” The tray appears. The eyes roam over an appealing array, a fresh Meyer lemon tart with a flower of whipped cream on top, a dark chocolate mousse with ginger shavings, a thick slice of apple pie oozing caramel filling, New York cheesecake in raspberry sauce…Hmmm…
Even though the stomach is protesting, “I’m too full. Please, no more!” the eyes are enchanted (and it’s hard to send the expectant young waitress back without an order). The decision is no longer whether to have a dessert but which dessert to have. Eye hunger has won out. The eyes say, “I could eat that!” even when stomach and cellular hunger are oversated.
Advertisers know about eye hunger. They devise lovely food ads in magazines, on billboards, on TV, and on movie theater screens. There are photographers whose specialty is photographing food so as to maximize its allure through the eye portal. The eye sees, the eye clings, the eye sends signals to the mind saying, “We’re hungry for that!” The eye can convince the mind to override the signals from the stomach and body, even when they are not at all hungry.
After a good dinner in the restaurant you and your friends decide to go to a movie. As you settle in your seats, brilliant ads for food and drink shine down upon you from the huge screen: Raisinets, Good & Plenty, Butterfingers, cheese nachos, hot buttered popcorn, Coke, and Pepsi. You’ve just eaten, but the sight of the caramel dripping from a three-foot Snickers bar causes eye hunger to kick in. The mind agrees. The movie will be two hours long, and besides, there’s always room for a Snickers.
Or maybe you decide that you don’t have room for any more food. Your friend, however, buys a large popcorn and, just to be polite, passes it to you. It smells so good. You have a choice, to sniff deeply and just enjoy the smell (“weird!”) or to start munching (“normal”).
People generally decide how much of a given food they will eat based upon feedback from the eyes. The eyes say something like, “Let’s eat half of this” or “Let’s eat all of this.” In his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink describes research showing that people who are given a large bucket of free but stale popcorn will dip in twenty-one more times and eat 173 more calories than people given a medium-sized bucket. This happens regardless of whether they have just eaten a full meal or not. In other words, the eyes will override information from the mouth (“This stale popcorn tastes like styrofoam”) and from the stomach and body (“We just ate, give us a break”). The ears are coconspirators. It hard to listen to other people in the theater around you munching away and resist the desire to join in.1
Researchers wanted to see how far the power of the eyes to override other signals of satiety could be stretched. They invented the bottomless soup bowl, which continuously refilled as people ate. After twenty minutes of eating, the people with bottomless bowls still had not detected that this was occurring! Even though the people with bottomless bowls ate 73 percent more soup than people with normal bowls, they estimated that they had eaten the same amount of calories as everyone else.2
The eyes also have the power to override the mouth. In Mindless Eating Wansink tells the story of a Navy cook whose troops were demanding cherry Jell-O. He had none on hand but found that he was able to make them believe they were eating cherry Jell-O simply by adding red food coloring to lemon Jell-O.3
Even the experts, the people who do this very research, can be fooled by the eye. At a party they served themselves and ate significantly more ice cream, without being aware of it, if they were given larger serving scoops and larger bowls. If we turn this around, the power of eye hunger can be turned to good use. People wishing to eat less should use smaller plates or bowls and smaller serving utensils. They can fill their plate up, but at least half the plate should be filled with vegetables and salad, the other half with protein and starch.4 The mix of colors and shapes satisfies eye hunger, the variety of tastes and textures satisfies mouth hunger, and the balance of nutrients satisfies cellular hunger.
The eye can even make us hungry when it reads words about food. When I was first married, I was fresh out of college. Wanting to study how to be a wife and cook, I read The Joy of Cooking, which my grandmother had given me as a wedding present. As I read, I became hungry. My mouth watered as I took in not actual food but words about food, words that conjured up images of delicious dishes. I began cooking my way through the book. I also ate my way through it. I planned meals beginning with the dessert and working backward. I was a person who never weighed myself because my weight was always the same—but now I noticed that my clothes were not fitting. My husband commented that I was looking zaftig (Yiddish for “pleasantly plump”).
Along with the difficulty of tight clothing, I began to be secretive. While my husband was at work, I would bake, say, a pan of fudge brownies. That night after dinner we each would have one or two. The next day, when he went off to work, I would sample the rest, and continue sampling until they were all gone. Afraid that he would notice, and feeling guilty about eating four days’ dessert at once, I would bake another pan. Then I would “have to” eat two to four brownies more so the pan would look the same as it had the night before.
At this point I realized that I was in trouble. When I did find a scale, I discovered that I had gained fifteen pounds. I realized that I was eating not from hunger but from a mixture of boredom and frustrated creativity. I got a job, became busy, and gradually went back to my accustomed size. I also gained a healthy respect for the suffering of people who struggle with eating.
EXERCISE
Becoming Aware of Eye Hunger
When you first sit down to eat, take a few moments to look at the food. Notice colors, textures, shapes, arrangements on the plate. What do the eyes like about the food?
• • •
Buy or borrow a woman’s magazine such as Woman’s Day or Martha Stewart Living.
Leaf through the pages, noticing what pictures appeal to eye hunger. How many photos in one magazine made you hungry?
If there are recipes in the magazine, try reading some without paying attention to the pictures. (It is hard to ignore the photos. They make them appealing on purpose.) This may work better if you have someone else read the recipes out loud. Notice if just hearing the recipes creates hunger for you or not.
• • •
When you go to a restaurant notice anything that appeals to your eye hunger. Include the menu and any food displays in your investigation.
What satisfies eye hunger? Beauty. Remember this common experience of eye hunger: You’ve eaten a filling meal and then the dessert tray arrives. If those desserts were blended in one bowl, a muddy mélange of pureed cheesecake, apple strudel, chocolate mousse, and lemon meringue pie, you’d say no thanks. It’s the deliberate eye appeal, the beauty of each dessert that persuades you to take in the extra calories.
To satisfy eye hunger we have to ask, what is beautiful?
The Japanese are masters of the art of nourishing through the eyes. In a traditional formal meal there are often twelve or fifteen small courses, each one a work of art appropriate to the season. Each offering is described by the waitress in a quiet, lilting voice. First she brings a little bowl of clear soup with a few twists of citron peel and fragrant herb leaves, then a bit of freshly made tofu with a pungent miso dressing, grilled and resting on fern leaves, followed by a pine-scented matsutake mushroom on a yellow and orange maple leaf. As each handmade bowl or plate is cleared away, another small treasure arrives: a delicately carved fresh bamboo shoot, a few slices of baked yam, a quivering square of sesame tofu, each with its own sauce and exquisite decoration. You can sit for several hours, like a king or queen, receiving many small works of art, presented one at a time so each can be fully appreciated. You leave satisfied, completely nourished through all the senses, and warmed in your heart by the loving attention that is palpable in all you have eaten.
Our eyes do get hungry. When we are distracted and not really looking at things, we feel vaguely dissatisfied and disconnected. Think of yourself rushing off to work. You run by your child or partner and give them a quick good-bye peck on the cheek. This habit of not really looking, of skimming our eyes over the surfaces of things, leaves us hungry and lonely in a fundamental way. When we stop and look with awareness, we connect. A brief connection like this can lift our mood, feeding our heart for hours. When we just look, anything we see becomes beautiful: cracks in a sidewalk, a dead plant, the wrinkled hands of an old woman. The Navaho admonish their people, “Walk in beauty.” When we use mindful eyes, everything is beautiful and everyone walks in beauty.
EXERCISE
Creating a Feast for the Eyes
Try making a mindful meal once a week for yourself as if you were a guest. You could get out your best plates and silverware, a place mat or tablecloth, even a small vase of flowers and a candle. Arrange food appealingly, as if for a guest. As you eat, let your eyes “feed” on not only the food but the other aspects of your table.
Even when you have a snack, you can take time to make it attractive. You can arrange apple slices in a fan or tangerine segments in a star shape on a napkin or plate, and add a leaf or flower. (In Japan people do not gnaw on whole apples or pears. They are always sliced in interesting shapes and attractively presented.)
EXERCISE
Feeding Eye Hunger without Eating
As you proceed through this book, you’ll learn to observe your hunger with greater curiosity and attentiveness. Sometimes you’ll discover that when you feel hungry, it’s not that your body wants food but that your eyes are hungry for beauty.
Experiment with feeding eye hunger by itself, without eating any food. Find something that is lovely or at least interesting to look at. Stop and really look at this something for a few minutes, drinking it in with your eyes. It could be the colored petals of a flower, a picture on the wall, or the many greens of the tree leaves outside your office window. Flower gardens or fabric stores are great places to feed the eyes on colors, patterns, and textures. The thing you choose to look at could be as simple as the colored paint on the walls or the patterns and textures of a cement sidewalk.
Imagine that the energy that radiates from this sight enters your eyes and is absorbed into your body. Feed your eyes as long as you like. You may find that feeding the eyes also nourishes the heart.
When I taught in Malawi I sometimes ate in the student cafeteria. We were served a heaping mound of nsima, hot cornmeal mush, surrounded by a moat of sauce, one day made of groundnuts (peanuts), another day of cabbage or tomatoes and a bit of fish. The students skillfully rolled a walnut sized ball of nsima, dipped it the sauce, and poked it into their mouths. They were connoisseurs of nsima and could tell you what region of the country it came from and whether the season was wet or dry as the corn grew.
In many cultures people eat with their hands. They say that using metal utensils is like attacking the food with weapons. Arab, African, and Indian people enthusiastically describe eating with their hands as more mindful. They say it helps you slow down and connect to what you are eating. (It is true that if you are eating with your hands, you cannot also be working on a computer or playing video games.) They find more satisfaction in eating when touch is added to the other senses.
There are rules. Wash the hands before and after eating with water, or, in desert countries, with sand. Eat only with the right hand (the left is used for personal hygiene). A small bit of flat bread or ball of rice is used to pick up the cooked vegetables, lentils, meat, or fish sauce that are served with it, in just the right proportion. You don’t lick your fingers except in some cultures, where noisy licking of fingers at the end of the meal broadcasts how delicious the food tasted.
Where people eat with their hands, they often eat together from common serving dishes or one large tray in the middle of the table. This supports a feeling of equality, intimacy, and warmth, of sharing both food and conversation. One person may put a delicious morsel on another’s plate or even hand-feed it to the other person. The fragrance of the food left on the fingers at the end of the meal later can invoke happy memories of a meal enjoyed. Some ethnic restaurants in New York City are now encouraging patrons to “try eating everything but soup” with their hands for a more satisfying experience.
Although it’s messy, it may be better to let babies feed themselves. It helps them learn “self-regulation of intake.” In one study, babies who fed themselves with finger food ate more appropriate foods, while infants who were fed pureed baby food from a spoon by an adult preferred sweet food and were much more likely to be obese. If adults push “one last bite” into a resisting mouth and an already full stomach they are teaching a child to override the wisdom of their own body’s feedback signals.
Touch is not confined to the fingers. Our lips and tongue are extremely sensitive to the textures of food: sleek cold butter on fluffy bread warm from the oven, crunchy bits of toffee in creamy vanilla ice cream, the bubbly froth on top of a latte coffee.
Eating is one of the most intimate and sensuous acts we humans engage in. When we take time to be mindful of how food feels in our fingers, on our lips, to our tongue, we increase the pleasure of this intimate experience—the experience of just eating.
Human beings thrive when they are touched. Studies show that touch deprivation, also called “skin hunger,” can lead to a variety of health and psychological problems, including distorted body image. Research studies also show that massage is therapeutic for many very different conditions. It helps premature infants gain weight and go home faster, lowers high blood pressure, improves lung function in children with asthma, increases mobility in people with Parkinson’s, lowers blood sugar in diabetics, lowers levels of stress hormone cortisol, reduces anxiety and depression, is a sleep aid for people with dementia, and reduces pain from a variety of causes. If one medicine had this many positive effects it would be called a wonder drug. These effects seem to be mediated by reduction in the stress hormone cortisol and increased secretion of “feel good” hormones like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin.
As we use more electronic devices, tell school children to “keep your hands to yourself,” and are warned about the dangers of sexual harassment, our society has become more avoidant of touch. In one study friends in different countries were observed having a conversation in a café. English people did not touch at all, Americans touched twice in an hour, French people touched 110 times, and Puerto Ricans touched 180 times, or an average of three times a minute!
We need to recognize that gentle, kindly touch is essential to human thriving. It not only feeds our heart’s hunger for intimacy, but it actually improves the health of our physical heart. We need to learn healthy ways to satisfy our natural hunger to be touched.
EXERCISE
Becoming Aware of Touch
Stop reading for a few minutes. Close your eyes and become aware of all the sensations of touch on your skin. Notice the soft brush of clothing on your body as you breathe. Where are the sensations the most gentle? Where are they the strongest?
Walk around with the purpose of feeling many textures. You can use your hands, cheeks, or even your bare feet. How many textures can you discover? Wood, china, glass, carpet, warm pet fur, stone, rough brick, slippery satin fabric, the bristles of a toothbrush, etc.
EXERCISE
Eating with Your Hands
Try eating an entire meal with your hands, that is, without using utensils. If you have children, they might enjoy trying this with you. Follow the custom of washing your hands before and after the meal. You can have small “finger bowls” of water and a cloth or paper towel at each place. As much as you try to be neat, you may need an extra napkin or two.
Investigate how this way of eating affects your attention to eating, the feeling of connection with your eating companions (if any), and also your enjoyment of and satisfaction with the food. Does it feel as if you are violating all the rules you were taught in childhood? Or does it feel liberating or even fun?
Have you noticed how the names of many skin care products refer to food? In a quick look at a well-known brand of “nourishing” face and body creams I find these flavors: “pomegranate and mango,” “strawberry and guava,” “cucumber and melon,” “vanilla crème,” and “Greek yoghurt.” When you massage “coconut body butter” and “peppermint reviving leg gel” into your skin, you are being nourished by touch as well as by the notion that you are feeding yourself through your skin.
EXERCISE
Feeding Touch Hunger
The research is clear: gentle to firm massage has many health benefits for people of all ages. Perhaps you already have regular massages with a licensed masseuse, or you have a loving partner who likes to cuddle or obligingly scratches your back. If not, you can do this simple exercise to provide compassionate touch to your body.
Sit quietly, eyes closed, and clasp your hands palm to palm. Become aware of how your hands support and care for each other all day long. Let them touch each other with kindness.
Now place your hands, palms up, on your thighs. Feel your hands fill with gentle kindness, as though you were touching a young child, animal, or person that you love.
Place one hand on the opposite upper arm. Hold it there for a while. Now switch, placing your other hand on the opposite upper arm.
Now place your hands palm up on your thighs again and let them fill again with kindness and caring.
Place both hands over your eyes. Then very gently touch or stroke your face.
Repeat this exercise by filling the hands and then placing them over different body parts, such as your heart, your stomach, or any body part that is having difficulty just now.
You can try this exercise in a different way, by using a light stroking motion or gentle massage.
You might try massaging a part of the body that is having difficulty using lotion or one of the “skin foods” mentioned above.
In a mindful eating workshop a few years ago we did an exercise on comfort foods. One person rapturously described a delicious pasta dish with a special creamy sauce she had eaten at a restaurant in Portland. During the next break I watched with amusement as participants crowded around her, pencils and pads poised to take down the name of the dish and the restaurant. It was a perfect example of hunger evoked by sound. The sounds of her words were translated into imagined tastes and imagined happiness by many minds.
Brian Wansink has done a number of experiments demonstrating the power of ear hunger. In his test restaurant, waiters described a complimentary glass of cheap wine as either “from a new winery in California” or “from a new North Dakota winery.” People who thought their wine was from North Dakota rated the wine as tasting bad and their food as less tasty, ate less food, and left the restaurant earlier. In another experiment, when a store played French music, people bought more French wine; when they played German music, people took home more German wine. Another research team found that people eating bittersweet toffee candies rated them more bitter when they listened to lower pitched music and more sweet when listening to music of a higher pitch.
There are some foods we expect to make noise when we eat them, like raw carrots, and some foods we expect to be quiet, like pudding. Dr. Charles Spence of Oxford University is a specialist in multisensory or cross modal aspects of perception. He was given the IgNobel Award (for unusual imaginative research that makes people laugh and then think) in 2008 for a study showing that changing the pitch and volume of the “crunch” of a potato chip (crisp) altered people’s perception of how crisp and fresh it was. He also invented an ice cream that tasted of eggs and bacon (!). When people ate the ice cream with a soundtrack of cackling chickens playing in the background, they rated the ice cream more “eggy” in flavor, but when they heard a soundtrack of frying bacon, they thought the bacon flavor was stronger.
Part of our pleasure in eating comes from what we hear. Dr. Spence relates the story of how the makers of Magnum ice cream bars altered the bar’s chocolate coating in response to consumer complaints that chocolate bits fell off and stained their clothing. But the new formula caused more complaints, because the chocolate no longer made its “distinct cracking sound” every time one of their customers bit into the bar. The company had to return to their original, pleasingly noisy coating.
Our strong preference for foods involving crunchy, crispy, or crackling sounds may arise from the implication that the food is fresh. A Cheetos ad proclaimed, “The cheese that goes crunch!” and Doritos once claimed that research proved that their chips produced the loudest crack.5
When people are blindfolded and white noise is piped into their earphones, the louder the volume, the less salty or sweet they rate the food they are eating. Loud ambient noise may explain why the food served on airplanes and to astronauts must be heavily seasoned to be enjoyed. Some restaurants are quite noisy, with music played at decibels that are uncomfortable and make talking to your friends an exercise in reading lips.
This may be a deliberate ploy to move customers along and increase profits. People eat more food (and drink more alcohol more quickly) when noise levels are higher and they cannot hear the sounds of their own eating and drinking.
EXERCISES
Becoming Aware of Ear Hunger
Notice the ways in which sound evokes hunger. Think of a dog or cat that comes running when they hear the whiz of a can opener. Here are other examples: the crinkle of a candy wrapper, the snap of a soda can pop-top, the sizzling sound of frying bacon.
ALTERING THE SOUNDS OF FOOD
Try eating half a snack or meal while wearing earplugs or noise-cancelling earphones. Halfway through, take the sound mufflers off and see if you notice any differences in the taste or enjoyment of your food.
LISTENING TO THE MUSIC OF EATING
Try preparing and eating a meal or snack in silence. As you eat, pay special attention to all the sounds that come to your ears. For example, there are many sounds involved just in making and eating toast. They include: the sound of the bread wrapper as you pull the bread out, the bread being dropped into the toaster slot, the toaster button being pushed down, the toast popping up, the knife cutting butter, the crunch as you first bite in, and the sounds inside your head of chewing and of swallowing. If you listen very carefully, you will hear more subtle sounds—the clink of a knife being put down on a plate, the small noise of crumbs dropping, the whisper of your fingers picking up a napkin and wiping your mouth.
When you are eating with others, at a table or in a cafeteria or restaurant, take a few minutes to just listen to the “music” of eating, as if you were a modern composer taking in ideas for a new avant-garde symphony. What do you hear? It might be lovely or amusing. Silverware on china? Chairs scraping? The murmur of conversation at a nearby table? A cell phone ringing?
SATISFYING EAR HUNGER WITHOUT USING FOOD
What does the ear like? Sounds. But what sounds our ears find pleasing depend upon many factors. Infants like soothing sounds, many teenagers like loud heavy metal rock. Sounds that are soft and repetitive tend to be calming, such as the sound of ocean waves or the rustling of bamboo leaves in a light wind.
Meditate on sound. Sit quietly, eyes partly or completely closed, and open your ears to sound. Refrain from naming or thinking about the sounds. Listen as though listening to interesting music from an alien planet. Listen for obvious and then more subtle sounds. Listen for sounds that are pleasing or sounds that can change your mood from sour to sweet.
I had a sudden and powerful awareness of nose hunger when the doors of the airport shuttle train opened. We’d had a sixteen-hour flight, stuffed into small seats with no chance to exercise, lulled through the sleepless hours by six mediocre movies and airline meals at times that did not match our bodies’ desire for food. With a tendency toward constipation on long sedentary trips, I landed feeling tired, out of sorts, and uncomfortably full. I was roused abruptly from half sleep when the smell of hot, spicy tomato sauce drifted in the open doors of the train. “I smell pizza! Let’s have some pizza!” my mind yelled.
Fortunately the messages from the rest of my body were very clear. “Are you crazy? You are not convincing the mouth up there to take in one more morsel until we get rid of what’s plugging up the works down here.” The smell of food had awakened a desire for “comfort food,” food that actually would increase the suffering of my poor uncomfortable body. It was more evidence that disharmony with food begins with lack of awareness within the body, heart, and mind.
Smells exert a primitive and potent effect upon the subconscious mind. Maybe it’s because the olfactory nerves are just short outgrowths from the brain or because the sense of smell was so important to our ancestors. They depended upon their sense of smell to locate food and to distinguish friends from enemies in forests or the dark of night. A good sense of smell was protective, indicating what foods might be good to eat and giving warning when food had spoiled. Humans are not the best smellers in the animal kingdom, but we are still able to distinguish ten thousand different smells.
What we call the “taste” or “flavor” of a food is almost entirely the smell of the food. Our tongues are actually able to taste only five flavors: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (a savory or meaty taste). Have you ever lost your sense of smell when you had a bad cold? If you love to eat it can be very distressing. When we can’t smell food, we perceive it as having almost no taste. Without smell all the subtlety of flavor is lost. Food becomes something you have to eat because your body needs fuel. You might as well save money and time by eating dog kibble. It’s interesting at those times to pay attention to what you are able to detect, which is only the tongue’s five basic flavors. The only other characteristic that you notice is in the textures of different foods, soft or crunchy. Just five flavors and a few textures are not enough to interest us.
Merchants are very aware of nose hunger, and they count on it to entice you. Think of the smells of a bakery, a coffee shop, a fast food hut, or a cinnamon bun stand that pipes that almost irresistible smell all over the mall. The right smells will make us eat more. When researchers impregnated plastic bowls with the artificial odor of cinnamon and raisin, people ate more plain oatmeal than when the bowls were scented with a discordant scent, macaroni and cheese.6 I can’t eat chocolate any more, but when I serve, say, chocolate truffles, I’ll hold one, inhale deeply, and just enjoy the aroma. It’s almost as good as eating it.
EXERCISE
Becoming Mindful of Nose Hunger
This is not an exercise to do when eating in polite company (unless you want to get rid of your polite company). Wait until you are alone or with someone you can explain this to.
1. Before you start to eat a meal, smell the food. Rather than bending down to nuzzle your food, bring the plate or bowl or piece of food up to your nose and inhale deeply, like a wine connoisseur. Do this several times, trying to detect as many components to the smells as you can. You can imagine that you have been asked to guess the ingredients or to write a description of the aroma.
2. As you eat, continue to be aware of smell (which we also call taste). As you chew, notice if the taste is stronger on the in-breath or the out-breath, or does it change?
3. After you’ve finished eating, sit for a few moments and notice how long you continue to taste the food. If you decided not to take another bite until you could no longer taste the food you had just swallowed, how long might that take?
Nose hunger is satisfied by fragrance. Once we asked my Zen teacher Maezumi Roshi why we offered incense four times a day as part of our services. Instantly he replied, “Because it is food for the ancestors. Those who have died have no bodies. This fragrance is what nourishes them.” My scientific mind was a little stunned, but my practice mind took this information in, and I have contemplated and used it while doing mindful eating ever since.
EXERCISES
Feeding Yourself with Fragrance
There is a lovely, subtle meditation on breath and smell. As you breathe, maintain awareness of changes in scent on the in- and out-breath. To be aware of the changing flow of smell is a more delicate and difficult meditation than to be aware of changes in what the other senses take in, such as sound or touch.
You might like to begin this practice in a setting where scent is fairly obvious. It could be a meditation room where incense is burning or at a shopping mall suffused with the smell of cinnamon buns. If your sense of smell is not good, you could try meditation on the smells at a food court or in your meditation space at home when someone is cooking dinner.
Once you have some practice with ongoing awareness of obvious smells, try the meditation on scent out of doors, preferably at night, when you are not as distracted by visual phenomena.
• • •
This is a fairly radical exercise. Imagine that you have entered a realm of existence (perhaps after death) in which you have no body, only sensory input and consciousness. You are nourished only by scent. “Feed” yourself by putting something with a pleasant scent in a small bowl or cup, like a teaspoon of vanilla or almond flavoring, or a bit of spice like nutmeg or cinnamon. Inhale the fragrance, imagining as vividly as you can that it is nourishing you.
What do you notice? Are there any changes in body, heart, or mind as you inhale?
You can also try this with incense, flowers, or aromatic herbs like lavender. You can also sniff your baby’s head or lie next to your partner at night and inhale their fragrance, feeling it nourish you. I remember my little sister sitting on the radiator and holding our cat when she was upset. She would calm herself by sniffing its head. She said it smelled like popcorn.
Mouth hunger is the mouth’s desire for pleasurable sensations. What constitutes pleasant sensations in the mouth varies from person to person. I don’t like hot sauce. If food is fiery hot, my mouth is in such distress it can’t taste anything but HOT! If I’m eating Thai shrimp curry with mangoes it might as well be sautéed lumps of clay if it’s smothered in chilis. My husband, however, loves hot sauces of all kinds. He says that the sensation of burning in his mouth enhances the flavors of food.
What your mouth experiences as pleasant depends upon factors such as genetics, food habits in your family of origin, cultural traditions, and conditioning, which means the association of certain foods with other pleasant or unpleasant experiences. Strawberries and cream will have an entirely different appeal if you enjoyed them with a lover or if you had to eat them at Grandma’s house when you were carsick.
An example of a genetic factor in mouth hunger is the reaction of different people to the herb cilantro. Most people enjoy this green herb in Mexican or Asian food. However, about 10 percent of the population, usually people of European origin, find it revolting. They describe it as tasting like soap, unwashed hair, burned rubber, or crushed bugs. Some people’s mouths delight in cilantro, while other people’s mouths are dismayed. This appears to be a heritable trait.
Here’s another example. There is a curious tropical fruit called durian. It smells like raw sewage. The odor is so strong that people have been kicked off buses for carrying a ripe durian. Some people are able to get past the smell and really enjoy its taste. There are even durian addicts. The mouth’s ability to enjoy durian may be a genetic trait, a learned behavior, or both.
I’ve learned a lot about cultural differences in mouth hunger by traveling abroad. When I lived in Africa there was palpable excitement in the open food market when a certain seasonal delicacy appeared. People crowded around mounds of brown deep-fried nut-like objects, buying them by the cupful and savoring them out of hand as they strolled away from the busy vendor. Infected with their enthusiasm, I crowded in close, money in hand, and bought a small bagful. Once at home I discovered that I had purchased half a pound of fried termites! I ate one, then gave the rest to our pet bush baby, who devoured them with relish. I felt queasy about eating fried insects, but the bush baby and the Bantu savored them. However, when the African villagers found out that we ate crayfish and lobster, they thought we were demented. No human beings should eat such things, they told us. The difference between what we each think is delicious or revolting is largely due to conditioning. It depends upon what we were taught was good to eat and drink by our family and culture.
There is an American advertisement for food that promises “a party in the mouth.” Like the parties of youth, a party in the mouth seems to consist of full-volume, blasting sensation. In America the food industry has amped up the level of sensation in food, particularly snack foods, to include more salt, more sugar, more spice, and more fat—even more sourness. This is quite noticeable when you travel abroad. In Japan and Europe the soft drinks, teas, and juices have about half the level of sweetness of comparable American drinks. The drinks actually refresh, rather than leaving a cloying stickiness in the mouth. Dessert in Japan is light, usually fresh fruit.
Japanese fruit is grown for taste, not, as in the West, for durability during mechanical picking and long-distance shipping. Fruit in Japan is eaten in season and ripe. The subtle layers of flavor in June strawberries, July melons, August peaches, and September grapes is a new experience for Americans.
People who grow up in cities may never eat fresh-picked fruit and do not know how it is supposed to feel or taste. The woman who owns the local fruit stand near our home told us that she was amazed to see young people put down soft, ripe peaches with distaste. They picked hard “green” peaches even when she told them they were not ripe yet. She was astounded to see them biting into a crunchy peach as they left the store. It seems that a generation has grown up eating green, flavorless, but very durable peaches from the supermarket. These young people are being conditioned to dislike soft, juicy, tree-ripened fruit.
In addition to less sugar, there is also much less fat in Japanese food than we are used to. Your lips are never greasy after dinner in Japan. Animal fat was unpalatable to fresh-fish-eating Japanese at first, and in the old days Westerners were called a derogatory name that meant “stinks like butter.” Traditional Japanese food has so little fat that you don’t need dishwashing soap. You can wash dishes in plain water. My first Zen teacher did not allow us to wash his dishes with soap because, even when we rinsed well, he could taste the soap residue in his food.
A student who grew up in Philadelphia told me that she disliked cherries when she was a child. When she was older and had fresh cherries for the first time she was surprised. “Wait a minute,” she thought, “I like these things! These can’t be cherries.” She suddenly realized that it was artificial cherry flavor that she disliked. Real cherries actually tasted good. A generation is growing up also thinking that the various “fruit flavors” of jelly beans and Kool-Aid are the true flavors of blueberries, grapes, apples, watermelon, and cherries. I wonder if there will come a time when real fruit will no longer satisfy and only the candy substitute will do?
What the mouth demands is partly dependent upon conditioning. The mouth can be trained to enjoy durian, termites, artificial cherry flavoring, and more or less sugar in juice.
To truly experience “a party in the mouth,” we don’t need stronger flavoring but the presence of awareness. To satisfy the mouth’s hunger for sensation, it isn’t enough to put food into the mouth, chew it, and swallow it. If we want to feel satisfied as we eat, the mind has to be aware of what is occurring in the mouth. In other words, if you want to have a party in the mouth, the mind has to be invited.
Let’s say that you’ve just sat down to enjoy a bowl of pasta with your favorite sauce. The first bite tastes so delicious! So does the second bite. You comment on the seasoning and then begin a conversation with your friend about the best restaurants you have eaten in and the best pasta dishes you’ve had. Suddenly you look down and see that the plate is empty! What happened to that wonderful pasta? After a few bites you didn’t taste it, because you were busy talking. Instead of eating the food before you in this moment, this mouthful, you were thinking about memories of food from the past. The mouth’s hunger has not been satisfied. The mouth asks for a second helping. It’s still hungry. If you talk or watch TV while eating this second helping, you might feel oddly unsatisfied once again and need a third helping.
This is mindless eating. We all do it. We can all learn to change it. Even a small change, a few minutes of mindful eating each day, can begin a change that will bring us to a different way of experiencing the world around and within us.
By the time we have a third helping, the stomach is groaning. The mouth, however, could still be demanding more sensation, more food. If you had been able to eat in silence, undistracted, with the mind “in the mouth,” one helping might have been just enough. The key to satisfying mouth hunger is to be present at the party in the mouth. This means to place the focus of our mind in our mouth and to open our awareness to all the textures, movements, smells, sounds, and taste sensations of eating and drinking.
EXERCISES
Becoming Aware of Mouth Hunger
During the day, notice mouth hunger. How does the mouth signal you, “Please put something in here”? What are the sensations of mouth hunger? See if you can ask the mouth what it wants and why. Does it want something salty, sweet, sour, crunchy, or creamy?
• • •
Before you eat, with the food in front of you, pause. Look at the food and become aware of the mouth’s desire for food. Rate the mouth’s hunger on a scale of zero (no mouth hunger) to ten (my mouth is ready to consume anything).
During the meal, pause every five minutes to assess mouth hunger. Does it change?
Note: It is easier to keep track of mouth hunger if you are not doing anything else during the meal, such as talking, reading, or watching TV.
• • •
When the mouth seems hungry, look inward to see if the mouth could be thirsty instead of hungry. Even if your mouth says it’s hungry, you might try a drink of water, juice, or tea and see if the amount of mouth hunger changes.
When you drink, try holding the liquid in your mouth and savoring it before swallowing.
In other worlds, don’t gulp. You can swish it around quietly as if rinsing your teeth, if that helps you to hold and taste each mouthful.
Mouth hunger is satisfied by sensation. The mouth is a sensation junkie, an organ of pure desire. We were born with a mouth that desired food. Without it we would have died. The mouth desires variety, variety in flavor and texture. If we are not aware of what is happening in the mouth, the mouth feels chronically deprived and convinces the hand to keep feeding it more.
The mouth is easily bored. It has difficulty staying present with sensations as we continue to chew, as the intensity of flavor begins to fade, and the texture turns to mushy. When the mouth is bored, it asks for another bite. If we keep shoveling in bite after bite and ignore the signals of “full” coming from the stomach, we will take in more food than our body needs.
If our mouth become accustomed to always being stimulated, it won’t be happy being empty. We will begin to snack continually, putting food and drink into the mouth during the entire time we are awake. When we eat mindlessly, we pay attention, perhaps, to the first few chews of the first bite. We shove another forkful in before we’ve even swallowed the first. We look down and are surprised to find that the food has disappeared while we weren’t even “looking.” When we eat mindfully, we are paying attention to the constant changes in the mouth that make up variety. Even when the food is simple, such as oatmeal and milk or a few potato chips in a bowl, when the guests of honor arrive, Awareness and Curiosity, the dullest event becomes a very interesting party.
EXERCISES
Feeding Mouth Hunger
Explore the role of texture in feeding mouth hunger. Try eating the same food pureed or whole. For example, you could eat and compare a half cup of unsweetened applesauce with a whole raw apple. Both have the same calories. Which satisfies more?
Try eating a potato chip plain and a second one dipped in water. Which satisfies more?
• • •
Chewing can also be an important part of satisfying mouth hunger. Begin by rating mouth hunger on a scale of zero (not hungry at all) to ten (famished). Then eat a few bites of food, chewing each bite at least fifteen or twenty times. If you do not usually chew your food well, you will need to give yourself some extra time. Now rate hunger again. What do you find?
There is a wonderful meditation on the tongue, what it does and what it senses as we eat. I won’t describe it here but you can find it on a bonus track at the end of the downloadable audio recording.
What signals does your stomach give you when it is hungry? For some people hunger is an empty feeling in the abdomen, an emptiness that demands to be filled. Others experience constriction, as if the stomach is trying to grind up food that isn’t there. Waves of constriction and relaxation called peristalsis do pass across the smooth muscles of our stomach. Not many people describe these sensations as pleasant.
From the evolutionary point of view, it’s good that we perceive “hunger pangs” as unpleasant. If we didn’t, we might starve to death. Because these sensations are uncomfortable, we feel an unhappy urgency about doing something to relieve them. Often hunger is described as gnawing, as if an animal were eating at our insides. It growls and complains until we throw food down the tunnel to placate it.
However, the notion that the stomach tells us when we must feed it is not correct. We actually tell the stomach when to be hungry. This occurs through our eating habits. When we eat three meals a day at regular times, the stomach becomes conditioned to expect food at those times. It will growl if we don’t feed it according to the schedule we gave it. If we travel to a different time zone the stomach learns to growl at a new time. People who never eat breakfast don’t have hunger pangs in the early morning. People who do, do.
If you fast for over three days, the hunger pangs and growling disappear. The abdomen feels flat, quiet, and comfortable. This tells us that stomach hunger is not a permanent, solid feature of our lives, one whose urging we must obey. It’s our body hunger that is more fundamental and important to learn to feel.
On the other hand, if we ignore sensations of hunger, we’ll get in trouble too. We have to walk the middle way with hunger. This means to be aware of signs of hunger in the whole body, not just the hunger signals from a stomach that demands food at the same time every day. It means not to be upset if our stomach is growling but we can’t eat right away or we need to eat less. It also means not ignoring our body when it tells us it needs quality fuel.
This sounds complicated, but with mindfulness to guide us, it’s not. It’s a matter of learning to “listen” to the body with the inner ear.
Here’s an interesting question. You might think, “My stomach is going to enjoy this delicious pie—or this juicy hamburger,” but can your stomach actually taste the food you eat? Stop reading and ask it. As a doctor, it’s embarrassing to admit, but for many years I did not realize that my stomach does not have taste buds and therefore cannot taste what I eat. The many tastes and textures of a meal that the mouth relishes disappear when we swallow. A gourmet meal quickly becomes an undifferentiated puree.
The stomach does not care about flavors. The stomach cares about volume. Actually, about stretch. When it is too full and over-stretched, it signals us with discomfort or even pain. It also signals us when it expects food and doesn’t get any (“Grrr, it’s lunch time, where’s my food?”).
As you practice mindfulness while eating, you will re-learn two important skills, checking in with the stomach to see how full it is at the moment, and then asking your stomach what volume of food and drink it would be comfortable handling. I say “re-learn” because this is a skill we all had in early childhood. There are two ways we lose touch with the requests of our stomach. One way is when the signals from the stomach are chronically over-ridden by habits of over-eating or self-starvation. The second one happens when we ignore the body’s inner signals and we turn instead to external sources of information, such as diet gurus, TV ads, or the bounty of an all-you-can-eat buffet to help us decide what and how much to eat.
There are two areas of potential confusion regarding signals of stomach hunger. Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is the medical name for what most people call heartburn. It is a disorder in which acid from the stomach moves up into the esophagus and causes irritation. It can occur if we put pressure on the stomach or turn upside down right after a meal. (Don’t try sit-ups or headstands after dinner.) Certain foods also can trigger pain coming from the esophagus, especially spicy food or caffeine. If people experience GERD symptoms and mistake them for hunger, they may eat more, thinking it will relieve the pain. It can have just the opposite effect, causing more stomach acid to be released and more reflux from the back pressure of overfilling the stomach, thus aggravating the symptoms. An unfortunate cycle begins: feeling discomfort, eating, feeling more discomfort, and eating more.
The same kind of confusion can occur with anxiety, which often makes our stomach growl or grind. If we mistake anxiety for stomach hunger, we may eat, trying to make the growling or gnawing go away. Unfortunately, eating doesn’t work. In fact it can start another vicious cycle. That is, when we are worried about something, our stomach signals distress, which we mistake for hunger, which leads us to eat. We then feel more anxious about all that we have eaten that we didn’t really need, and our stomach acts up even more. We eat again, thinking it will help, but it just further feeds the guilt and shame, heightening our emotional discomfort, and thus the cycle of needless distress continues.
I find myself in the middle of this cycle when I am working hard to meet a deadline. Anxiety makes me reach for snacks, which I stuff in mindlessly because I’m too busy to take a proper break. I don’t taste the snacks because I’m distracted with the work, so my stomach ends up full of junk food and my brain fogs over. This makes me more tense, which triggers further stomach symptoms. I grab for more food.
The cure is to sit down and take care of myself in the proper way. I assess hunger in the eyes, mouth, and stomach. I acknowledge that my stomach is helping me by signaling my anxiety. I thank it for its message and promise to attend to my real needs. I put my feet up for a moment (if only in my mind) and have a slow cup of tea, or peel an orange and eat each bite slowly. I take a short nap or walk outside for a few minutes, feeding my eyes on the many colors of green.
I return, refreshed by the short pause, having stepped off the cycle of trying to treat worry and other uncomfortable emotions in the mind by filling my poor stomach with food.
In our workshops on mindful eating we have found that many people are completely unaware of stomach hunger. They are mystified about how to go about assessing the experience of their stomach and cannot get a read on whether their stomachs are full, half full, or empty. It is a revelation for many people to find that they can begin to “listen” to the stomach and act upon its intelligence. When we are able to do this, very often we find that we are about to put food into a stomach that actually is not hungry or a stomach that is full and is asking us to wait for a while and then to question it again in a few hours.
Medical scientists are realizing that the digestive system is rich in nerves, so rich that they are speaking of it as a “second brain” in the abdomen. The Japanese have known this for a long time. They have an expression, haragei, which means “stomach wisdom.” In mindful eating we learn to pay attention to the intelligence of our gut. It is a very good feeling to begin to live in harmony with our body and to learn from its wisdom.
EXERCISES
Becoming Aware of Stomach Hunger
Be aware of the sensations in the “stomach” during the day. How does the “stomach” signal to you that it is “hungry”?
• Be aware of any sounds and internal feelings of pressure or movement, warmth or coolness, and so forth that are signaling hunger.
• When you’re eating, what sensations tell you that the stomach is empty? Half full? Pleasantly full? Overfull?
• Are there other situations besides hunger that make the stomach feel pangs or discomfort? What do you think is going on at those times?
• When does the stomach signal hunger? Is it at predictable times? When during the day does it signal most strongly: before breakfast, at noon, afternoon, before dinner, or at bedtime?
• • •
When you feel hungry, delay eating for a while. Simply be aware of the sensation you call “hunger.” Be aware of body sensations, feelings, and thoughts. Is it difficult or easy to feel hunger and deliberately delay eating?
What satisfies stomach hunger? The right amount and kinds of food. When you open your awareness to investigate when the stomach is most at ease, what do you find? I find that my stomach likes to do its work. It doesn’t like the feeling of being very full. The stomach can’t work well when it is overfilled. Although my mouth might enjoy being full most of the time, my stomach disagrees. It likes to be comfortably full, about four-fifths full. It also likes to be empty and to rest.
EXERCISE
Staying Aware of Stomach Hunger during a Meal
When you sit down to eat, take a few seconds to assess stomach hunger. Ask your stomach how full it is. Empty? Quarter full? Half full? Full? Overfull? Then ask your stomach what volume it would be comfortable working with. A half cup? One cup? Two cups?
After you’ve eaten half your food, stop eating and take a few seconds to assess stomach hunger again.
At the end of the meal, assess stomach hunger again. To satisfy stomach hunger we need to feed the stomach just enough food, let it do its work, and then let it rest. As we eat we need to pause periodically to check in with the stomach to discern when it is becoming comfortably full.
When we were infants, we were tuned in to the signals from our body that told us when to eat and when to stop. Given a choice, we had an instinctive awareness of what foods and how much food our body needed. As we grew older this inner wisdom became lost in a bewildering host of other inner and outer voices that told us how we should eat. We received conflicting messages from our parents, from our peers, from advertising and health classes, from scientific research and diet doctors, and from movies and mirrors. These messages created a confusion of desires, impulses, and aversions that have rendered us unable to just eat and to eat just enough. If we are to return to a healthy and balanced relationship with food, it is essential that we learn to turn our awareness inward and to hear again what our body is always telling us about its needs and its satisfaction. To learn to listen to cellular hunger is a primary skill of mindful eating.
One of the most dramatic examples of cellular hunger was taught to me by a baby. I was a nervous pediatric intern on my first assignment, the emergency room at University Hospital in San Diego. On a hot summer night a young couple arrived with their one-year-old child. They had been driving several hours in one-hundred-degree heat across the desert in a car without air conditioning, from Twenty Nine Palms, where the father was stationed. In the evening they had noticed that something was wrong with their baby. He had become weak and so floppy that he was unable to sit up. This sort of history rings many alarm bells in a young doctor’s mind. It raises the specter of a number of rare and life-threatening illnesses, including meningitis, polio, and botulism.
I was reassured when I examined the little boy. He was alert, smiled at me, and had a neurologic exam that ruled out brain infection or paralysis. His mouth and diaper were wet, so he was not dehydrated. He just seemed to lack the energy to sit up or crawl. I asked the young parents what he had been eating and drinking. Because of the heat he’d stopped eating. His parents, worried that he might get diarrhea from contaminated water, had just given him distilled water to drink, lots of it. I suddenly realized that the baby simply might be salt depleted.
Rather than doing expensive and painful blood tests, I ran to the cafeteria and returned with a bag of potato chips. When I opened it and held them out, the little boy sat up, grabbed the chips, and began eating. His parents were amazed at this sudden resurrection! I explained that their baby had been sweating profusely in the heat, losing salt and water as they traveled. The distilled water he was gulping down had only replaced the water, not the salt. He had “heard” his cells calling out for sodium chloride (salt) and as soon as he saw it, he responded.
The body has its own wisdom and can tell us a lot about what it requires if we are able to listen. Unfortunately, as we get older we become deaf to what our bodies are telling us we need. For example, people who are working and sweating in hot weather often suffer from heat prostration due to loss of sodium and chloride. Doctors have to tell them to take salt tablets. Other people have to be careful not to eat too much salt.
A common symptom of undiagnosed diabetes is incessant thirst and frequent urination. This is a good example of how the body is able to communicate its urgent needs as it tries to keep us healthy. In diabetes, the pancreas is unable to produce enough insulin to metabolize the sugar in the bloodstream. The sugar level in the body becomes too concentrated, not a happy condition for our cells. They put out a call for more water, trying to dilute the sugar, and we drink more. The kidneys then set to work flushing out both extra water and sugar by producing more urine.
How can we learn to hear the call of our cells for certain nutrients? Our body may signal hunger through symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, irritability, a light-headed feeling, or a sudden loss of energy—“pooping out.” A diabetic person has to learn the difference between the body’s signaling, “Too much sugar, give me more insulin” versus the opposite, “My blood sugar is too low, give me sugar quickly.” Not to be sensitive to these signals, or to mix them up, can be dangerous.
You would think that when a person fasts the signals from their hungry cells would become overwhelming. It’s curious to me that signals of hunger such as faintness or dizziness only last a few days during fasting. After that people often say they feel very energized! Maybe the body is saying, “Thanks for stopping all the junk food. I needed a rest.”
On my fiftieth birthday I had a dramatic experience with cellular hunger. I had a hysterectomy after years of unsuccessful treatments for bleeding that caused severe anemia. I went into the surgery quite anemic and lost even more blood during the surgery. I emerged from the anesthesia with one overwhelming desire: barbequed spare ribs! This amused my friends greatly, as I had been a vegetarian for years. My body was saying, loud and clear, “I need iron to build new red blood cells! Forget that puny spinach, I need red meat!” Urgent cellular hunger can override personal habits and preferences.
Pica is a medical disorder related to cellular hunger. People with pica (rhymes with “mica”) eat nonfood substances such as soil, string, paint, or wood. One form of pica occurs among pregnant women who develop a craving for clay. In the southern states there are clay banks where poor pregnant women sometimes go to dig clay to eat. Analysis of the preferred clay shows high levels of iron. Pregnant women who are building the bodies and blood of their growing fetus have an increased need for iron. If they receive prenatal vitamins with supplemental iron, the pica disappears.
Women from the American South who have moved to northern cities and lost access to this clay, however, have been seen to substitute laundry starch, which has the consistency of clay but unfortunately contains no iron and thus does not treat anemia associated with pregnancy. Poor women often cannot afford prenatal vitamins or iron-rich foods such as eggs or meat. If they fill up with starch, they are even less likely to eat good food and get adequate iron.
Thus what began as cellular hunger for a needed nutrient, iron, becomes a mind hunger for clay-like foods. Eating starch, which swells in contact with water, may satisfy stomach hunger by stopping hunger pangs, but it does not satisfy the needs of anemic cells.
In the autumn you may become aware of a seasonal aspect of cellular hunger. As the temperature drops the body begins to call for more food. Until recent times, when humans began living in well-heated houses, listening to and responding to this demand was essential to our survival. We needed to add a layer of insulating fat to keep our inner organs warm. We needed more calories for the work of keeping the inner furnace going. Shivering burns extra calories. In the north you could be stuck in a cold cave until the snow melted from the entrance, with dwindling supplies of food and fuel. Eating more food in the fall, while it was still abundant, was a very intelligent habit. Now that we live in warm houses and pay teenage boys to clear our driveways so we can drive in heated cars to the supermarket when we get a craving for double-fudge ice cream, maybe it’s not so intelligent to load up on calories for the winter.
How can we overcome these old “survival scripts”? First, mindfulness helps us become aware of them. We can hear the little voice inside crying, “Feed me. I’m cold!” We might even be aware of the tension of its ancient fear of death by starvation, death by freezing. We can pause to acknowledge it and to become aware of what might suffice to comfort that voice.
If we’re the teenage boy who has been shoveling the driveway for two hours in subzero weather, it might be appropriate to feed that inner voice two sandwiches, some cookies, and a big mug of hot cocoa with a marshmallow on top. If we are the middle-aged homeowner who has been watching the teenage boy through double-pane windows, we might offer that voice the comfort of a slow cup of tea. It could be soothed by a hot shower or a bowl of soup eaten by the warmth of a crackling fire. There are many ways to be kind to ourselves.
Through mindfulness we can become more sensitive to cellular hunger and learn to separate what the body actually needs from what our mind is demanding. If we stop and listen carefully and often enough, eventually we might be able to do what some animals do, taste a food and “know” it is what we need. We would eat a banana when our cells asked for more potassium; carrots when we needed beta carotene; eggs or meat when we needed protein or iron; oranges or grapefruit when our cells asked for vitamin C; chocolate when we needed magnesium; and flaxseed, purslane, or fish when our body needed omega-3 oils. We would also know the difference between hunger and thirst.
We can train ourselves to listen to what our body is saying in a very simple way. We take a small pause before eating. We turn our attention inward. We ask the body what it needs to do its work.
EXERCISES
Exercises for Becoming Mindful of Cellular Hunger
1. Sit quietly, close your eyes, and become aware of the entire body. Can you discern whether the cells of the body are hungry or satisfied?
2. If they are hungry, for what? Liquid or solid? Vegetables? Root or leafy? Fruit? Citrus or not? Salt? Starch? Protein? This is not easy to discern at first. It might be easier to be aware of the signals from the body’s cells if you try this before you eat. Sit for a few minutes with your eyes closed and try to read what the body actually wants.
• • •
Halfway through a meal, stop eating, close your eyes, and try to feel if the body itself is hungry now. If so, for what? At the end of the meal, stop, close your eyes, and ask again.
• • •
Sometimes what we interpret as hunger is actually cellular thirst. Before you eat a snack, try having something to drink instead, juice or a hot beverage. Sip it slowly, with awareness of temperature and taste. Now turn your attention inward and investigate whether your hunger has changed. Has it decreased, increased, or changed the foods it is asking for?
The essential elements satisfy cellular hunger. These include water, salt, protein, fat, carbohydrates, minerals, vitamins, and trace elements such as iron or zinc. We busy, noisy, distracted humans are not very well attuned to the sensations in the body that signal a request for a specific nutrient. At times we get a clear request: citrus! water! tomato soup! These requests tend to come through when we are ill and the body insists that we be careful about what we put into it.
EXERCISES
Asking the Body What It Wants
Next time you are ill, ask the body what it needs. You can run through your refrigerator or your shelves in your mind’s eye, holding the question, “Body, please tell me what you need.” A variation of this exercise, which you can do whether you are well or ill, can be found on track 3 of the audio recording.
• • •
Try this at the grocery store; however, it is important not to go when you are very hungry. Walk around the outer aisles, where real food is displayed. Say to your body, “Tell me what you need.” Stop to look at a food and ask your body, “Is this what you need?” Hold the question lightly and see what information you get.
Mind hunger is based upon thoughts. These thoughts include information, numbers, instructions, and criticism.
“I should eat more protein.”
“I deserve an ice cream cone.”
“That magazine article said I should drink twelve glasses of water a day.”
“Eggs are good for you. They have lots of protein and vitamin A.”
“Eggs are bad for you. They have too much cholesterol.”
“You ate something that was not on your diet. You are a complete failure.”
Mind hunger is influenced by what we take in through eyes and ears, the words we read and hear. Thousands of cookbooks provide food for mind hunger. Thousands of diet books provide food for mind hunger.
I have watched scores of dieting fads come and go during my medical career. What was good to eat one year becomes evil a decade later. The no-citrus diet (“bad for your joints”) was followed by the grapefruit diet. The pasta diet was followed by the no-carbohydrates diet. The all-the-vegetables-you-can-eat diet turned around and became the high-quality-protein-only diet.
Mind hunger is often based upon absolutes and opposites: good food versus bad food, should eat versus should not eat. When I was in medical school we were taught that animal fat was bad. We were informed of the early findings of the large Framingham Study that linked consumption of animal fat with heart disease. We all renounced butter, whole milk, cream, half-and-half, cream cheese, beef, and pork. We substituted sherbet for ice cream. Eggs were rationed, two per person per week. It became alarming to see the foods we had labeled as dangerous being shoveled into a woefully ignorant mouth.
Corn oil was considered good. Corn oil margarine was endorsed by medical groups. A few years later, however, a study showed that a diet high in oil was linked to lower rates of heart attack and stroke but higher rates of cancer. Unsaturated fats were less able to protect against free-radical damage to cells. Then science told us that margarine contained trans fats, which were worse for us than butter! We gratefully allowed butter back on our bread. The compromise introduced by one of my professors was “better butter,” whipped up out of equal parts of butter and oil.
Coconut oil was good, then bad. Recently scientists have realized that people and animals who eat a lot of coconut have healthy hearts and maybe it’s OK after all. Fat was the enemy for a long time, but under the Atkins diet, it was transformed into our best friend. Now the Atkins diet and coconut oil seem to be fading out of fashion.
Eggs were the villains for many years. It was hard to bake anything on the two-eggs-per-week rationing plan, and recipes appeared that used only egg whites. Then an article appeared in a medical journal describing a mentally ill man who had eaten thirty-six hard-boiled eggs a day for several years and had a normal cholesterol level. Subsequent studies suggested that eating eggs does not increase one’s risk of heart disease. We gratefully made beautiful, whole-egg, yellow-colored omelets again. Eggs were our friends once more.
My grandmother had diverticulitis, a painful disease of the colon thought to occur when the muscles of the colon weakened from trying to digest too much fiber in the diet. She was told to eat only pale, mushy foods: applesauce, mashed potatoes, custard, creamed soups. Later studies reversed this prescription, postulating that diverticulitis results from not enough fiber in the diet!
In my early years in medicine I was swayed by the latest nutritional “truths” announced by doctors and research scientists. Over the decades I have become more skeptical as I have seen the experts reverse themselves repeatedly. I’ve ended up not taking any absolute statements about food too seriously, whether they come from a medical journal or from within the urging of my own mind. The Buddhist principle of the middle way emerges as a very sane way to live. It advises us not to become caught up in any extremes. In the context of eating, finding the middle way means not clinging to any food and not hating any food. Don’t go overboard with anything, in either a positive or negative way. Food is food. The rest is mind games.
The journalist Michael Pollan writes,
We’ve learned to choose our foods by the numbers (calories, carbs, fats, RDA’s, price, whatever), relying more heavily on our reading and computational skills than upon our senses. We’ve lost all confidence in our sense of taste and smell, which can’t detect the invisible macro- and micro-nutrients science has taught us to worry about, and which food processors have become adept at deceiving anyway. The American supermarket—chilled and stocked with hermetically sealed packages bristling with information—has effectively shut out the Nose and elevated the Eye.
No wonder we have become, in the midst of our astounding abundance, the world’s most anxious eaters.7
I would suggest that we have actually shut out the nose and elevated the mind. It is the mind that makes us anxious, not the nose or eye. The mind thinks that the body would cooperate and eat perfectly if it could keep us informed about the truth, the scientific nutritional facts. When these “facts” are revealed as impermanent, a moving target, changing as new studies are done or a new medical guru appears, it creates a condition of chronic anxiety. Like Catholics who grow up anxious because they might be sinning and not even know it, the mind is anxious because we might be ingesting something dangerous and not even know it—until a new scientific study is published. When we eat based upon the thoughts in the mind, our eating is usually based in worry. When the mind is fretting about “should eat” and “should not eat,” our enjoyment of what is actually in our mouth evaporates.
There are some amusing studies showing the power the mind has over our eating habits. People can be convinced to like or dislike certain foods based upon false information. Scientists have been able to lead people to believe that in childhood they had a negative experience with a certain food. Told that a “computer analysis” indicates that they became ill after eating strawberry ice cream, some participants later indicate a belief that this episode had in fact occurred. They also say that they plan to avoid the offending flavor in the future. On the flip side, positive food memories can be planted, too. In another study people were led to believe that they loved asparagus when they first tasted it. The 40 percent of people who incorporated this belief also indicated that they intended to eat more asparagus in the future.8
The voices that comprise mind hunger are important to hear but should be taken with a large grain of salt. (But not too large, as salt is now “bad.”) “You should start the day with a big breakfast.” “You should eat six times a day.” “You shouldn’t eat past noon.” “Sugar is poison.”
The notion that we should eat scientifically and that food is medicine is uniquely American. It leads us to wait anxiously for pronouncements arising from the latest research studies and to follow the newest fad diet, especially if it is promoted by a telegenic doctor and adopted by a movie star or two. The food and beverage industry, alert to these trends, develops new products and feeds our anxiety through their advertising.
For example, in the last decade there has been an epidemic of mind-induced thirst. The minds of most modern Americans compel them to carry around a water bottle at all times and to sip from it frequently, much like a baby bottle, no matter where they are: at a business meeting, at a concert or play, in the swimming pool. This fetish began with a medical report stating that humans should drink eight to twelve glasses of water a day. Tea and coffee did not count, as they were diuretics and depleted the body of water. Your cells were crying out for water. Fearing death by dehydration, Americans began carrying glasses of water around. Product development departments noticed and responded quickly, spawning two huge new industries: bottled water and water bottles.9
I looked at a shelf of water bottles at a retreat recently. There was water shipped from Iceland, Canada, Colorado, Alaska, California, Washington, and Oregon. People now try to bring personal water bottles into the meditation hall during retreats. Apparently they are unable to endure various body sensations that they interpret as “dehydration” and cannot go thirty to sixty minutes without a drink. All the liquid that goes in eventually must come out. People pop up and down to go to the bathroom like grasshoppers.
A few years ago a corrective report announced that people had misinterpreted the first report. Humans needed a total of sixty-four ounces of liquid a day, but they did not have to drink that amount from a glass. It actually all could come from food. And coffee and tea counted. Studies showed that these caffeinated beverages didn’t deplete the body’s liquids after all.
Why, in the midst of this epidemic of grown-ups toting and constantly nursing from water bottles decorated with various company logos, has no one asked how our mothers and fathers and our grandparents, and the entire human race for tens of thousands of years before, escaped mass annihilation by dehydration because high-impact polycarbonate plastic bottles filled with “spring water” hadn’t been invented yet? Our modern minds believed what putative “science” and old wives’ tales in magazines told us and overrode the wisdom of our bodies.
I once witnessed a poignant battle between mind and body hunger. My adopted daughter had recently arrived from Vietnam. She was painfully thin and ate everything voraciously, stuffing herself so that her belly swelled visibly, and she hoarded any leftover food. She would refuse to leave the table as long as food remained in the serving dishes or on anyone’s plate. One day we served something she tasted and did not like. She tried again and again to eat the food, becoming more and more upset. Her mind was telling her to eat it even if she found it repulsive, because there might not be any more food for a long time. The memory of past scarcity was trying to override her mouth and body, which were clear about what they did not want to eat.
We do this all the time. We are very full, but the mind says, “One more won’t hurt.” Or, as a workshop member said, “I’m really stuffed, but…I could eat that.” Brian Wansink describes one study in which amnesiac patients were told it was dinnertime, and they proceeded to eat an entire meal even though their digestive tracts were still busy processing the full meal they had eaten and forgotten only thirty minutes before. In another study people were put in a room with all the food they could eat and a clock that ran two hours fast. Overweight subjects tended to eat more frequently based upon what their mind told them about “mealtime” as they read it off the clock. Normal-weight subjects tended to eat less often, relying upon their internal cues of hunger.10
At our silent lunch on the first day of a mindful eating retreat, just as seconds were being passed, I announced, “Here at the monastery lunch is our largest meal of the day. Supper will be light.” That afternoon many people reported that they had been feeling quite satisfied after their first helping at lunch. However, as soon as they heard my announcement their minds jumped to scarcity mode, and they found themselves taking second helpings. These were helpings that their eyes, mouth, stomach, and body did not desire! They said that they could hear their minds saying, “You better store up. Maybe you’ll be hungry after supper.” This is a clear example of mind hunger overriding all the other signals of fullness and satisfaction.
This is exactly what lies at the heart of our current disturbed relationship to eating and food. Our minds do not always tell us the truth. In order to restore a harmonious relationship to eating, in order to enjoy our food, we must learn to listen to the deeper wisdom of our body.
Of course, our mind is not an enemy. It can be extremely helpful, reading labels on packaged foods to see if they are “food-like substances” or real food. It can remind us to slow down, to check in with the Nine Hungers, and to direct full awareness to what we are eating. If we have a medical condition that restricts our diet, such as diabetes or celiac disease, our mind can advise us about what foods will work well with our body and what foods will make us feel worse. We want to develop a mind that is kind to us and whose directives are wise and balanced with information from the rest of the body.
EXERCISES
Becoming Aware of Mind Hunger
During the day become aware of what the mind is telling you about food and drink. Listen for the mind’s comments on what you “should” eat or “should” drink and “should not” eat or drink. Notice whether there are competing voices that say different things about the same food. For example, the mind might be saying, “I’m really thirsty. I’d like a Coke.” Another voice says, “Coke is bad for you. Don’t you remember, you can dissolve a tooth in Coke? Get juice instead.” Another voice says, “You need the caffeine. You’re falling asleep at the wheel. Get a Coke.” Yet another voice says, “You’re addicted to caffeine. You should be able to stay awake without it. Start your caffeine fast right now.”
• • •
Before you eat, pause and look at the food. Listen inwardly to hear what the mind is saying about this food and drink before you.
What is the mind is saying about hunger? Is hunger “good” or “bad”? Check the eyes, stomach, body, and mind to see where hunger might lie.
What is the mind saying about satisfaction? Check before, during, and after the meal. Move the mind’s awareness to the mouth, the stomach, and the body. What parts are satisfied? What parts are not?
• • •
As you read articles about scientific studies of food, become aware of any “shoulds” or “should nots” that are forming in the mind. Remember that this scientific information changes frequently. If you are using this book in a class, you can bring some articles to class that illustrate the American “scientific” or “medical” approach to eating. It’s especially interesting to point out the contradictions and reversals that emerge, such as the recommendation not to eat coconut oil and then the news that coconut oil may be good for you, or the way agave syrup went from a miracle sweetener to a dangerous substance.
I’m not sure we can ever really satisfy mind hunger, because the mind is always changing its mind. One day it puts us on a strict diet, the next day it convinces us we need another dessert. The mind also contains the inner critic, a voice that criticizes us no matter what we eat or drink (more on this voice in chapter 4).
Please investigate this for yourself. What satisfies mind hunger?
Often the mind feeds on information, on news, on gossip. The mind likes to learn new things, to digest new information. Let’s say that you are eating at a fast-food place. On the table is a place mat with nutritional information on the foods you are eating. As you eat a cheeseburger, your mind is taking in the nutritional content of your cheeseburger. The mind might be satisfied to learn that this restaurant has switched to cooking without trans fats. This is interesting information, but is it truly satisfying? No. Why not? Because this type of information, what is “good” or “bad” to eat, is always changing. Forty years ago, trans fat–laden margarine was good, and Crisco and lard were staples in our diet. The mind knows that knowledge is always changing, so it can never be at ease.
The mind is truly content only when it becomes quiet. When the many and contradictory voices around eating are still, when the awareness function is dominant over the thinking function, then we can be fully present as we eat. When we are filled with awareness, we become filled with satisfaction.
Our mind can confuse us and lead us away from listening to our bodies. However, our mind is not our enemy. Our mind can save our life by reminding us what kinds of food will make us ill when we have a medical condition like kidney failure or diabetes. Our mind can help us practice mindful eating by directing itself back to the sensations in our mouth or telling us, “Let’s ask our stomach how full we are.” Our mind can tell us, “You are going to get hungry later today. Let’s pack a healthy snack, take it with us, and avoid a stop at a fast-food-like-substance store.”
Here’s one funny aspect of mindfulness and meditation: we use our mind to quiet and clear that very same mind. Once our mind realizes how much better we—and it—function without anxiety and how interesting it is to pay attention to our entire body, our mind begins to trust and enjoy this new way of gathering information and making “community” decisions. It relaxes into a more natural way of being with food, and with everything else life brings us.
I became aware of heart hunger through the comments of participants in our mindful eating workshops. They talked longingly of foods they had eaten for family holidays, foods their mothers had made for them when they were ill, foods eaten with people they loved. It was clear that the particular foods were not as important as the mood or emotion they evoked. Hunger for these foods arose from the desire to be loved and cared for. The memory of those special times infused these foods with warmth and happiness.
One woman said that the mindful way we ate in the monastery had suddenly evoked memories of eating with her grandparents. She and her siblings had spent childhood summers at their grandparents’ farm. There, meals were slow affairs, with grace before eating and intervals of silence to appreciate the food, which was homegrown, home preserved, and home cooked. She remembered,
Grandma had a “feel” for making bread. We’d compare crusts and tastes like some people savor a fine wine. She told me that making bread was like taking care of a baby: “You don’t want to get it in a draft.” Grandfather had Bell’s palsy and chewed quite slowly and carefully. He would finish twenty minutes after everyone else. We all sat at the table and waited for him, though not in silence. He would compare the virtues of the several varieties of corn and tomatoes on the table, urging the children to really taste them! Grandmother would talk about what she had canned when—peaches, plums, pickles, jams. I would leave from a visit with them feeling very “full.” They had a way of being present to me although I can’t say we had any earth-shattering talks.
No, not earth-shattering, but heart-nourishing. It was food grown with love, shared and eaten in love. Her grandparents had taught her about mindful eating, but she had forgotten their lessons until she came to the retreat and slowed down, eating again with awareness and appreciation. After the workshop she wrote me, “Sometimes I have felt deprivation around eating. I realize now it was only my perception. I actually was in the midst of abundance and richness. I lacked the mindfulness to appreciate the food at hand.”
Many people are aware that they eat in an attempt to fill a hole, not in the stomach but in the heart. We eat when we are lonely. We eat when a relationship ends. We eat when someone dies, taking food to the home of those who are grieving. These are the ways we try to take care of ourselves and others, but we must understand that food put into the stomach will never ease the emptiness, the ache in a heart.
Curt came to mindful eating classes with a history of dieting since he was a teenager. He was a veteran of hundreds of diets and many years in Overeaters Anonymous. He had been fairly skeptical about the utility of mindful eating until we did an exercise in the next-to-last class. We passed around a plate of thinly sliced apples arranged on a bed of fern leaves with pink azalea flowers. Everyone took in the color, form, and texture of the apples with their eyes, took in their fragrance with deep inhalations, and then slowly ate one slice. When it was his turn to relate his experience, I was ready for a bitter comment about how for him a whole apple was one bite and a whole apple pie was one serving.
Instead his face softened and his eyes filled with tears. He looked like a little boy.
He said in wonder, “I was transported back to my grandmother’s home. She had built a house in an old apple orchard. The trees still bore apples, large ones, and we always ate them when we went to visit her. When I tasted this little slice of apple I was right there, back in her kitchen! I could smell it and see it, right down to the pattern on the linoleum on the floor.”
“You have just fed the heart’s hunger,” I said.
Later Curt told me that his comfort foods were slow-baked beans, split pea soup, and “anything cooked from scratch out of the Fanny Farmer cookbook.” Why?
Because it meant that Momma wasn’t drinking. When she was sober she’d pull out that book and cook for us kids, things that took hours to prepare. It was the only time she was really present and showed that she loved us. Just the sight of that cookbook made me feel good. I’ve searched used bookstores for that particular edition but haven’t ever found it.
It’s no mystery that many comfort foods are the things our mother or grandmother made us when we were sick or the foods we ate with the family on holidays. For each person the food that is flavored with love is different. It could be chicken soup, custard, mashed potatoes, or cinnamon toast.
When I was six years old I had a lingering, mysterious illness, with fever and swollen glands, enough like leukemia to scare everyone, including our family doctor. I had to be taken into the city for blood tests. Each time I cried but sat unmoving in the face of what seemed like an enormous needle. The reward was an ice cream cone. Ice cream at that time was an uncommon treat. We were not poor, but not rich, and had to drive ten miles to an ice cream store that had only four flavors of ice cream: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and the flavor of the week.
Now my parents are dead, and I can buy at least sixty kinds of ice cream in any supermarket, but I seldom keep ice cream at home. It would lose its power. It is my own reward, my own way of caring for myself. If I undergo an ordeal, such as a particularly hard day or week at work, when I emerge, I reward myself with ice cream. I take myself out to an ice cream shop, take my time choosing a flavor, and savor every lick. It is a ritual that feeds the hunger of my heart. I am honoring the kindness of my parents and my earnest wish that every child could be so lovingly nourished.
We feed our heart when we take care in preparing food for ourselves, treating ourselves as well as we would a guest. It only takes a few minutes to arrange food nicely on a plate rather than eating out of a cardboard take-home carton or to sit down at a table you have set with a colorful place mat and candle rather than eating standing up at the kitchen counter.
A few years ago I ate dinner in a restaurant with an old friend who was critical of the food we had been served. He told me that he was always searching for the perfect meal. He could remember a few exceptional meals in his lifetime. When he described them it was clear that it was not the memory of the perfect entrée or dessert wine that had created this longing. It was the food for the heart, the all-too-brief experience of interconnectedness with his dinner companions, that he longed to find again.
During the mindful eating workshops, as we try different exercises, people often have memories suddenly float to the surface of consciousness. Once, as we were sharing our lists of comfort foods, one woman read out, “Raspberry yogurt.” She began to say, “I don’t know why I like only raspberry flavor—” and suddenly she exclaimed, “Oh! I just remembered that my grandmother loved raspberry jam. She was a diabetic and wasn’t supposed to have it, but she had some jam hidden that she would share with me when I was a little girl. It was our special secret.”
When you talk with people at any length about comfort foods, you will always uncover a story that is warm with feelings of connection, love, and companionship. All the rich food in the world will not fill our heart’s hunger. The heart is nourished by intimacy with others.
There are remarkable stories about people in concentration camps who, in the midst of torture, death, and deliberate starvation by their captors, still found ways to feed the heart’s hunger. Some women in German concentration camps, for instance, shared their favorite family recipes, creating oral cookbooks. Teaching each other, memorizing other women’s recipes, they created friendship, hope, and an optimism that some aspect of their lives might survive the camp and nourish others.11
During World War II a group of women prisoners in a Japanese concentration camp in Sumatra wrote down musical scores from memory and formed a choir. Too weak to stand, they performed sitting down. Half the choir died in a year’s time. But they forgot the terrible hunger of their emaciated bodies as their hearts were filled with the music they created together. “Each time [we had a concert] again it seemed a miracle, that among those cockroaches and rats, and the bedbugs and the dysentery, the smells of the latrines, that there could be that much beauty, that women’s voices could actually do this, and bring this to this horrid camp,” one of the singers later recalled.12
We cannot always depend upon others to fulfill our desire for intimacy, however, because people are always changing. They move away, they fall out of love with us and into love with someone else, they get Alzheimer’s and think we are a stranger, and eventually they die.
A woman at a workshop choked up as she told of being in a puzzling transition. She was an excellent cook, and for many years she had taken great pride in feeding her husband and three boys home-cooked meals. Now her sons were grown. The last time they had come home, they said, “Mom, you are always so busy feeding us that you never sit down with us at the table. Come sit down.” She couldn’t understand why they weren’t interested in her food any more. I told her, “When they were boys, you fed their stomachs and, at the same time, their hearts, because you cooked with love. Now they are men who can buy whatever they wish to feed the hunger of their stomachs. Now they know that life passes quickly and that time together is precious. They are asking that you sit down and be present with them, talk, tell stories, and laugh with them. They are asking for time with you, time that will nourish the hunger of their hearts.”
We cannot depend upon food to fill the empty place in our heart. Ultimately what must nourish our heart is intimacy with this very moment. We can experience this intimacy with anything that presents itself to us, people or plants, rocks, rice, or raisins. This is what being present brings us to, the sweet and poignant taste of true presence. When this presence fills us, all hungers vanish. All things, just as they are, are perfect satisfaction.
EXERCISES
Becoming Aware of Heart Hunger
What foods do you eat when you are sad or lonely? Make a list. If you are working in a mindful eating group, read these lists to each other.
• • •
When, between meals, you feel the impulse to have a snack or a drink, please look at what emotions you were feeling or what thoughts you were thinking just before that impulse arose.
If you have the snack or drink, does anything change?
• • •
When you become aware of heart hunger, pick a favorite comfort food. Buy a small portion or single helping, such as one special chocolate truffle or a single scoop of good ice cream. Sit down and look at the food with love. Eat it very slowly. As you swallow each bite, imagine sending it to your heart (before your stomach and body), infused with grandmotherly kindness and love. (If your grandmother was a bear, pick someone you know who is kind.)
At our monastery, when we ask people to notice what they were feeling right before they felt the urge to snack, people discover an array of emotions that have occurred. They include frustration, sadness, irritation, boredom, anxiety, disappointment, anger, confusion, insecurity, and impatience. Notice that these emotions all fall into the category of negative or aversive feelings.
This finding raises some interesting questions. Do we often eat in order to change the state of our mind and heart? Do we eat to rid ourselves of uncomfortable feelings?
Many people in the workshops on mindful eating tell us that they feel a huge hole in their heart. They might relate it to the death of a loved person or animal. It might be experienced as sadness, or as loneliness, or as the feeling of not quite belonging or fitting anywhere. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that to live as a human being is to experience suffering. For most of us it is not the suffering of being caught in war or tortured. It is more subtle. As a teenaged girl told me sadly, “I always feel like something is wrong, but I don’t know what it is. And I don’t know how to fix it.” There is an underlying, pervasive, restless feeling of unsatisfactoriness. There is a gap between you and the rest of the world. You eat, but you don’t really taste or enjoy.
Most unbalanced relationships with food are caused by being unaware of heart hunger. No food can ever satisfy this form of hunger. To satisfy it, we must learn how to nourish our hearts. We will not find full satisfaction in food, no matter how delicious, if we do not nourish the heart on a daily basis. Conversely, when we are mindful with eating, a feeling of intimacy and connection will arise. Then any food can nourish the heart.
Heart hunger is satisfied by intimacy. Each of us is fundamentally alone in the world. No one can know us to the bottom of our being. No one can know all our thoughts. No one can know completely the deepest longings of our hearts. No one, not even the person we are closest to, can experience life as we do.
The realization that we are fundamentally alone can be a source of sadness, of grief. More dangerously, it can lead us to try unhealthy ways to create a false sense of intimacy, such as abusing drugs, sex, or food. Many people hang out in bars, waiting in vain for their “soul mate” to wander in. They settle for a series of brief and disappointing sexual encounters. Many people try to solve their loneliness by maintaining Internet relationships, relationships that are essentially based upon fantasy.
Eating can be another way to relieve loneliness. As long as I am busy with an all-important activity like eating, I am distracted from my plight, my situation as an individual living in isolation, separated forever from all of the “others” in the universe.
Most people feel self-conscious about eating alone. There is an awkwardness about eating alone in a restaurant. It seems to imply that you have no friends. If they are eating alone at home most people will turn on the TV, a way of creating the illusion of intimacy, the feeling that their house is filled with people and activity.
By contrast, people who are practicing mindful eating deliberately create times and search out places to eat alone. They are relieved to be doing one thing at a time, simply eating, sheltered from the distractions of talking, reading, or watching TV.
When we eat and look deeply into our food, we are in the company of many beings: the plants, animals, and people whose life energy was poured into the food on our plate. According to the Zen teachings, each time we eat, we take in the life energy of countless beings into our bodies. The food on our plate is the product of the sun, the earth, the rain, the insects who pollinate the plants, and many people, including farmers, truck drivers, and grocers. This energy, which is the product of so many beings, courses through our body, propelled by every beat of our heart. It travels to the farthest cells, to our toenails and to the tips of our hair. These beings literally become us, our blue or brown eyes, our soft lips, our hard white teeth, our loving heart. This daily miracle of transubstantiation occurs in our own bodies, day and night.
Unfortunately, while this miracle is occurring we are mostly unaware of it. To awaken to it, even for a few moments each day, can give us new joy, no matter how difficult the other circumstances of our life may be. It can give us new energy, no matter what our age or how tired we are. If we eat with our mind open and aware we can experience our intimate connection to these many beings, and our loneliness dissolves.
EXERCISE
Satisfying Heart Hunger
When you feel hungry but a check of the Nine Hungers reveals that the mouth, stomach, and body are not hungry, do something deliberate to nourish the heart. Here are some ideas. Talk to a person you love, play with a child or a pet, work in your garden, create something, listen to your favorite music, give a gift. If you eat, eat slowly, and open your awareness to the multitude of beings who brought this food to your table. Give thanks.
Now you are becoming aware of the Nine Hungers. Four of the nine tend to be more problematic in our lives than the others. They are:
mouth hunger (because the mouth is always eager for new taste sensations),
stomach hunger (because we have lost awareness of what volume the stomach is happy with),
mind hunger (which tends to intrude into aware eating with thoughts and to criticize us) and
heart hunger (because unbalanced eating can be prompted by unconscious emotions).
These forms of hunger often cause us to overeat—but only when we remain unaware of them and of how to go about satisfying them.
Now that you’ve explored the nine types of hunger, you can develop an essential skill of mindful eating: assessing the level of each kind of hunger whenever the desire to eat arises. In order to know which kind of hunger we are feeling, we can make it a regular practice to ask the question, “Who in there is hungry?”
To find this out, we have to pause before we eat. At first assessing the Nine Hungers may seem cumbersome, but once you learn this skill, it will take only a few seconds, and you will be able to do it in the company of others without their noticing. Even if they do notice and ask what you are doing, you can say, “I’m checking in with my body to see which parts are hungry and what they are asking for.” With some people you will be able to add, “I’m practicing mindful eating.” This might be the start of an interesting conversation.
EXERCISE
Who Is Hungry in There?
This is the most important exercise in this book. It is the essence of mindful eating. Please do it at every meal, until it becomes second nature. This exercise is also included on the audio recording, on track 4.
Each of the Nine Hungers is associated with a different part of the body. Before eating or drinking, look inward and ask each of these parts if it is hungry. If the answer is yes, ask that part how hungry it is on a scale of zero (not interested at all) to ten (famished).
To review: the parts of the body and the senses we look to are the eyes, touch, ears, nose, mouth, stomach, cells, mind, and heart.
Example: You see some donuts at work. The eyes might say, “They were left over from yesterday’s party, but they look OK. Maybe we should have one.” Eye hunger registers a three on the hunger scale.
The sense of touch says, “I don’t like the sticky feeling of donut icing on my fingers, especially when I’m using the computer.” Touch hunger is zero.
The ears say, “Donuts don’t make a sound that is important to us. The rest of you can do what you want.” Ear hunger is zero.
The nose might say, “I can’t help out. I can’t smell anything. If I can’t smell them, I’m not interested in them at all.” Zero nose hunger.
The mouth says, “Any sensation is better than an empty mouth. Let’s try them.” Mouth hunger is a five.
The stomach says, “After all that coffee you drank in the car I feel a little shaky and slightly nauseated. I’m not interested in taking in anything right now.” Stomach hunger is zero.
The cells say, “Stale fat and sugar? Not good for any of our cells.” Cellular hunger is also a zero.
The mind says, “Well, we really shouldn’t eat a donut because we’re trying to eat in a more healthy way. You did well this morning, with only a glass of orange juice and a half cup of yogurt for breakfast. You didn’t have any carbs though…maybe you could have half a donut at coffee break, if you work hard all morning.” Then the mind goes into scarcity mode and continues, “On the other hand, those donuts might be gone by coffee break, so maybe we better get one now.” Then the mind begins bargaining with itself. “You could take one and break it in half. We’ll do some isometric exercises in our cubicle to make up for it.” Mind hunger is a six.
The heart says, “I’m dreading starting this new project. I just can’t seem to wrap our mind around it. I have no idea where to start. My mother always said that you work better with a good breakfast. I don’t think we had a good breakfast. Sugar soothes me, and a donut could help me think better. I saw Susan in the lunchroom. She’s easy to talk to. Let’s go get a donut and talk with her for a while.” The heart registers hunger at eight.
In this example, the hunger of mouth, mind, and heart override the messages from the poor stomach and cells, who aren’t hungry at all. This is very common. People eat not because their body needs food, but because they are anxious or sad, or because the clock says it’s lunchtime, or because “everyone else is eating,” or because “it would be a waste of good food to throw it away,” or because “there might not be any left later.”
• • •
Once you learn to investigate who inside you is hungry, and make it a regular routine to stop and do this exercise before you eat, then you can make a more informed decision about whether to eat or not. Only food or drink will satisfy stomach and cellular hunger; however, there are many alternatives to food for satisfying the other seven types of hunger.
Each of us has habits we developed in childhood to take care of ourselves. In childhood they saved us from suffering. As adults these habits can become compulsions and cause us a great deal of suffering.
We have to appreciate and love the little child who had no power in the adult world and almost no tools to take care of their distress and pain, except food. In unloving or abusive families, many children use food to sooth and comfort themselves when no one else comes to their rescue. They use food to survive. And exactly as a result of finding ways to survive those fearful situations, that child became a resilient, creative, strong adult—and, often, an adult with out-of-balance eating habits. As one woman said, “Food was my only friend, my reliable friend. Why would I give it up?”
The answer is, “Because it is making you miserable. Not the food itself, but the way you have learned to relate to it.”
You don’t have to give up food. You have to give up the obsession with food (and body image) that has you imprisoned. People can make little nests in that prison. That nest can be lined with food. You have to have courage, step out of that prison, one step at a time, and learn to be guided by what is true now (not by what used to be true when you were a child). The first step is to listen to your body, heart, and mind. That is what we call checking in with the Nine Hungers.
Once you are aware of the information from the Nine Hungers, you have choices. Once you have choices, you have stepped into freedom. This is a motto for life:
Awareness brings choice and choice brings freedom.
When you learn to pop up into awareness, when you can ask, ‘Who’s hungry in there?” you are no longer a creature chained to old habits, and you begin the journey to freedom.
It’s like a bus driver with nine unruly passengers. Each passenger is telling you how to drive (faster, slower) and where to go (go to the mall, no, take me home). The bus driver can’t react emotionally to all of this input. The driver has to listen, take into account what each passenger is saying, and then make an informed, wise, and compassionate decision about how to drive and where to go. Just so, through mindful eating, you, the driver of the vehicle called your body, will learn to listen to the information from the nine aspects of hunger and make an informed, wise, and compassionate decision about what and where and how much and how fast to eat.
If we want to feel satisfied and eat the appropriate amount, we have to take food in through all the sense doors, becoming awake to the color, fragrance, texture, taste, temperature, and sound of our food. And if we want to be content in this moment and to be nourished by whatever comes into our life, we also must find ways to feed our heart.