IN THE LAST CHAPTER WE EXPLORED ONE OF THE essential skills of mindful eating: bringing our full awareness and attention to hunger itself so that we can know what exactly we’re hungry for and how to satisfy it. Another important aspect of mindful eating is becoming more aware of the eating habits and patterns we’ve developed throughout our lives—what is often called our conditioning.
When we read the word “conditioning” we might think of Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. As the dogs were fed, a bell was rung. After some time the dogs would salivate whenever they heard the sound of the bell, even when no food appeared. Their cells in their bodies and brains reacted to the sound alone.
Humans also form connections like this. When we receive positive rewards, like praise, smiles, kisses, or pleasurable sensations from food, we are more likely to continue a behavior. When we receive negative feedback, scolding, frowns, rejection, or unpleasant sensations such as a swat on the behind, we are less likely to continue a behavior. Food itself is intrinsically neither good nor bad. We learn “good food” or “bad food” through experience. A crawling baby may put anything he finds on the ground, including mud or worms, into his mouth and chew happily until his mother shrieks, “Ugh, that’s dirty. Bad boy!” She jabs her finger in his mouth to dig out his tasty morsel and eventually teaches (conditions) him to wash his hands, sit at a table, and eat proper food with a fork and knife. However, if this baby were raised in the wild by dogs or wolves, he would prefer raw meat eaten right off the ground.
Although our food choices are affected by social conditioning, some foods, such as sugar, salt, and fat, provide their own positive reinforcement in the form of pleasant taste sensations and a lift in our mood. Other potential foods provide the opposite. One episode of vomiting after eating rhubarb leaves or blisters in the mouth from snacking on poison ivy provides pretty potent negative conditioning. Positive conditioning results in desire; negative conditioning results in aversion.
Conditioning is a normal, unavoidable phenomenon in all our lives. Conditioning around food begins as soon as we are born. As we drink warm milk we are being cuddled by our mother, skin on warm skin. Breast milk is surprisingly sweet. It is not a surprise, then, that when people make a list of comfort foods, many of these foods are white, milky, creamy, rich, or sweet, such as ice cream, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes with butter, a bowl of creamed soup, a latte with whipped cream, hot cocoa, or even a basic glass of warm milk.
When we cry, we are comforted by being picked up and given a nipple to suck on. Researchers can assess a baby’s distress by measuring their sucking rate. The more distressed, the more sucks per minute. Rags or pacifiers dipped in sugar have been used for generations to quiet babies. Pacifiers or “binkies” are now sold by the millions based upon the comfort provided by sucking. They are even used to decrease babies’ crying during circumcision. It is not a surprise, then, to see how popular personal water bottles and flavored waters have become of late. It is a legitimate way for an adult to relieve stress by “nursing” throughout the day. A more subtle form of comfort is the never-empty cup of warm coffee or tea carried about throughout the workday. Our minds and bodies have formed this link: stress + warm drink → comfort (lessening of stress).
As we grow the conditioning continues. The conditioning can be positive or negative. We will form very different associations and habit patterns when we eat something and our mother beams and says, “Good boy! You ate it all up!” versus her frowning and saying, “Don’t be such a pig!” A little girl who is warned, “If you eat too much you’ll get fat like your mom!” is being directed on a very different path from a boy who is praised with, “What a great appetite he has! He’s going to grow up to be bigger than his daddy!”
In research on how couples eat on a date, women report that to “overeat” on a date would not be feminine, while men feel that overeating is a sign of being manly or powerful. In one experiment, men read a long and detailed description of a man named Brad going out on a date. There were two versions of the story that differed only in these few words. Brad either ate “most” of his popcorn or “a few handfuls” of his popcorn. Young men who read the “most” version rated Brad as stronger, more aggressive, more masculine, and able to bench-press more weight. Interestingly, women were not affected either positively or negatively by the few words characterizing Brad as having a big or small appetite.1
Our relationship to food is conditioned by thousands of influences: our family of origin, advertising, television, movies, books, magazines, our peer groups, our culture. Have you noticed that if you read about a certain food in a book or see it in a movie, you begin to be hungry for it? A few years ago there was a popular series of books about a minister in a fictional small town in North Carolina. One of the characters, a lady named Esther, had a secret recipe for an orange marmalade cake that always sold out at annual church bazaars. So many readers developed a craving for a cake that they had never tasted, but only read about, that the author wrote a small book featuring the recipe. I even baked this cake, but I was disappointed to find that it didn’t taste as delicious as the (imaginary) people described the (imaginary) cake in the book to be.
If you were raised in a difficult family, mealtimes may have been very unpleasant. Perhaps they were always disharmonious or tense occasions, when anger could erupt suddenly, for no clear reason. Perhaps it was the time when all your misdeeds, real or imagined, were named and publicly criticized. Maybe you were told that you were stupid or worthless or had ruined your parent’s life. Maybe you were ridiculed, called clumsy or fat or more humiliating names. You wanted to run, but if you had left the table, the verbal and emotional abuse would have escalated.
In Pavlov’s experiments with dogs, food was paired with a bell. Perhaps in your home, food was paired with stress, shame, anxiety, and danger. In Pavlov’s experiments, the sound of a bell made the conditioned dogs salivate. Because human beings are more complex than dogs, and because our environment is not as simple and controlled as a cage in a laboratory, there could be many different results, many possible behaviors, that result from the pairing of eating with stress.
Even after you grew up, left home, and could eat alone in safety, events could trigger the body and mind to react as they did when you were a child. Because feeling hungry meant having to enter a place of peril in your childhood, as an adult you might react to feelings of hunger as if they were dangerous. You might try to prevent these “dangerous” sensations of hunger from arising by continuously “grazing” or by sipping sodas. You might confuse the sensations of anxiety and hunger, eating to relieve “hunger pangs” that actually are gastrointestinal signals of emotional distress.
Because the family table was the scene of unhappiness, you may feel subtle anxiety when you sit down at a table to eat. Thus you prefer to eat standing up at the refrigerator or in the kitchen. Maybe it helps to be distracted, so you eat while watching TV or in your car. Perhaps you only feel safe eating in restaurants because your family never acted out in a public place.
Let’s say that your family had its difficulties, but at Thanksgiving time everyone gathered at Grandma’s house and all bickering and arguments ceased. Tension dissolved like butter melting on mashed potatoes. Harmony prevailed as everyone joined in the pleasure of eating and reminiscing about the good old days. Now, as an adult, every time you have an argument with a family member, or when the “family” of internal voices in your mind are arguing and being critical of you, you may find yourself overeating on purpose, to the point where you are too stuffed to think and the voices are temporarily silent.
This is called “self-soothing.” It is a way of using food to help disguise or dispel uncomfortable feelings and inner voices. They won’t stay silent for long, however. As soon as you wake from your food-induced lethargy they will have fresh fuel for self-criticism.
These “eat fast and run” or “snack continuously to avoid hunger” or “eat into a stupor” behaviors were good strategies when you were a child and doing the best you could in an inescapable and repeatedly abusive situation. However, using food this way is not a healthy and happy way to eat when you are an adult.
Will it make you eat more or less if stress and eating were paired in early life? It depends. The old linkage of anxiety with eating could make you lose your appetite and eat less. The sight or taste of certain foods that you had as a child could make your body react with a faster heart rate, nausea, and secretion of hormones related to stress. Let’s imagine that you come home late from a long, tense meeting at work and your spouse or partner has to reheat a homemade dinner that has now grown cold. Your stomach is in knots before the meal arrives, and you just can’t eat it. Your spouse then feels disappointed and hurt. Your insides continue to register the disharmony in the air, anxiety combined with pangs of hunger, and you go to bed early with a stomachache.
However, the old pairing of anxiety with eating could have the opposite effect. It could make you eat more, especially more of comfort foods. Perhaps you come home unhappy about the outcome of a week of hard work and you overeat to the point of numbness and then watch a funny movie on TV. The show is about a man who is fired from his job and ends up living with the homeless under a bridge. It doesn’t seem so funny to you. In fact, you are feeling anxious again, so you rummage around in the refrigerator, finding an open half gallon of mocha fudge ice cream that you eat surreptitiously while standing over the sink. In the bathroom mirror, as you take your anticholesterol pill, you see a smudge of chocolate around your mouth and become aware of how much fat you have just consumed. You get into bed with your spouse, feeling simultaneously guilty and defensive.
You can see how the soup of old conditioning, operating at the subconscious level, can be stirred round with new ingredients in our life to create a bitter stew of ongoing suffering.
A common form of conditioning occurs when children are told, “Clean your plate!” This is particularly potent if we are made to feel guilty about malnourished children on the other side of the globe. This instruction tells us to ignore signals from our stomach and to rely instead on the signal of an empty plate to decide when we’ve had “enough.” Research shows that this is exactly how most people in North America decide when to stop eating. When asked how they decide when to stop eating, only 20 percent of people say they decide based upon clues from their body, such as when they feel full or no longer hungry. The rest depend upon external cues. They stop when the TV show or movie is over, or when the plate or bowl, regardless of size, is empty. As we saw in chapter 2, even if a soup bowl is rigged so that it will never empty, people will keep on eating until they’re told to stop.
Many people who come to our mindful eating workshops do not know how to tell when their body is satisfied with the amount they have eaten. The only signals they are able to recognize are “uncomfortable-hungry” and “uncomfortable-stuffed-full.” When they eat, they bypass the more subtle signal of “satisfied” and eat until they feel discomfort from being overly full. They consistently overeat and thus gain weight, particularly if they are eating calorie-dense foods. Bariatric surgery works in part by exaggerating the signals from the gastrointestinal tract so that patients cannot ignore them. If they do, and try to eat sugar, fat, or more than a small amount of food, they will suffer abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, faintness, and diarrhea.
Why did our grandparents or parents give us (the potentially lethal) instruction to clean our plates? They may have been reacting to memories of hunger they felt when they were poor, or during the war or the Great Depression. Perhaps they resolved then that their children would never go hungry. Their nagging is actually a sign of their love, but it doesn’t feel like love to their children. It makes them feel criticized, guilty, and confused. If there are babies starving in Africa, which is worse: to eat or not eat?
This nagging about food can also create rebellious children. I once knew an intelligent university professor and his intelligent wife who enforced the clean-your-plate-or-else rule. Their doubly intelligent kids would meekly obey so they could be excused quickly to run outside and play. They became the neighborhood’s champion vomiters. This was probably not the outcome the parents intended.
Most of the habit patterns we create in childhood are harmless and fade away. Ideally, as we mature we become more flexible and are able to recognize conditioned patterns of behavior and free ourselves from them. Many reactive patterns, however, are deeply held. They remain hidden and constrain us. How can we detect that an old conditioned habit pattern has been activated? There are several clues. They are idiosyncratic eating, anger, overwhelming desire, and going unconscious.
In reaction to various events in childhood, everyone develops idiosyncratic habits around eating. Research confirms the power of conditioning, for instance, on the order in which people eat foods. People who were the youngest or from a large family tend to eat a favorite food first. They learned in childhood not to wait to eat a food they liked. It might be grabbed and gone before they knew what happened. People who were only children or the oldest are more relaxed and tend to leave a favorite food to eat last.2
My mother was an only child, but she always ate the icing off her cake first. She did this because as a child she once set the icing aside to eat last. She was dismayed when my grandmother speared it with a fork and popped it into her mouth, saying, “Oh, if you don’t want to eat this, I will.” The incensed little girl resolved never to be cheated of her icing again. My mother was conscious of this habit pattern and how it arose. She could laugh about it. She was able to be flexible and eat her icing last without feeling distressed. Most of our conditioned habits, however, remain unconscious and therefore hidden to us unless someone points them out to us.
A man who attended a mindful eating workshop had stunned his family when he abruptly got up during a tense discussion about serious health issues and sped away to get ice cream and root beer that they said “nobody needed or wanted.” When questioned about this odd behavior he recalled, “When I was growing up we rarely had desserts. But once in a while my dad, who never cooked, would make us root beer floats. It was a huge treat. Even looking at a bottle of Dad’s Root Beer brings back those memories and makes me happy. I realize that when I ran out to buy ice cream and root beer I was thinking, ‘I’m going to fix this. Everything’s going to be wonderful. I’ll make everyone happy again.’ ”
Sometimes we must rely on others’ observations to see in what ways our eating might be idiosyncratic. My father once commented, “Oh, I see you still eat the same way you did when you were a child. You always ate only one thing at a time.” I wasn’t consciously aware of this habit pattern, but when I watched myself eat, he was right. I remembered that as a child I didn’t like foods to touch. I liked to keep them separate on my plate, so beet juice wouldn’t “bleed” into the peas or the applesauce. I didn’t even like to mix tastes and would eat all of one kind of food on the plate before beginning on another. I would rotate a glass of milk so as not to drink from a place on the rim I had already used. Only when I became aware of this pattern could I sense the old childish anxiety that lay beneath it and enter the freedom that came with letting it go.
At the Zen monastery where I live and teach, food is passed down the table and held at a side table while we chant and eat first portions in silence. Then the food is passed back up to the top so that everyone has the option of taking seconds. During the mindful eating workshops some people noticed that anger arose when seconds were being passed. I can often predict who these people will be, because they can’t help looking down the table to see what kind and amount of food is coming and how much others are taking.
In a discussion after the meal, a workshop participant said that she really liked the lasagna and was hoping for a second helping, but when the pan reached her, it was all gone and she felt upset. She told us,
The funny thing is, my stomach was completely satisfied with the amount of lasagna I had eaten already, but my mind wanted more. Then I remembered the feeling I had when I was a child. I was the youngest of five kids. My big brothers would always grab the food as soon as it hit the table, and I had to be quick if I wanted to eat at all. I realized that when I’m eating with others I’m always watching to see that people don’t take more than their “fair share.”
Concentration camp survivors report becoming quite distressed if they have to stand in line for food or if they see food being thrown away, even when it has spoiled; likewise, they say that they often become anxious when food is not readily available.3
One Friday night as I was driving home from work I realized that I was out of balance with a particular food. It had been a hard week, with way too much suffering coming in the door of our child abuse program. I had been looking forward to a relaxing weekend at home when an emergency rape case came in, half an hour before closing time. You cannot rush these cases, especially when you are collecting evidence. By the time we finished it was eight o’clock. I was driving home on the freeway and found my mind searching the car for…chocolate! Was there any in my purse? Nope, ate that yesterday. My mind turned to the glove compartment. A one-handed search turned up nothing, as did a rummage through both map pockets and a grope through the dust balls under the seats. Should I stop at a convenience store for a fix of inferior milk chocolate or wait until I got home for a spoonful of the emergency jar of Nutella hidden at the back of the pantry shelf?
My mind was in the grip of an overwhelming desire for one food, chocolate. Almost everyone laughs when I tell this story. It is laughter of recognition. They then reveal that they also have an “addiction” to some kind of food. They recognize that this food “calls” to them when they are upset and that they eat more of it than they “should.” Often they eat it faster than usual and afterward they feel uncomfortably full, guilty, or ashamed.
While it is common to overeat once in a while, especially at holidays or festivals, people with binge-eating disorder succumb to eating episodes that are out of their control every few days, consuming thousands of calories in an hour or two. They may be aware that their goal is to go unconscious, to briefly forget painful emotions, fear, loneliness, and the feeling that they are failing. Sometimes we eat to go unconscious, and sometimes we go unconscious while eating. Both can point to hidden habit patterns involving food.
When I was an intern working forty-eight-hour shifts, I would go down to the X-ray department at night, lie on the warm developing machine, and eat a frozen Ding Dong. I don’t even like Ding Dongs, but the cold sugar and warm metal helped numb my physical and mental stress so I could continue to work with others who were in worse distress.
The point of mindful eating is not to forbid ourselves to ever use food in this way. The point is that by eating with mindfulness we can become aware of the seductive power of the call to go unconscious. As we become aware, we are creating a larger frame around what is happening in our body-mind complex. This larger space gives us flexibility, the freedom to live life on purpose. With each conscious choice, whether we ultimately choose a Ding Dong or a protein shake, a greater degree of sanity enters our life.
How can we work with unconscious conditioning in order to unwind ourselves from its painful embrace? Awareness is the key. Our desire to be awake, to see clearly how our blind spots make us and others suffer, has to be stronger than our desire to live on automatic pilot. It’s not a simple, once-made-always-kept decision. It’s a decision we will face again and again.
Most of the time we talk about anger as a destructive emotion, one that we work to dissolve. But anger can be a powerful teacher. It is a call to wake up, a signal that an unconscious pattern has been activated, that our illusions, our invisible protective ego defense shields, have been poked. Once they have been poked, they are no longer invisible. We can begin to see what they are and work with loosening them. For example, if someone serves me a plate of food with beet juice running into the salad and coloring the mashed potatoes, I might find myself thinking indignantly, “She’s not a very neat person.”
If I am aware of my mind, I can detect that there is something extra going on. I can feel the extra “heat” of this internal judgment. I can hear the mind developing a confirmatory story. “Yes,” my mind says to itself, “I noticed the trash in her bathroom hadn’t been emptied before we arrived.” My mind begins to rummage through its closet of old grievances. If I can stop the stories and return to the reality of a plate of food in my hands, the weight, the aromas, the colors, the shapes, then I can enjoy eating the food and feel gratitude for the one who prepared it and served it to me.
I can see again that suffering originates with me. “Oh, this is just a plate of colors and shapes. It is a gift. It has activated my old anxiety about foods not touching. I can see that rutted mind-path and I will not go down it tonight. I will stay with what is, here, now.”
How can we break old habit patterns? The answer is deceptively simple but not so easy to carry out. We break old habits by being aware of them and by not moving. “Being aware and not moving” means not speaking, not doing anything with the body. Moving either the mouth or body is what Buddhists call karma. When we stop an automatic behavior, when we create a gap between a thought and the action or speech that usually follows it, we are wedging open the door to the prison made of thousands of conditioned habit patterns. Eventually, after years of practice, the door will stand wide open. When the old habit patterns surface, we will have choice. We will even be able to smile at the absurdity of the many schemes of our mind.
EXERCISES
Becoming Aware of Conditioning around Eating
It’s useful to begin by recalling what mealtimes were like for you in childhood. Find a partner for this exercise. Describe to your partner a typical meal when you were five to ten years old. Start with breakfast. Later move to lunch and dinner. Your partner can prompt you by asking questions if needed: Where did you eat? Who was present? What was the noise and activity level? Who made the food? Was it food you enjoyed? How was it served? What was the mood as you ate? What was talked about? Who did the talking? How long did the meal last? How did people get up and leave? As a five- to ten-year-old, did you have any chores around cooking, eating, or cleanup? Now reverse roles so your partner does the exercise while you listen and ask questions.
• • •
Tell a partner as many rules around food, eating, and table manners as you can remember from your childhood. For example: “Clean your plate or else __________,” “No dessert unless you __________,” “Don’t chew with your mouth open,” “Children are to be seen, not heard.”
Tell your partner how you have reacted to these rules. Do you still honor them, or have you modified or rebelled against them? What happened if you broke the rules or refused to eat a certain food?
• • •
Ask a person in your nuclear family about meals when they were five to ten years old. It’s important to ask in a warm and nonjudgmental way, as if you were an academic doing historical research. You can frame this undertaking by saying that you want to gather family history and learn more about your parents’ or other relatives’ lives.
If you ask a parent or grandparent, you may learn about their conditioning around eating and how it was handed down to you. If you ask a sibling you may get a point of view on your family’s habits around eating that is different from yours.
• • •
Ask at least one person who knew you when you were five to ten years old what kind of an eater you were. If you are polling a parent or an older sibling, you can ask about your eating patterns from birth through childhood.
Can they describe your eating habits in one word? One sentence? Did you have any physical difficulties around eating? Colic? Gastroesophageal reflux? Stomachaches? Diarrhea or constipation? Were there foods you hated or loved? How did they know this?
Note: This is a slightly risky undertaking, as you may hear uncomfortable things about yourself. Keep in mind that what you hear is only a point of view, and there are as many points of view as there are people. One person’s point of view about the you-of-the-past may be flattering, interesting, or upsetting, but it is only a very small part of the truth.
We have to become the scientist and the experimental animal. We have to want to uncover our half-hidden habit patterns around food so we can gain freedom from automatic behaviors. We have to be curious and nonjudgmental about this interesting construction we call “myself.”
One particularly strong area of conditioning has to do with binging and dieting. If we look at these impulses, we find that they are rooted not only in our personal life experiences but in our collective human history.
“I have been dieting since age fourteen,” Curt said. “It has been a grit-your-teeth daily battle for all those years. From the first moment of the day, when I wake up and can’t have what I want for breakfast, through the entire day until the evening, when I argue with myself about wanting to eat a second dinner, it has been a grim, nonstop battle.” Curt found that joining Overeaters Anonymous helped him. “I stopped dieting and became abstinent,4 and I lost seventy-five pounds. But then I made the mistake of eating one bowl of ice cream, and I ended up regaining those seventy-five pounds.” He says that he struggled again and became “abstinent again” and lost those seventy-five pounds. “But I ate one cookie at a weekend retreat, because they were out on the tea table and everyone was eating cookies, and that cookie became twenty-five more pounds.”
This is the feast-or-famine mode of dieting. One “voice” in your mind takes over and puts you on a diet. It talks to you about the rules, the shoulds and should nots. You should eat five small meals, you should skip breakfast and eat only one big meal, protein is good, fat is bad, no, fat is good and carbohydrates are bad. You can have an extra candy because you didn’t have real sugar in your coffee this morning, but you can’t have butter or salt on your popcorn because you didn’t exercise at all this week and salt makes you retain water and gain weight.
Sooner or later you get tired of being constantly nagged by this voice, and a change occurs. Another part or voice takes over. It might be triggered by indulging in a single cookie or one bowl of ice cream. “What the heck,” it says. “You’ve blown it now, so you might as well go all the way.” Suddenly you flip out of the iron grip of strict discipline and into the indulgence of eating what you want, and a lot of it.
Flipping between fasting mode and feasting mode, also called “yo-yoing,” becomes a way of life for many people. It is a frustrating, exhausting, and demoralizing way to live. When the inner voice that is not currently in charge has the power to emerge and take over any time, you have to be on guard duty day and night. Who wants to live their life as both perpetrator and victim of an unending internal battle? The Buddha said that it does not matter if we desire something or hate it, we are still tethered like a dog to a stake. If we binge on meat or if we are a fanatical vegetarian, we are still tethered to the same stake (or steak).
How can we untie the rope that binds us to either desire or aversion toward food? How can we bring ourselves to a sense of ongoing trust with food, to find peace in body and mind when we eat? It helps to look at our hidden impulses through a historical lens.
Our ancestors did not have a constant supply of food. When a large animal—a whale, a bison, a wooly mammoth, or an elephant—was killed, everyone feasted, gorged. There was no refrigeration, no way to preserve what was left. After a few days the meat would begin to rot, and it might be weeks or months before another big kill, so large amounts had to be eaten quickly and then stored in the body for the times of scarcity that were sure to come. This is an ancient or atavistic memory, which calls us to eat all we can now, even if we are not hungry, just in case there won’t be any food tomorrow. It doesn’t matter whether or not we personally have ever been without food in our lives or whether our parents and grandparents have always had food as well—there is something deep in our primitive brain that still fears starvation, scarcity, famine.
Famine has continued to be a reality of human life despite the development of agriculture and the technological advances that have increased crop production over human history. There are countless examples of large numbers of people starving to death, in both ancient and modern times. Over three thousand years ago Egypt suffered several decades of drought. An autobiographical text left by one ruler from this devastating era states, “All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children.” The Old Testament describes seven consecutive lean years and plagues of locusts that ate all the crops in the fields. Walter Mallory, a famine relief officer in Asia, noted that Chinese scribes carefully recorded 1,828 famines between 108 B.C.E. and 1911 C.E., almost one famine each year.
During the last sixty years famines have killed 30 million people in China, 3 million in North Korea, and half a million in Ethiopia. In the twenty-first century, a child dies of hunger every five seconds somewhere on this earth. Of all the continents, only North America seems to have been spared the suffering of widespread famine. However, one in eight American children goes to bed hungry, and one in six elderly people has an inadequate diet. Almost half of the mayors of American cities report that they cannot meet their most vulnerable citizens’ needs for food. Fear of scarcity and the instinctual imperative to eat food while we have it are therefore not unfounded even in our own time, and these feelings combine to produce one of our most primitive and powerful drives.
On top of these ancient and cellular fears about starving to death, many more people than you might expect have had actual experiences of scarcity or starvation in their own lives. These distressing memories confirm and reinforce the atavistic fears with a little voice that says, “Remember the time we were hungry before? It could happen again. Better eat what you can while it’s in the fridge.”
You might think that no one you know has ever been truly starving, but you are probably wrong. I didn’t realize this until I began leading mindful eating workshops and heard stories of early deprivation, even in middle-class families. As participants hesitatingly told their stories to the group, they often had insights into how their self-defeating patterns with food had developed. The younger a person was when these experiences around eating occurred, the stronger the reactive pattern was likely to be. Here are three examples.
When Josh was six, his father died of colon cancer. For several years before that his father was in and out of the hospital, and family meals were lost in the chaos. After his father died, his mother, an award-winning elementary school teacher, sank into deep depression. She was able to pull herself together for a day of teaching, but she arrived home with no energy left to cook or even to stock the kitchen with food. He recalls her crying continuously for several years before she married again. It was an unfortunate choice, a man who was verbally abusive to her and to Josh. Josh lived on the food he was able to scavenge for himself: peanut butter, canned SpaghettiOs, Froot Loops sugared cereal, croutons from a box, bologna, milk, and Pop-Tarts.
As an adult he says that the foods that sustained him through a lonely childhood are comforting, even dry croutons. He describes himself as “addicted” to peanut butter. He undertook a month of abstinence from peanut butter in order to face his fear of being without it. Through mindful eating practice, Josh has become aware that certain foods can provide solace. He is able to use them with awareness of their particular power, without overeating.
Lydia was raised by parents who were teenagers when they conceived her, the first of five closely spaced children. Children raising children. Actually, alcoholic children raising children. Lydia told us that her parents would disappear, sometimes for days, drinking with friends. Lydia was told to look after the younger children. She remembers them crying in hunger, in a house empty of food. She fed them ice scraped from the freezer compartment flavored with vanilla, the only thing she found in an otherwise bare cupboard. Lydia now loves to cook, eat, and feed people. Memories of near starvation keep her safely over three hundred pounds despite many periods of dieting. She had uncontrolled diabetes and high blood pressure and has decided to have intestinal bypass surgery. She prepared for surgery by taking a mindful eating training.
After surgery Lydia had to be very careful about what she ate and her portions sizes were small. She lost 100 pounds and was able to go off her medications for diabetes and hypertension. Chronic foot and knee pain disappeared when her joints did not have to bear the weight of two people. However, she is disappointed that she did not reach her target weight, and now, six years after surgery, her diabetes has returned. When she went to the bariatric surgery support group at the university she heard women complaining, “I thought I wouldn’t be hungry after surgery, but I’m still hungry!” She says they did not realize that stomach hunger and some aspects of cellular hunger diminish with surgery, but the other seven hungers, eye, nose, ear, touch, mind, mouth, and heart, are still active.
Erika was born to older parents, with a condition that made her skin rough, flaky, and easily infected. Her rigid, critical mother was unable to care for her, and she was placed in an infants’ home at six months. There she became ill and was transferred to a hospital, where she was fed through a tube in her nose. The misguided policy at that time was not to allow parents to visit, let alone stay overnight in the hospital, for fear of upsetting the sick child. She didn’t return home until she was a year old.
During a long meditation retreat Erika was suddenly transported back to infancy. She vividly reexperienced herself as a small being in a huge, cold bed, too weak to move anything but her eyes. A cold, bright light shone in her eyes. Periodically an adult who smelled bad would appear and touch her with cold hands. She recalls, “I was hollow below the throat, and the stomach seemed to be an empty sea of longing.”
Erika came from a middle class family, but her parents disapproved of her career choice, telling her that she lacked the intelligence and stamina to become a doctor. She became an impoverished student, attending medical school in a foreign country. She studied in streetcars because they were warm. She says that her thinking became organized around what and when she could eat. She learned where to buy the cheapest food, and she looked with longing at food left on plates, in garbage bins, or dropped on the floor in grocery stores. She saw many pets given meals that she herself would have wolfed down gladly. She felt envious of people in restaurants, as casual with their food as she once had been. At times, the temptation to take food that people had left behind was “almost unbearable.” She discovered new companions, whom she describes as “old bearded beggars, strangely dressed, forlorn immigrants, the lonely elderly carefully dressed and rummaging in garbage cans, and the poor mothers queuing up for bargains in the pouring rain.”
These experiences have left their mark in suffering, but they also have made Erika a more compassionate physician, able to “tune in to this view of the world any time and have a soft spot for food obsessions.” She became an oncologist, caring for those with cancer, the most lonely and frightened patients. Among them are many children; among them are many people who cannot eat and are wasting away.
These are stories not just of unsatisfied physical hunger but also of unsatisfied heart hunger. Food and love, which are often wedded in our minds, become traumatically bonded when parents deprive a child of both caloric and emotional nutrition.
Because her experience of deprivation occurred earlier in life, when she had fewer coping skills, and because it involved guilt over not being able to relieve the suffering of her little brothers and sisters mixed with anger at her immature parents, Lydia’s eating patterns are more likely to be fueled by strong reactivity, an underlying vow never to be without food again. She might be more likely to gorge when food is available, more likely to urge food on those she loves, more likely to stockpile food. Because Erika was physically hungry as an adult, when she was able to talk herself through a temporary and even noble situation in medical school, she may have a less powerful reactive pattern. She might find herself eating seconds when she isn’t really hungry or taking home in her briefcase the little bag of pretzels she didn’t eat on the airplane.
I have encountered many examples of food deprivation in my work. There were the children diagnosed with “failure to thrive,” small and barely growing despite our earnest nutritional advice to their parents. Suddenly, when they turned two or three, their weight would shoot up. We realized that they were now able to get into cupboards and open refrigerators by themselves and get the food they needed. Addicted parents who lose their appetites when they are high on drugs often neglect to feed their children. I have talked to many children who began fixing food at age six or seven for both themselves and their younger siblings. Their parents were either high or sleeping off a high and forgot to feed their children. These children may not have conscious memories of being starved, but their unconscious minds will remember. They may feel a strong urge to eat more than they need to now, in case food is not available tomorrow or all next week. These early experiences of “not enough” are powerful forms of conditioning. When not enough food is paired with not enough love, the impact is doubly deep.
The ancient fear of death by starvation was so necessary to survival that it seems to have become part of our very cells. When this primitive anxiety, passed on over countless generations, becomes paired in this lifetime with actual experiences of scarcity, powerful emotions can arise apparently out of nowhere, driving us to eat. As long as our behavior is being controlled by our ancestral memories, by our subconscious mind, and by conditioned habit patterns, we are not free. If we try to overcome these by forcing ourselves into a pattern of rigid control we still will not be free.
How can we liberate ourselves from patterns of conditioning that have been repeated for many years, even many generations? We begin with mindfulness exercises. These exercises, and our group discussions about these exercises, can help us discover hidden thoughts and automatic behaviors. Once we bring them up into the light of awareness these behaviors will change. They may change slowly, but they will no longer have the hold on us that they did when they were operating in the darkness of our unconscious, hidden from the light of our awareness.
I repeat, a small change is all that’s needed, a small change in awareness, a small change in behavior. The anthropologist Margaret Mead observed that a custom, let’s say always eating fish on Fridays, could persist unchanged for centuries in a culture. However, as soon as someone traveled outside the culture and saw that there was the possibility of doing things differently, the old custom was doomed. It might take centuries, but inevitably it would change. People would begin to eat chicken on Fridays or fish on Tuesdays. This is true of our individual customs, too. As long as our habit patterns are hidden backstage, they will remain unchanged. As soon as we bring them up onto the stage of our mind and shine the spotlight of awareness on them, they will inevitably change.
For example, once we see that whenever we are stressed we soothe ourselves with vanilla ice cream, this habit will begin to loosen its hold on us. The next step is to change our behavior. If we are able to experience the impulse to eat in an unhealthy way and not act upon it, even once in a while, this is wonderful. This might mean not having the vanilla ice cream or substituting frozen mango slices or just delaying eating the ice cream for thirty minutes. Do not discount small and intermittent changes in your behavior. Ultimately small shifts can have a big impact, slowly but steadily bringing us to greater health and ease.
EXERCISE
Exercise for Becoming Aware of Reactive Patterns around Food
With a partner or within a group (or in a journal if you are alone), share stories of:
• Food used as a reward
• Food used as punishment
• Hoarding food
• Deprivation or starvation
Can you discern any reactive patterns that might have resulted from these experiences?
EXERCISE
Exercise for Becoming Aware of Food Cravings, Fears, and Anxieties
You will need a piece of paper and a pen or pencil for this exercise. On the sheet of paper make four columns. At the top of the first column write, “Food for Illness.” Make a list of foods you would like someone to make for you when you are sick. For example, what do you like to eat when you have a bad cold or the flu? Now, in the same column, write the foods your mother made for you when you were sick. Are they the same or different from what you want today?
At the top of the second column write, “Comfort Foods.” List the foods you eat when you need comforting. It helps to ask yourself, “When I drag myself home after a bad day, I think, ‘What I really need now is some…’ ”
Title the third column “Craved Foods.” Make a list of foods that you find yourself daydreaming about or going out of your way to buy, or foods you never quite get enough of.
Finally, title the fourth column “Feared and Disliked Foods.” Make a list of foods that you are fearful of eating or that you particularly dislike. The fear could be felt in a mild form, like avoidance, or a strong form, such as distress or even anger when you see or smell the food. Do you know why you particularly like or dislike certain foods?
If you are working with a partner or group, take turns reading these lists out loud. Is there any similarity or overlap in different people’s lists?
Another important aspect of exploring our eating habits is to look into our cravings for what we might call “the big three”: sugar, salt, and fat. They are an unholy and very profitable trio. The fast-food industry depends upon our insatiable desire for these three: the soothing taste of sweetness, the tangy taste of salt, and the deep-fried taste and creamy, melting texture of fat. When eaten in excess they play a role in many diseases, including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, stroke, and fatty liver disease. They have an addictive quality. Witness how hard it is to convert children raised on fast food to a healthy diet.
My grandson recently came home from high school lamenting, “They only serve baked french fries at school now, and they don’t taste as good as deep fried.” Out of concern over the epidemic of childhood obesity, the nutritionists in our school district had tossed out their deep-fat fryers. Why does less fat and salt not taste as good, even to a child? Why do fast foods containing the unholy trio taste better than, and thus inevitably displace, traditional foods in every country where they are sold?
It’s because sugar, salt, and fat are actually a holy trio. They are essential to our survival. Our body recognizes them as treasured substances. Until recently they were difficult to obtain. The story of our history with these foods will tell us a lot about why they are central to our food cravings and why humans the world over, once they have access to an unlimited supply, become unbalanced in their relationship with them.
Sugar and fat are energy sources. We must have their energy to be a warm and active living being, to run the billions of tiny factories in the cells in our body. Sugar is absorbed quickly and provides an immediate burst of energy, but it cannot be stored in the body for later use. If we are not taking in sugars, our reserves last only about six hours. Fat is absorbed more slowly than sugar and can be stored under our skin and inside “beer” bellies. The body can convert fat into the sugar glucose, making fat a sustained-release fuel. Fat was critical to our ancestors’ survival in winter or during lean times. The third substance we crave, salt, is essential to maintain the narrow healthy range of sodium and chloride that all our cells depend on to function. Let’s look at our craving for each of the holy trio one at a time.
Why do our mouths desire sweetness? Basically, it’s because we can’t eat sunshine. We have to rely on plants to convert the sun’s energy into sugar, a form we can eat and savor. Sugarcane (in the tropics) and sugar beets (in the temperate zones) are the most efficient converters of energy from the sun into sugar. Sweetness in the form of refined sugar is a recent invention; concentrated sugar has only become available to human bodies in quantity in the last 150 years, as a result of large-scale cultivation of these two plants.
While King Henry III of England had difficulty obtaining three pounds of sugar for a feast, today the average American consumes three pounds of sugar and other sweeteners every week! Only 250 years ago sugar was so valuable in England it was called “white gold.” Today, however, King Henry could send a servant to a local grocery with less than two dollars to purchase his three pounds, which wouldn’t be enough to make even a few cakes with icing with today’s recipes. “Hardly a banquet,” modern guests would complain, eyeing a tiny morsel of cake. “Where’s the dessert buffet and the chocolate fountain?”
Our first food, breast milk, was sweet, and, given a choice, we choose sweet drinks even before our birth. Babies in the womb swallow amniotic fluid. If sugar is added to that salty liquid, their rate of swallowing goes up. Sweetness also is reassuring to us, a signal that a plant or fruit is likely safe to eat. A bitter flavor often signals that a plant contains dangerous alkaloids.
During most of our 200,000 years of evolution, we humans had to spend a lot of time and energy just to get enough energy to survive. As our brain capacity increased, so did our need for sugar, the brain’s fuel. Our human brain comprises one fifth of our body by weight, but it requires more glucose than the rest of our body. Sugar, a soothing and delicious energy hit, was not readily available to us in olden times. On the rare occasion when people located a stash of sweetness, say, a honeycomb, they had to expend a lot of energy climbing the tree, smoking out the bees, extracting the honey from the comb, and healing their scrapes and bee stings. Or they had to tap maple trees, cut wood for fires, and boil a gallon of sap to make a third of a cup of maple syrup. If you add in the energy needed to make the tomahawk to gash the trees and the birch bark buckets to collect the sap and the clay pots to boil it in, that’s a lot of work for a third of a cup, or 320 calories, of sweet syrup.
While sugar was rare, we were able to derive great pleasure in a small and infrequent sweet treat. Now that sugar is cheap and ubiquitous, it seems to satisfy us less, and we are consuming more with each passing year. Average consumption of sugar and other sweeteners in the United States is now 152 pounds per person per year, and even higher in Europe and Australia. This is almost a half cup of sugar per day on top of the sugar already present in our food. Most people cannot imagine trying to choke down a total of three-quarters of a cup of sugar or honey, spoonful by spoonful, every day. Yet we do just this, and quite happily, because sweeteners are hidden in almost all processed food.
One hundred fifty years of exposure to concentrated sugar is only five or six generations, not enough time for human bodies to evolve the ability to handle ten times the sugar intake of our ancestors. It’s no wonder our poor pancreas can’t produce enough insulin to manage all the extra sweeteners we pour in.
To help me grasp the enormity of the change in our diet since concentrated sugar became cheap, ubiquitous, and a staple in our diet, I took the example of an American Indian woman living 250 years ago in the forest on the banks of the Columbia River where our monastery now stands. What were the sources of sugar in her diet before Europeans first appeared in this land? Fruit. Actually, wild fruit, for this was before white settlers introduced cultivated apple, pear, and plum trees. Native fruit like chokecherries or wild plums were not very sweet. How much fruit sweetness could she enjoy? It depended upon the season. The World Health Organization currently recommends that people eat at least 400 grams of fruit a day. In the summertime a resourceful woman of the local Clatskanie or Chinook tribes would have been able to meet this recommendation if she gathered and ate one cup of blackberries and two cups of wild huckleberries, enjoying a total of 136 calories and 7 grams (1½ teaspoons) of sugar. Most modern women don’t pick huckleberries, but they can taste that native fruit in fast-food form by going to a chain called Burgerville and getting a “Northwest huckleberry shake,” which contains 790 calories and 105 grams (22 teaspoons) of sugar.
We can’t forget that the Native American woman had to expend calories to obtain this sweet bounty. Let’s say she had to walk an hour to gather this fruit in various fields and forests. (We won’t count any calories for picking or processing the fruit.) That’s an expenditure of 280 calories. The fruit gave her 136 calories, a net drain of 144 calories. Thus she could eat all the “dessert” she wanted and still not gain weight. If you also consider that fruit was only available in the summer, it is obvious why diabetes has become epidemic in modern times, even in children. Human bodies, designed to process a few teaspoons of sugar a day, a few months of the year, cannot cope with modern sugar-laced foods.
If our native woman lived in modern times, she could hop in a car and drive to Burgerville for that Northwest huckleberry shake. A twenty-minute drive plus a few minutes of walking would burn up about 40 calories. After finishing her shake, she would have an extra 750 calories to keep. If she did not burn it in exercise when she got home, then her body would dutifully store it as fat, a hedge against lean winter months to come, and her pancreas would have to produce a lot more insulin to burn the morning’s intake of 22 extra teaspoons of sugar. If she drank a Northwest huckleberry shake every day instead of going to the trouble to gather fruit to satisfy her sweet tooth, she would gain about seventy-five pounds a year. Her dentist and her doctor might prosper, but she would not.
Before the industrial revolution, a human body had to work very hard to prevent its own starvation. The primal brain remembers long intervals between successful hunts, long winters with dwindling food stores. Our primal brain demands gorging ourselves when we have the food, before it spoils or we have to flee.
Over those long winters, when summer’s sweet fruit is gone, fat is the fuel we need to burn to stay warm and remain alive. This fuel reserve was critically important to pregnant women and nursing mothers, who had to have enough stored calories during times of scarcity to support their infant’s life. You may have noticed that you are hungrier when you are cold. This is an ancient signal from the body saying, “Put on a layer of insulation and store up portable calories for the winter! Food could be scarce!” Restaurants are aware of the power of this ancient signal, and they purposely keep dining rooms cool so customers will order and eat more.
Our instinct to store fuel is the reason we love fat: the creamy fat in crème brûlée, the crispy fat in potato chips, the melt-on-your-tongue fat in chocolate. This is why fast food and many comfort foods contain a lot of fat. Restaurants know that we like to end meals with desserts rich in fat: ice cream, chocolate mousse, cheesecake, anything with whipped cream on top. This desire to finish the day’s intake with some fat may have its biological origin in the “hind milk” that comes in at the end of a breastfeeding session. It is extra rich in fat and calories, perhaps nature’s strategy to help nursing babies feel full, content, and sleepy (and to give their mothers a break!). It may help us get to sleep, too, to have a warm cup of milk or cocoa before we go to bed.
Salt, too, appeals to our taste buds because it is essential to human survival. Everyone has tasted the salt in their own tears, sweat, and blood. In hot weather you can feel or even see the salt you are losing in sweat as it crusts on your skin. Under normal conditions we lose two grams of salt a day; while exercising in hot weather it can be more than 30 grams, or 6 teaspoons. Every year military recruits and other people who engage in activity that makes them sweat profusely die as a result of drinking water but not replacing the salt lost in perspiration. Our most vital organs, the heart and the brain, cannot function unless their cells are supplied with adequate salt to maintain certain concentrations of sodium, chloride, potassium, and other elements. While it is critical that our body maintain those concentrations, we have no organ that can store salt. Thus we depend upon a regular supply from the outside to maintain health. When humans were primarily carnivores, they obtained adequate salt from the blood and muscle of their prey. Land plants, however, do not contain enough salts, so when humans began to live in settlements, cultivating and eating plant crops, they had to find sources of supplemental salt. Like the grazing animals, humans beat trails to saltpans or licks. Unlike the other animals, they learned to harvest, refine, and sell this valuable commodity.
Salt is an essential nutrient, a condiment, a disinfectant, and a medicine. It has enabled humans to preserve food, and preserving food enables them to undertake long sea voyages and overland trips—including expeditions to trade salt. At one time salt, like sugar, was worth its weight in gold. Men sold their wives and children into slavery for salt. It became a critical raw material as humans developed skills in various industries, including glassmaking, dying fabric, glazing pottery, and tanning leather. Salt is so essential that governments all over the world have depended upon salt taxes to underwrite their budgets and to keep citizens under control; indignation over high taxes on salt imposed by England was a factor in inciting both the American Revolution and Gandhi’s fight for India’s independence.
Sugar, fat, and salt all have a powerful effect upon our mind states. The following exercise is one of the most revealing that we do in our mindful eating workshops. In it we investigate the effect of food on our moods.
EXERCISE
Food and Mood
Have ready small amounts of sugar, salt, dark or bittersweet chocolate, and hot sauce.
1. Begin by closing your eyes. Now bring into your mind something upsetting that happened in the past week. Think hard about this event and purposely stir yourself up by recalling your distress, anger, or frustration. Think about how you would like to get revenge if you could.
Hint: If you need help generating a distressing recent memory three different times (as the exercise progresses), here are some other possible topics to bring to mind.
• Recall something upsetting you heard on the morning news or read in the newspaper.
• Recall a time when someone wronged you, cheated you, or betrayed you.
• Bring to mind a person who really bugs you. It could be a coworker, a family member, a politician, or a movie or TV star. Imagine spending hours in a small room trapped with them.
• Bring to mind a time when you were in pain and could not find relief.
Now, on a scale of one (calm) to ten (furious), how would you rate your level of distress?
Next, put a little sugar or honey on your tongue. Savor the taste.
Now, return to the upsetting memory. How would you rate your level of distress? Has it changed?
Now, eat a little more of the sugar with mindful attention.
Return again to the memory. What score would you give it now?
2. Repeat this exercise using salt.
3. Repeat this exercise using a small amount of something fatty, such as a square or a few chips of dark chocolate.
4. Repeat this exercise using a small amount of spicy food, such as hot sauce.
Remember that there are no “right answers.” These are experiments.
This exercise demonstrates why we crave certain foods. They can have a powerful effect upon our moods. We seek out sugar, salt, and fat not only because they were essential and often scarce foods in our ancestral past but also because they are potent foods for changing our moods. Perhaps they are potent precisely because they were rare in our historic past, and finding and eating them has always relieved a primitive anxiety related to survival.
Keep in mind: There is nothing wrong with using food skillfully to change a difficult state of mind, if we do it with full awareness and in a way that does not harm our body. Food can literally act as mood-changing medicine. However, we need to know the appropriate dose.