Chapter Three

Your Physical Body
(Annamaya Kosa)

I briefly had a friend in graduate school who was a much “better” bulimic than I was. She was thinner, sexier, somehow you could tell that she wasn’t afraid of bending the rules. I once looked in her refrigerator and saw only a head of broccoli. She captured the imagination. We shared a moment of recognition once, discussing the feeling of waking up the next morning after eating (a lot) the night before, anxiously patting our stomach to see if we “got away with it,” meaning, to see if we managed to metabolize the evidence before it lodged itself in bloat and girth. This was a losing battle for me and was always laced with anxiety and a strong sense of impending failure. However, those moments of victory—when the scale reflected the desired number and my regimen of eating, not eating, and exercising evened out to the desired ratio of bone to flesh—made it seem worthwhile. Men would look at me a little longer, women would say enviously, “How do you stay so thin?” These short moments in time were soon lost in spite of my grim efforts. Being the perfect specimen, hitting the right number and the correct size, was not natural to me (or to anyone really), and the game of balancing my hunger and anxiety with appropriate caloric intake exacted its own cost. I had my tricks—lots of gum and candy, skipped meals, daily running, carrots. When I would overeat, my purging method was not eating and exercise until I could work the excesses through my system. It took a toll physically and emotionally.

I tell this little vignette to illustrate the lexicon of the eating disordered. Being a “better” bulimic is obviously not possible. Yet, when I looked at my friend, I imagined that it came more easily for her. I guessed that she didn’t suffer from the anxiety or the self-hatred that I did. After all, she was thinner than me. And she looked so cool in her skinny black dress and boots. Maybe I could get it right too … just maybe.

Bulimics play with the laws of nature, while compulsive eaters deny them. You could say that anorexics are attempting to deny nature all together. When you are attempting to outwit the body, to deny or circumvent the laws of nature, you are under the illusion that some people are playing this game “better” than you are. The words of B.K.S. Iyengar put this illusion in a yogic perspective: “The rules of nature cannot be bent. They are impersonal and implacable. But we do play with them. By accepting nature’s challenge and joining the game, we find ourselves on a windswept and exciting journey that will pay benefits commensurate to the time and effort we put in … ”

This is a very powerful statement when we apply it to your body. Your flesh is tangible and material and functions according to certain rules—universal “rules” regarding food and your body that you may not like very much. So you play with them, try to outwit them, and get around them. This generally leads to more suffering, although it can be fun for a while. These are the moments of “payoff,” when you hit the right numbers on the scale or your blood work comes back good in spite of your “bad” behavior. Perhaps you can “get away with it,” you think to yourself. And then there are those moments of enjoying a delicious meal with delightful abandon. At times like these, it all seems to work and you see no need to change. More often, however, there is that nagging feeling that all is not well inside. It may show up as, “I really need to take off that ten, twenty, thirty pounds.” Or, “I know I need to get a handle on my stress level.” These whispers from the inside are what we begin to open to and listen to when we enter the realm of the physical body/annamaya kosa.

Yoga is a process by which you begin to learn about and integrate the laws of nature as they apply to your body. Remember, yoga means “to yoke” or “unite.” You begin to yoke your external knowledge of how to care for your body with your internal sense of what is good for you. At its most basic level, the yoga of food means recognizing that some foods and habits serve you better than other foods and habits. At a slightly more elevated level, it means honoring your body’s internal feedback system and letting your body accept that feedback, rather than allowing external rules to guide your self-care/food choices. Essentially, the yoga of food is about integrating what you know about the “rules” of nature as they apply to your body, and living in accordance with these rules. As you progress along the path of yoga, it becomes less about manipulating your body to be a particular way (thin or healthy), and more about appreciating your body as an expression of universal intelligence.

Get Under Your Skin

My client Moxie has been through the wars. Diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer at thirty-six and positive for the BRCA gene (a mutation linked with high likelihood of breast and ovarian cancer), she has endured radical double mastectomy and hysterectomy procedures. Then, after having her gallbladder removed, she subsequently had her entire colon, anus, and rectum removed due to an early stage diagnosis of colon cancer.

Despite these setbacks, she maintains a no-nonsense approach to life and is determined to see her child through his youth. Sporting a blond pixie haircut and a forthright manner, she is the kind of gal you know would do anything to protect the ones she loves. Why is it then that she can’t love herself? And why does she keep sabotaging her health with afternoon junk food and evening ice cream? “I feel like a marshmallow with a pinhead,” she declares with her usual self-deprecating laugh. She describes working out in the gym and feeling pretty good afterward. This positive reconnection with her body is then swept away by regret when she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She is well aware of her body dysmorphia, “I feel mutilated,” she declares, without self-pity, knowing that these habits of denigrating her body preceded her cancer diagnoses. The work for Moxie, as for many of us, is to learn to see herself beyond the apologetic image in the mirror and beyond the glare of what is wrong with, or missing from, her body. This is deep work, particularly for Moxie, having so suddenly (within seven years) been forced to endure the loss of her youthful, pristine body. We discuss the importance of learning to put her health first, to not “flake” on herself, but to use her precious energy to enhance her own well-being. I talk to her about the need to delve beneath her fixation on her appearance and bring a new commitment to life under her skin.

Moving Inside

Shift your perspective away from your own body for a moment and think about what a marvelous entity you are. You are a self-contained, finely calibrated system. You can stand on your head and your body knows what to do to equalize pressure and hold your vital organs in place. Your heart beats away, pumping blood where it needs to go, oxygenating your tissues and your brain. You decide to move your toes and voilà, you move your toes. When your body tells you to hydrate, you get something to drink. If only eating when you are hungry was such a simple process!

In our culture we are mesmerized by externals—the size of your hips and thighs, the wrinkles and gray hair—and it is so pervasive that it eclipses your attention so you don’t notice what is going on under your skin, right under your nose, so to speak. Rather than marveling in the complexity and ingenuity of your physical self, you may perpetuate a contentious, critical relationship with your body. It becomes habitual to focus on what is not going well, nitpicking the imperfections, comparing your body to other, seemingly better models. This creates an internal rift, a dissonance that can disrupt your ability to appreciate your body, let alone your life. A shift in perspective is necessary to take a peek inside and develop more gratitude for what is happening just beneath your skin. You might say that in our culture, most of us suffer from an extreme lack of imagination. This is the meaning of the word “ignore-ance”—think of this as a verb indicating the act of ignoring what is. In Iyengar’s words, “It is an obsession in our modern society to focus on appearance, presentation, and packaging. We do not ask ourselves, ‘How am I really?’ but ‘How do I look, how do others see me?’ It is not a question of “What am I saying?’ but ‘How do I sound?’” So captivated by the appearance and grooming of our flesh, we are blind to the magic and complexity of our physical beings. This means appreciating what is going right with your body. If you are alive, there is more going right than wrong. It also means developing some concern about unnecessary strain your daily habits may be perpetuating. The decline in energy and well-being that many of us experience as we age is gradual, so it is easy to ascribe subtle symptoms to the inevitable slowing down of aging. Unless you have some sort of obvious problem, like cancer or chronic fatigue, you may underestimate the burden that your body is under. Your body tends to make the best of things until the proverbial straw breaks the camel’s back. This discussion of your internal health is not meant to be alarmist or preachy. It is meant to give you more awareness of the fact that your body is real, it is subject to the laws of nature, and your insides are as real as the your outside.

As you read on, I want you to be aware of your internal reaction. Do you start to get anxious as you think about your insides? Do you begin to dissociate a bit, perhaps skimming the text with less attention? Do you get overwhelmed? Your reactions are all grist for the mill. Assimilate what you can and trust your own process. You are reading this, after all, which in and of itself signifies some new awareness and growth. Remember, you don’t have to do everything at once. You can change your habits slowly and respectfully over time.

So let us turn now to your digestive tract. Yes, that slippery tube inside you from mouth to anus. As you know, you are dependent upon food as an energy source to keep your body alive and to provide the nutrients that allow for the ongoing functioning of your body’s various systems. Your digestive tract assimilates these nutrients. The system works like this—you choose foods with various nutritional components and chew them up in your mouth to begin the digestive process. Saliva is a magic substance that rushes in to help break down your food and kill bacteria. You then swallow the food so that it can travel to your stomach, where it mixes up with more digestive juices and a small amount of hydrochloric acid to further break down the food, kill bacteria, and release nutrients for absorption. This slurry (called chyme) is then transported through your small and large intestines, where nutrients are gradually absorbed and delivered to the rest of your body. The components of the foods that are not used travel into the lower colon and out your body. All of this is in the service of fueling your body for ongoing life.

We all know that we need to eat to live and that our digestive tracts are designed to process the foods we take in. But, even though you “know” this in your head, if you have food issues, you likely eat with very little attention to the needs of your body. You may choose foods based on caloric content, or the latest nutritional advice (if you are being “good”), and perhaps consume whatever/whenever in a dissociated frenzy (when you are being “bad”). During a “good” phase, you may choose heavily processed, artificially engineered materials designed to supposedly help you lose weight. You may give little thought to the impact these substances have on the vital processes occurring under your skin. The other side of this coin is consuming the heavily flavored, sugared substances designed by our food industry to excite and stimulate your appetite. The two habits go hand in hand—restrictive, calculated ingestion of what you “should” eat with the goal to get yourself under control followed by a free-for-all that reliably comes as an inevitable response to deprivation.

At a less extreme level, perhaps you have more consistent eating habits but rarely stop to consider the food’s quality and the impact of what you are consuming has on your vital system. Your eating habits are so routine and utilitarian that almost no attention is paid to quality or quantity—and even less attention goes toward enjoyment, taking pleasure in a meal. On the flip side are those of you who do not eat enough, who thrive on deprivation and the challenge of seeing how little you can get by on. If you suffer from any of the above habits, it is important to not criticize or disparage yourself. Your relationship with food and your body is just that, a relationship. As I have mentioned, yoga is commonly defined as “union,” or “to yoke.” The yoga of food is based on healing your relationship with food and your body. Feeling into your insides and learning to hold yourself with reverence, as opposed to either controlling or indulging yourself, is the common path of healing for us all.

Due to the content of our modern diet and the process of our modern lifestyle (rush, rush, rush, worry, worry, worry), the internal lining of the digestive tract can become inflamed, which interferes with your ability to digest and assimilate food. This can lead to food intolerances, which though not as severe as allergies, will create a cycle of instability in your system. When you are unwittingly perpetuating this cycle with what you eat, you have very little power to change—mainly because you are unaware that anything is amiss. As I said, when you are focused on externals, the cosmetics of the situation, you overlook the reality underlying the condition of your body. Healing from the inside out is both frightening and empowering. It is frightening because it can shatter some of your denial (your “ignore-ance”). If you are under the impression that you just need to “lose a few pounds,” or that you are “a little run-down,” it can be quite a game changer to realize that the fuel you have been providing (or not providing!) your body is a cause that has left an effect inside. This is a wake-up call, an “uh-oh” moment. It can also be very empowering. By facing the reality of what is going on beneath your skin, which takes courage and a paradigm shift (you are looking inside now, rather than being mesmerized by your image), you have the power to take charge in a new way. There are things that you can do to address the health of your insides. You can learn to choose foods with more awareness regarding how they affect your body. You can begin to feel what is good for you as your awareness begins to expand beneath your skin. As you make wiser choices and develop more care and appreciation for your body, you also start to feel better. This is the sweetest outcome of all. You get more in touch with your capacity for pleasure and well-being, rather than dependent upon food substances that do little good for your body.

In order to heal your relationship with food, it is essential that you bring attention and appreciation to the world beneath your skin and learn to honor your body. The paradigm shift I refer to above is not really a “moment,” but rather a process of unlearning old habits of thinking about your body and food. It certainly does not mean that you must forsake pleasure in eating or that you must deprive yourself of good things. It means learning to expand your idea of pleasure to enjoying the pleasure of a well-nourished, healthy body. Think of this process as additive rather than depriving. “What can I add to my repertoire of foods and activities that will encourage trust and confidence in my body?” The journey for all of us is allowing this enjoyment to become more embodied, meaning eating food is an act of appreciation for the nourishment the food is providing, rather than a compulsive, dissociated activity that ends up being abusive toward your body.

Reflections on Your Body

1. Consider what is going well in your body at this moment. Perhaps you have good knees. Do you have a strong heart? A hearty digestive system? Perhaps you don’t have a headache. If you’re anything like me, you don’t stop to appreciate what feels good, and instead your attention is captured by the ache, pain and imperfection.
2. When is the last time that you went to the doctor for a checkup? I thought so. Make an appointment with your primary care doctor to get a basic blood panel, including cholesterol, triglycerides, thyroid, iron, blood sugar, and any other tests that you and your doctor deems relevant. You will likely resist doing this. I know I do. However, it is important to get a concrete sense of how your body is doing as you seek to take charge of your health in a more proactive way.
3. You might consider consulting a naturopathic doctor to assess the health of your digestive tract. This is especially relevant if you suffer from low energy or digestive problems. A naturopath can give you advice regarding healing your digestive tract and accelerate your course toward improved health. I suggest you seek out someone who has gone to an accredited school and is licensed to practice naturopathy.

The Karma of Food

The idea of karma is a widely known and accepted concept in our society. Our interpretation of it here in the West is quite different than its meaning in Classical Yoga, which deems karma an undesirable force that holds us to unending incarnations. For our purposes, I am going to stick to the Western meaning, which highlights the relationship between cause and effect. Every action has a reaction, or ripple effect. Although the concept of karma as we interpret it here in the West is not foolproof—after all, bad things happen to good people all the time—more often than not this simple formula has its utility because it helps us stay accountable to our actions. You may be familiar with the saying “what goes around, comes around.” When discussing food, we could rephrase the formula as the ubiquitous “you are what you eat.” Food matters. It is matter that contains energy that has an effect on your body. As Iyengar states, “When we eat a head of lettuce, every leaf expresses the beauty and complexity of the cosmic intelligence that formed it, and so we are partaking of cosmic intelligence by ingesting it directly.”

I recently had a conversation with a client who was in the habit of having chips and soda for breakfast. “Would you put low-grade gas in a high-performance car?” I asked her. “Well, of course not,” she replied, recognition subtly lighting in her eyes. I pressed on, “And why not?” “Because it wouldn’t run as well and over time it would degrade and start to have problems.”

Exactly. I am not suggesting that you should think of yourself as a high-performance car, as this is rather objectifying. But I do suggest that you consider whether you treat your car better than your body (which, after all, you cannot trade in when it wears out), and if you do, pause for a moment to reflect on this.

Not only is it true that “you are what you eat,” taking it a step further we could add, “you are what you assimilate.” I once heard it explained this way: our bodies are like computers and the food we put into them contains certain information that our bodies are designed to read. Your body knows how to read the information contained within fruits, vegetables, and other whole foods. Throw in the hydrogenated fats and high-fructose corn syrup and you’ve got a programming mess—your body doesn’t know how to read the information, leading to our larger societal problems of skyrocketing rates of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The truth is that whole foods from the earth are best for us. Spinach, carrots, lentils … As an aside, though you may think of lentils, spinach, and others of their ilk as supremely unpalatable, I hope to convince you otherwise later on.

The type of food you put into your body is a “cause” that will bring about a particular “effect” in your body. What you choose to eat matters. The laws of karma apply. For most of us (though not Moxie, who bears a genetic burden making her more vulnerable to disease), we can “get away with it,” meaning we have the dubious luxury of neglecting our health to a degree, when we are young. Around forty years or so, bad habits begin to knock at the door to collect. You are more tired, labs aren’t so good, and some of you get more scary diagnoses that shake your invulnerability. Genetics play a huge role in what you can get away with and when and how your lifestyle habits will collect. Some of you will get cancer, diabetes, or an autoimmune disorder in spite of a healthy lifestyle. And then there is the opposite extreme, embodied by Keith Richards, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones, who God love him, should be dead from multiple causes by now. No matter what your health status, the line from the movie Unforgiven, when Clint Eastwood tells his young, cocky companion in his classic deadpan tone, “Kid, we all got it comin’ … ” has great relevance for all of us with regard to our health. The realization that, sorry to say, “you got it coming” in some form or other can serve as a powerful impetus to do what you can to take care of yourself today by making more mindful decisions regarding what kind of “causes” you want to apply in your daily life. Being a more mindful custodian of your body will pay great dividends in your present life and your future well-being, regardless of your current weight or health status.

Applying the concept of karma to food/weight issues entails cultivating an acceptance of your body as a representation, a result, of past behaviors. Your body is a conglomeration of your genetics and your past behaviors and beliefs about health. This is not a permanent condition, however, you must contend with it directly in order to initiate change. Meeting your body in the here and now means not focusing on your present condition in a disparaging way (as in, “my thighs are so fat!”) or focusing on the size or weight that you must be in a month or next year (“I have to lose weight for the wedding!”). Rather, it is a commitment to steering your flesh in a different direction, one that is aligned with better health and well-being. This is an act of faith because it requires leaping beyond the present state of affairs and trusting that different behaviors over time will create different circumstances. Most of us go awry by over focusing on results, on the visible “realities.” You need lower numbers on the scale, a smaller clothes size, or your commitment derails. You leave the gym after a good workout and are flummoxed by the image in the mirror.

Your taste—that is, the foods you gravitate toward—are also a product of your past behaviors and conditioning. You likely associate certain foods with comfort, health, and normalcy, often with very little information. My husband, for example, was confounded when we watched the movie Super Size Me and learned just how unhealthy ice cream is due to its saturated fat content. “I always thought ice cream was wholesome,” he said in a regretful tone, another illusion of childhood gone. Isn’t this exactly what commercials appeal to—our tendency to lump arbitrary associations in our mind without discrimination? It is important to begin challenging some of your conditioned associations. Do you see salads as depriving, unappealing, or for sissies? Is a big steak “healthy” because it helps you build muscle? Are people who eat healthfully strange or puritanical? Are lentils or spinach an unpalatable consolation prize or potentially delicious sustenance for your mind and body?

If you are in the habit of relying on food to satisfy needs other than nourishment, you are set up for difficulty. As I have mentioned, food can be a lovely feature of living in a body on this planet. However, it is a bonus, not the main feature. If you have been using it as the main feature, or if you use it to support the main feature in a dysfunctional way (as in, “Let me get through this heinous meeting, activity, function, so I can go eat”), then physical satisfaction is something that you will need to re-find. This gets complicated because, according to the laws of karma (action-reaction), your body has become habituated to particular ways of eating, which have created conditions in your body that you now must contend with. For example, leptin and ghrelin are hormones related to satiety and hunger respectively. When you have been eating high-sugar/high-fat, low-nutrient food for many years, these hormones are not going to be working in your favor. Meaning, you are not going to be sensitive to leptin, which signals when you are full, and your ghrelin may function as a ravenous little gremlin, signaling hunger all the time. Thus, hormonally you are in a bit of a pickle. (If only a pickle was all that you were craving!) On the flip side, someone who has anorexic patterns may have more ghrelin circulating in her system and yet she has habituated herself not to respond to it—she is ghrelin-resistant. This is a poignant example of how the will can be used to subvert the natural signals of the body. The challenge is learning not to respond habitually to your “hunger”/or lack thereof, but to gently guide your physiology away from what feels “good” (or familiar) in the immediate sense to what feels better in a long-term sense. Satisfaction may change from the heavy feeling after a rich, high-carbohydrate meal to the lighter feeling after a large salad with protein. Or the peace felt by restricting food and being lightheaded and empty can shift to the peace of knowing that you are caring for your body by allowing yourself to accept nourishment. Either change will be highly uncomfortable at first because it is outside the habituated pattern. You might interpret your lack of fullness as “hunger” if you are used to being heavily anchored to the earth by food. Or you might feel “stuffed/fat” if you are used to a constant state of emptiness. Learning to interpret either side of the discomfort as anxiety wrought from change rather than as hunger that needs to be quenched, or fullness that needs to be eradicated, is a huge step in learning to relate to food in a more sane, holistic way.

Sophie, a twenty-two-year-old woman whom you shall hear more about later on, recently shared with me that when she wants to eat when she is not hungry, she is learning to just “sit with” the uncomfortable feeling. She has been largely abandoned by her parents, who are now going through an ugly divorce. Her father is living somewhere else, unable to help her financially, and rarely contacts her. Her mother is involved in a new relationship and is pressuring Sophie to get a job so she can move out. No one seems to consider that this might be an inappropriate expectation given that Sophie has extreme social anxiety, which is why she was allowed to leave high school when she was fifteen. She is bravely trying to face up to the task of growth, but at times she feels overwhelmed, particularly when she is home alone and has free access to the ready comfort of food. “I am learning to just stay with the anxiety,” she said to me recently, “and I am learning that the anxiety passes,” she elaborated, “but it is soooo uncomfortable.” Another client shared with me her experience of feeling compelled to binge on fast food but knowing that “just this once,” wasn’t going to cut it anymore. She lay on her bed repeating to herself, “It’s just tire tracks in my mind. It’s just tire tracks in my body. It’s possible to create new ones.” What courage and fortitude it takes for these young women to sit in the nameless waves of such consuming hungers without filling them with food. It helps to remember that the feelings will pass, as well as the fact that you are not alone in having them.

So here is the challenge. You commit to meeting “what is,” meaning the current condition of your body, with the intention to act in the best interest of your body even if it is uncomfortable in the moment. The leap of faith is trusting that over time, what is good for you will begin to appeal to you more and more. At the beginning, rather than focusing on your weight (numbers, after all, can be deceiving), I suggest tracking the effect that different foods have on your sense of well-being, your energy levels, and the pattern of your hunger. I also suggest using your mind (manomaya kosa) to guide your choices. This is where mind can be helpful. Research the foods that health experts suggest. Make decisions about what to eat based upon what you know about nutrition. Many women with weight issues are veritable encyclopedias regarding calories and health. The necessary shift is to transform this information into knowledge, that is, into a knowing that is embodied and lived. The attitude that you will need to cultivate is patience with the process, shifting focus from “results” (such as losing weight) and trusting that over time what feels unfamiliar or depriving will become more natural. Also trust that this process is not about self-deprivation, but is about learning to align what you want with what is good for you. This is a worthwhile endeavor for many reasons. It reduces the amount of energy you needlessly expend in neurotic conflict (the “I want it!” “You shouldn’t have it!” argument inside), freeing this energy so that it is available for more meaningful pursuits. It also provides you with a deeper feeling of satisfaction—what you want is actually good for you. Imagine that! As Iyengar puts it, “People forget that in our quest for the soul, we first reclaim the pristine joys of the animal kingdom, health and instinct, vibrant and alive.”

Homework for Understanding
Your Eating Habits

1. Start keeping a food journal. You may resist this because eating “should” be natural and you rebel against putting so much time into thinking about it. Or perhaps it is because of the accountability a food journal brings to your habitual patterns. Or the ubiquitous “It’s boring.” “I don’t have time.” In order to change, you have to have a good sense of what you need to change—and a food journal gives you exactly that. I suggest tracking your mood and energy levels along with what you are eating. This will help you piece together patterns around what you are eating and how you are feeling.
2. Take some time to reflect on your overall eating habits. How much of your daily repast is processed, amalgamated food products vs. actual whole foods? What aspects of your eating habits are healthful? Now list some changes that you would like to make, perhaps cooking more, eating more salads or fresh fruit, or reducing portion size.
3. How much faith do you have that small changes over time will lead in a direction of positive change? What strategies will you use to support yourself when you are feeling discouraged? Support groups, journaling, reading inspirational literature, and nature are all examples of supports that can open up your perspective from hopelessness to openness.

Learning a New Way

Janice initiated therapy with me after months of acute depression that she had been trying mightily to cope with on her own. She is a bright, hard-working person who takes her responsibilities to her friends and her job very seriously. She is no stranger to self-sacrifice and her depression was one more thing she thought she should just be able to plow through. Her efforts had not been successful. One of Janice’s main issues is that she cares for others far better than she does for herself. She has wept in my office over the death of her good friend’s infant son subsequent to having spent many days at the hospital supporting her grieving friend. She has a harder time acknowledging her own pain, which she tends to minimize and rationalize, “Oh, it wasn’t that bad.” Over the months of her weekly therapy sessions, she began to agree with me that it was “that bad.”

When Janice became valedictorian of her high school, her father commented, “I don’t care if you get a PhD in prostitution, you’re getting a PhD.” His words still ring in her ears twenty years later. Other memories gradually emerge and are woven through our weekly sessions. Being forced in the fourth grade to finish food she did not want until she vomited at the dinner table. The mandated workouts in the eighth grade in front of her father, who commanded her to continue from his armchair. After these humiliating sessions, she would retreat into her bedroom and binge on her hidden stash of junk food, which at the time served as her only form of self-assertion. Then there was the time in high school when her mother didn’t speak to her for a month after hearing Janice make a snarky comment about her to a friend. In desperation, Janice begged her mother to forgive her, but she was stone. And these are just the family memories.

There was the doctor that she worked for at sixteen who repeatedly chased her around the exam table to cop a feel. Oh yes, and that adolescent cousin who French kissed her when she was under five years old. Her parents fluffed it off when she told them, and allowed her to continue to share a bedroom with him.

I have commented to Janice that I am surprised, given the emotional trauma of her background, that she does not have more serious mental health and personality problems. We agree that food served as her anchor, gave her that thing to hold on to, that way to rebel, affirm, and comfort herself in the midst of unpredictable and sometimes sadistic behavior. Her use of food to punish herself is a new realization. The memory that marks the genesis of her distorted relationship with food started out innocently enough. At a family gathering celebrating her father’s birthday, five-year-old Janice accidentally poured too much Hershey’s syrup on her ice cream. Her enraged father forced her to pour the whole can of syrup into her bowl and eat it. The adults, including her mother, stood by. Janice says that on some level she knew that her father’s behavior was wrong. However, it was far safer to turn the anger inside, where it morphed into self-hatred expressed by self-abuse with food for the following thirty years. The fact that she has also used food for comfort and anchoring only serves to illustrate the complexities of the human heart and palate.

Janice now weighs more than three hundred pounds. Her dawning recognition of her self-hatred and use of food to punish herself has been startling. “When I get fast food, I only give my dog little bites because I know it’s bad for him.” She says this incredulously, stupefied by the fact that she treats her dog better than she treats herself.

Janice is currently learning how to eat. She grew up with no real meal times. People in her family ate when and what they wanted from the cupboards and refrigerator stocked with American cheese, white bread, hot dogs, pizza, and chips. Learning how to eat real food is painstaking, both because of the intense emotional aspects of coming to terms with childhood abuse, but also the behavioral and physiological aspects of retraining a mind and body used to consuming large quantities of highly processed foods. She is faced with the challenge of employing restraint without triggering the violent hunger, fueled by entitlement, rage and despair, hovering just below the surface. Janice initially went on a medically supervised weight-loss program but decided after losing sixty pounds that she did not want to consume the artificially flavored, nutrified substance advocated by the program. “I want to learn how to eat real food,” she told me. Now she is experimenting with vegetables and cooking. She is slowly, through trial and error, becoming more familiar with her patterns and her pitfalls. “I realize that I cannot have processed foods in the house,” she declared after consuming a box of Fiber One bars in one sitting. She also realizes that although her choices are getting better—she’s eating real food after all—she cannot eat a pound of pasta for dinner, even if it is whole wheat.

Let us join Janice on her journey of learning how to eat real food in appropriate portions. Remember the laws of karma and let food begin to matter to you in a different way. You can begin to approach food as matter that is here for your enjoyment, as well as for the nourishment of your mind, body, and soul.

Janice is not alone in her struggle to eat more nutritiously. Most of us here in the United States eat the Standard American Diet, or SAD. This acronym was coined in the 1970s as awareness of the poor quality of the typical American’s diet was increasingly recognized. The SAD consists of de-nutritionalized grains, amalgamated fats and sugars, chemical additives, and mass-produced, hormone- and antibiotic-injected (some would say tormented) animal protein. Because most of us grew up eating this way, we are conditioned to believe that it is “normal” and don’t even give it a second thought—ice cream is “wholesome” after all.

But if you don’t question the stuff you are fueling yourself with, you instead end up berating yourself for being “fat” and bemoaning your sluggish metabolism. While metabolism certainly plays a role, hating yourself for a biological trait you’ve inherited does not accomplish anything. Perhaps it is time to be proactive and question your conditioning regarding what is appropriate fare for your body.

There is so much conflicting nutritional advice out there. Who hasn’t been confused by the “fact” that eggs are the devil one day and healthy the next? Dairy is deadly, or it helps you lose weight? Meat has a bad name. But then in the next breath we are told to eat lean proteins and fewer carbs. Coffee? It fights diabetes or contains a drug we should avoid? Wine? Good for the heart or poison for the organs? What you read depends upon the day. What I am struck by is the compartmentalization of “facts” that drives our health information. I receive the Tufts Newsletter, which publishes scientifically based research on nutrition. They may do a study on vitamin D and run scientifically controlled experiments to determine the health effects of this supplement. But, in the end, at least for me, it becomes meaningless. Because, can you really extract one nutritional element and then study its effects in isolation? The synergy of human health is far more complex than that. I am reminded of the parable of three blind men trying to describe an elephant after feeling three different locations of the elephants’ body. Yes, they successfully describe the part they are exposed to (the trunk, the legs, and the tail), but they do nothing to approach a meaningful understanding of the whole elephant. The other thing that such compartmentalized advice overlooks is your own internal wisdom regarding what is right for you, what your body needs, and what feels good in an intuitive way. Iyengar states, “Instinct is the unconscious intelligence of the cells surfacing.” Information that is dissociated from your instinct does nothing to reestablish your basic sense of trust in yourself and your ability to determine what is good for you.

The best, most succinct, and noncontradictory nutritional advice I have heard is from Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. His motto: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I love this advice because it is nonpunitive and it isn’t rigid and full of magic promises (“Eat dairy, lose weight!”). The following sections will break down this deceptively simple advice and add a little “scientific” data that I have gathered over the years. I put the word scientific in quotes because it seems to me that when it comes to the subject of nutrition and human health you can find a study, or at least an opinion, to back up any “fact” that you want to be true. So, let’s try to find some common sense here amidst the deluge of foods and facts facing us today.

The yoga of food asks us to bring together our internal knowledge about what is good for us with our behavior, meaning we unite intention with action. You have to trust yourself, even when you don’t “know” what you are doing. In other words, allow yourself to be a beginner and make mistakes while learning something new. This is similar to when you go through a yoga flow when you don’t really know what you are doing, but then after a few moves you enter the practice in spite of yourself. It is an act of faith to begin, but you have to start somewhere. So step to the front of your mat and take a breath.

Eat Food

“Eat food.” You may be saying, “Duh, that’s my problem, I eat too much of it.” We’ll get to that later. If your struggle is more the anorexic/
orthorexic mentality, you may find yourself recoiling. After all, your main focus has been avoiding eating food. So let’s hear Mr. Pollan out and try to assimilate what he means by this simple two-word sentence? In his book In Defense of Food, he recommends that we don’t eat anything that our grandmothers would not recognize as food from their dinner tables. He discusses the fact that our grocery stores are filled with food substances, meaning various conglomerations of wheat, corn, fat, sugar, and chemical components to make it all tasty. Our grandmothers would likely be befuddled by the long list of chemical ingredients on the labels.

So then, what is food? Food is material derived from the earth that we can use to fuel our bodies. The less processed the better. This is not a moralistic, self-denying position. It’s really just common sense. What happens when we primarily dine on highly processed, adulterated food substances? Let’s look at the humble pretzel, a simple little snack consisting of processed white flour, oil, a little sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, and a hefty punch of sodium. A great afternoon snack, right, given that it is not fried or particularly sweet? Well, not so much.

When you eat high-sugar food or simple carbohydrates—like pretzels, like many processed cereals and all fruit juices, your body gets a quick hit of glucose in the bloodstream. Your body responds to this surge of glucose by pumping out insulin to neutralize the circulating sugar. This brings your blood sugar down within an hour or two, but it can bring it too far down, resulting in your weak, depleted, “hungry” feeling. So, although you are experientially “ravenous,” you probably are not calorie deprived—you just need a sugar fix to bring your flagging blood sugar back up to normal. You can see how this leads to an unhealthy roller coaster of simultaneous overconsumption of calories and nutritional depletion. Aside from the short-term negative effects of riding the blood sugar roller coaster (weight gain, low energy), there are serious long-term effects including insulin resistance (your cells become less sensitive to insulin and require more to respond), which over the long haul can lead to type 2 diabetes. Also, the empty calories waste an opportunity to bring in foods that actually help your body in its daily travails.

The key to addressing this problem is to “eat food.” Whole food. Even high-carbohydrate foods, like beans, fruit, and brown rice are beneficial for blood sugar control. This is because they come with copious amounts of fiber, which slows the absorption of sugar into your bloodstream. Nature has some nifty packaging. Consequently, your body does not have to pump out as much insulin so quickly to stabilize your blood sugar. You stay fuller longer because your body is fueled slowly over time, rather than via a quick, short-acting surge of sugar. Another benefit is that all these food contain lots of antioxidants and nutrients, and many, such as beans and quinoa, contain protein as well.

It is actually not too hard, and can be very satisfying, to eat in a blood-sugar friendly way. I have always had a problem processing carbs and discovered in my thirties that the ubiquitous pretzel, much as I loved the salty crunch, did me no favors in the mood or energy department two hours later. Switching over to nuts, vegetables with some dressing, or cheese is not too difficult and is quite delicious. Whole-wheat pasta with pesto or with vegetables and a little cheese is quite a treat at dinner. Salads can be occasions for creativity and celebration when given a little time, good dressing, and thoughtful extras like roasted vegetables, artichoke hearts, or beets. Bean dishes can be prepared from scratch without too much fuss and are a far cry from the canned refried beans you might be used to. The idea here is to slowly introduce whole-grain pastas, sweet potatoes, root vegetables, and other fruits of the earth mixed with spices and good fats to make blood-sugar, body-friendly meals that will feel as good going down as they will make you feel in two hours. Some other blood-sugar friendly ideas include adding acids, such as vinegar or lemon to your meals, which slows the breakdown of starches into sugar. In addition, common spices, such as cinnamon and turmeric, seem to stabilize blood sugar. Turmeric has anti-inflammatory properties, as well as possibly fighting cancer.

The next category of “food” that deserves a word or two is fat. Yes, fat. If ever there was a food category that has been maligned one day and hailed as a savior the next, it is fat. The important thing about fat is the kind you eat. There are some real bad guys in the fat department but luckily there are some real good guys as well. Usually I am not an advocate of black and white thinking. However, when it comes to fat, I am willing to jump on the bandwagon and vilify some of the substances that have made it into our food supply.

The worst of the “bad guys” are the non-food substances that are inserted into prepackaged and fast foods. These fats are dangerous to consume even occasionally. They are transfats and their newest permutation, interestified fats. Transfats are found in the partially or fully hydrogenated vegetable oils that are used in commercially processed foods in part because they extend the shelf life. However, some restaurants have actually banned the use of transfats because of their clear implication in heart disease. Interestified fats are the food industry’s response. These come under the names interestified soybean/vegetable oil and partially or fully hydrogenated oil or stearic acid. Being a relatively new concoction, there is no clear link between interestified fats and heart disease. That’s not to say they do not have any health implications. Not only do these fats raise LDL and lower HDL (by the way, H is for “happy,” it’s the good cholesterol), they also appear to raise blood sugar and depress insulin levels. This raises the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, which is on the rise in our nation.

The yoga of food asks you to consider the impact that foods are having on the inside and to cultivate your intuitive wisdom regarding what is good for you. This takes time to develop, as you may feel quite “good” after eating something “bad” for you. Yoga asks you to try new things (in this case, foods rather than a body position) and work with the initial discomfort before writing it off. So what are the good fats? Here are some suggestions. Omega-3 fats are the fats found in fish, abundantly in salmon, sardines, and anchovies. Plant sources include flaxseeds and walnuts. These foods, and particularly fish, are excellent sources of EFAs, essential fatty acids. They are referred to as “essential” because they are necessary for human health and the body is unable to produce them on its own. EFAs perform vital functions such as lowering triglycerides, lowering LDL (the “bad” cholesterol) and aiding in proper functioning of the metabolism, including insulin regulation. They are also essential for proper brain function. Omega-6s, which are also EFAs, are beneficial fats as well. They are found in nuts, seeds, and olive oil. Olive oil is a monounsaturated fat, rich in omega-6s, that has numerous health benefits, including lowering circulating cholesterol and decreasing inflammation. So consider replacing your bottled fat-free salad dressing and chop up a garlic clove and mix a cup of olive oil with a half cup of vinegar. You may resist this because it seems time-consuming or messy, but try it anyway and see if you like it. One more note, although omega-6s are beneficial, it is important to have a proper ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s. The proper ratio is thought to be 3 to 1 (omega-6s to omega-3s). Most of us do not eat enough fish, walnuts, and flax to approximate this healthy ratio. You can add walnuts to salads, buy canned wild salmon, and grind up a tablespoon of flaxseeds (just use a coffee grinder) for your cereal or yogurt.

The more common “bad” fats are the saturated fats found in red meats and dairy, such as butter, cream, and egg yolks. Occasional, moderate intake of these fats is fine. Overconsumption has been thought to be dangerous due to their negative effect on cholesterol. Recent research has revealed that these fats may not increase cholesterol, but rather it is inflammation in the body (caused by transfats and their ilk) that causes cholesterol to increase. I think the upshot of the issue is that moderation, not deprivation, makes the most sense in your approach to these foods.

So, in this new pursuit of eating real food, gradually introduce fresh, whole foods into your diet. This does take more planning and preparation, but I think you will also be tickled by how delicious this food is. And there is something that feels really good when you eat food that is colorful and flavorful—your body knows that it is good for you and this actually increases your enjoyment. Pleasure that is integrated, rather than dissociated from your body, is the goal of this new, “old” way of eating. A client who struggles with food restriction recently shared with me that she now asks herself when she wants to restrict, “Is this good for me?” She is learning to listen to her body and to make choices to eat or not eat that are integrated with her body’s needs rather than her predetermined decision. That’s the yoga of food!

Mostly Plants

I’ll save the contentious “not too much” part of the formula for later. First, let’s talk about plants. And no, Michael Pollan is not asking you to be a vegetarian. Why plants? And what does he even mean by plants? Plants, in my reading of his message, refers to anything that is grown from the earth, including lettuce, carrots, beets, celery, potatoes, whole grains like oats, quinoa, whole wheat, and fruits, which although technically are the fruit of plants, I’ll take the liberty of including here. There are at least three important reasons to make the majority of your food intake plants.

Fiber. In some health books that I have read, I have come across the phrase, “Death starts in the colon.” To add to this drama and morbidity, I have received health publications (yes, I am on some bizarre mailing lists) that claim that John Wayne, poor soul, had forty pounds of fecal matter in his colon at the time of his death. I recently googled this and the topic does come up, but it appears to be bunk. It just shows how hysterical we can become. All drama and hyperbole aside, there is some truth to be found here, if not regarding the impacted fecal matter in John Wayne’s colon, at least in regard to the importance of having regular bowel movements. In order to be healthy, you must be able to release waste from your body. To do so, your body requires sufficient fiber. Eating the whole foods way—incorporating plants in copious quantities to your diet—will make a big difference. Standard recommendations suggest that you get 25 to 30 grams of fiber a day, however, many alternative health practitioners advocate even more. I recommend building up your intake slowly so as not to shock your system if you are not used to eating a lot of fiber. Fiber comes in two main categories, soluble and insoluble. Soluble fibers dissolve, attract water and slow down digestion, which can help stabilize blood sugar levels. Insoluble fibers go through your system relatively intact (think raisins, broccoli, and wheat bran), which adds bulk and prevents constipation. In my opinion, it’s not particularly important to sweat the difference because both are beneficial. Remember, the benefit of adding whole, plant-based fare to your diet is that you automatically give your body what it needs in the right form. Mother Nature might even become a friend as you discover Her basic common sense.

In addition to plant foods, consider adding a probiotic to your daily fare. Probiotics are healthy bacteria that assist in digestion, elimination, and immunity. If you are feeling adventurous, you could add unpasteurized fermented foods and yogurt. These are natural probiotics and are even better than the supplements. Also, make sure to incorporate plenty of water into your daily intake. Weight Watchers recommends keeping track by filling a 32-ounce bottle twice a day or a 64-ounce bottle once a day. If you feel that you don’t have time for all the peeing, think of it as a meditation break, an excuse to sit down and take a few breaths. Because people often mistake thirst for hunger, drinking more water can aid you in your quest to establish a clearer perception of when your body actually is in need of food. As an aside, I have been told that it is better to drink your water in 16-ounce servings rather than sipping all day long. Your kidneys need a rest too, after all.

The second reason to eat more fruits and vegetables has to do with the nutrients these foods supply. I am sure that you are familiar with the term antioxidants. You may not, however, really understand what they are or how they work in your body. In a nutshell (and yes, nuts have them too), your body is constantly exposed to things like pollution, chemicals, and other substances in the environment and in your food, all of which take a toll on your body. Actually, normal metabolic processes, and even exercise, create stress within your body. This stress, which causes mild damage in your body, is called oxidative stress. This is similar to what happens when iron rusts or when a cut-up banana turns brown. It is caused by free radicals, which are atoms that possess a charge due to having an excess or deficiency of electrons. These charged atoms scavenge your cells to pick up or deposit an electron, causing oxidative stress, or more literally, creating mild damage to your cells (like rust or a brown banana). Antioxidants neutralize the damage caused by oxidation. They are like applying lemon juice to your fruit salad! Antioxidants appear to bind the free radicals that are created via the normal functions of living, neutralizing them and helping your body metabolize and release them through the kidneys. Antioxidants are vitamins, minerals, and enzymes (proteins involved in metabolism) that are found in whole foods and a variety of spices. Substances (you may notice that I did not use the word “foods”) like white flour, sugar, corn chips, soda pop, and hydrogenated oils do not contain antioxidants and are likely to cause further oxidative stress in your body. Think of it this way, when you eat fruits and vegetables (and other whole foods), you are helping your body out enormously as it struggles to survive and thrive in this taxing world.

The third reason to eat copious amounts of vegetables is to maintain proper acid/alkaline balance in your body. Now, you may be asking, what in the world does that have to do with my body or with vegetables? Most of us are familiar with the term “pH balance,” perhaps in relation to shampoo or swimming pools. You may not, however, have heard the term used in relation to the fluids in your body. This is because mainstream science has not yet established its clear relevance to the body’s health and functioning. Doctors are trained to diagnose severe pH imbalances, which are very rare, but they usually overlook low-grade imbalances. Naturopathic doctors are more likely to emphasize the importance of maintaining an optimal pH in your bodily fluids and see it as a vital constituent in your overall health.

A refresher to your eighth-grade science class: pH stands for “the potential of hydrogen.” The concentration of hydrogen in a fluid determines its pH measured on a scale of 0 to 14. The higher the number, the more alkaline the solution is. A neutral pH is 7. Levels between 7.34 and 7.45 are optimal in your body. Your body strives to maintain a pH in this range and will pull minerals from your bones and tissues to compensate for acidity in your body. How does the body become overly acidic? A direct cause is dietary.

Some foods are acid-forming while others are alkalizing. Although all foods are exposed to acid in your stomach, the ash (like the ash left over from wood) is different depending on the foods you eat. What foods create an acid ash? If you guessed the staples of our Standard American Diet (SAD), then you would be right. Meat, sugar, flour, alcohol, milk, eggs, coffee, artificial sweeteners, salt, etc., are all acid forming. Healthful foods like yogurt, nuts, beans, and whole wheat are also acid forming. You do not need to eschew all such foods, but the point is to balance them with lots of vegetables. It always comes back to that, doesn’t it? Fruits and vegetables are alkalizing. Very alkalizing foods are coconut water, dates, raisins, and spinach. Interestingly, citrus fruits like lemons and grapefruits, which are acidic, actually have an alkalizing effect in the body. So a refreshing, tasty way to begin to alkalize your body is to add a spritz of lemon to your water.

Let’s look at some of the possible health effects of low-grade metabolic acidosis (which refers to a chronically acidic system). Think of a day in the life of your body. Lots of work to be done—blood to pump, oxygen to disperse, food to digest, viruses to ward off … And you thought that you were busy! One of the many tasks your body is doing is striving to maintain optimal pH levels in your blood and tissues. So how does your body do this if the majority of what you consume are acid-forming foods? Well, your body compensates for this by pulling minerals from your bones and tissues in order to maintain safe pH levels. The kidneys play a major role in this process by excreting the broken-down muscle and bone minerals. Kidney stones are formed when the bones release calcium to buffer acidity and the calcium separates and forms a kidney stone. You can also see how the risk of osteoporosis is raised if calcium is being leached from your bones to buffer acidity. You might consider the irony of eating copious amounts of dairy to fight osteoporosis, when the dairy is acid forming and therefore promotes this leaching of calcium from the bones. Alternative health literature suggests that other potential ills that might be linked to chronic, low-grade acidosis are diabetes, thyroid problems, and high blood pressure.

What you can do: The good news is that this problem is amenable to intervention. You can limit your intake of high-sodium processed foods, increase your vegetable intake, and stay hydrated, possibly adding lemon to your water. Avoid or limit diet soda, alcohol, and coffee. Try to replace some of the meats and starches you consume with fruits and vegetables. If you are curious and want to measure your body’s pH, you can pick up some testing strips at your local health-food store in order to get an average of your body’s pH. This test is done with either urine or saliva. (These recommendations come courtesy of Dr. Mark Stengler’s Natural Healing, Vol. 4, No. 9, Sept. 2008.)

So, hopefully you are a convert from SAD to, well, GLAD, Gobbling Lettuce, Arugula, and Dates (that’s my acronym by the way). As you acclimate yourself to this new/”old” (more like our ancestors) way of eating, you will discover that nature has some wonderful things to offer. Your body mirrors nature’s intelligence. Fuel your body with the stuff that you are made of. And strive to make your meals delicious. Experiment with different spices and cooking techniques. This will open up a whole new culinary world for you that will satisfy your body in a way that feels right because it is aligned with nature.

Not Too Much

I am feeling your anxiety rise now. Anyone out there who has struggled with weight likely has visions of paltry portions of bland foods that barely make a dent in the appetite. You can only endure this for so long. The feeling of deprivation is anathema for all of us. It is an aversion that is wired deep into our primitive brains. The idea here is learning to meet your requirements for pleasure and satiety in a way that is also healthful for your body. It is vital that you do not become so deprived that your primitive brain kicks in and threatens a mutiny.

So what does “not too much” mean and how do you incorporate this without triggering your inner starving (angry?) animal self, who might just go ahead and eat down the house? Here are a few thoughts. Know thyself. If you know that you have a habit of, say, not eating much all day and then losing it at the dinner table, you need to coax yourself to eat smaller, more frequent meals or snacks through the day. If you eat protein-rich snacks, you may find that you are less ravenous in the evening. Vegetables can also serve as a great way to tide yourself over between meals. The main trick here (and quite a trick it is) is to examine your patterns with food and discern what habits set you up for overeating. A common pitfall is allowing yourself to become overstressed and overly hungry without planning for your meals. Then you find yourself starving, and stressed, without any healthy food conveniently available. This is when the pizza or fast food present as convenient alternatives that make it extremely easy to overeat without even realizing it. Believe it or not, half (if not more) of the reason you are eating is to calm the stress rather than to satisfy actual physical hunger.

The need to feel satisfied physically is vitally important in our daily lives. Here are a few more tricks for satiety management. When you are “hungry,” or “still hungry” after an appropriate meal, try drinking a glass of water or tea sweetened with stevia. Teeccino is a great caffeine-free grain beverage in the tradition of Postum but much nicer in my opinion. It provides a rich after-meal treat with stevia and some nut milk. You may be surprised that you feel satiated afterward. That’s partly due to the twenty-minute rule. (It takes your brain about twenty minutes to register satiety after eating). Sometimes it helps to drink a glass of water when you “think” you are hungry, as thirst often masquerades as hunger. Another trick to curb hunger is grabbing a handful of good old carrots (organic if possible). I find them very useful when I want more food that my body doesn’t really need or just want a little something to tide me over until dinner. Bearing down on a carrot has a visceral satisfaction, which admittedly is not the same as a bag of potato chips, but does the trick nonetheless. I would also suggest adding a bit of protein or fat to your carrots to mitigate the blood-sugar response. The fat will also help you process the nutrients.

Lisa Delaney addresses portion control in her book The Secrets of a Former Fat Girl, which incorporates humor and practical advice as she details shifts in her habits and identity on her journey from heavy to healthy. When eating richer foods, such as oils, nuts, meats, and cheeses, it is important to keep your attention engaged. You may have heard—meat should be a deck of cards, cheese is four dice, nuts are two C batteries, pasta a tennis ball. If you portion things out, it keeps you honest and will help you shift out of your pattern of overeating. If you still feel deprived, I suggest that you fill up on salads and vegetables to compensate. This brings in the healthy foods and hopefully allows you to feel satisfied after the meal. Try to remember that if you leave a little space inside, your body has more room to do the work of digestion. See if you feel better after the lighter meal compared to how you feel after a heavier meal.

Now, I must add a word for those of you who take the “not too much” factor too far the other way. You, my dear, revel in your ability to push your plate away, delay your meal just a little longer, and cultivate emptiness as your pleasure. It is so important for you to shift this to compassion for your flesh, feeling into the crannies of your body and the discomforts that you endure. You can start to tune in to the pleasures of fullness in areas not involving food as a way to integrate more sensuality into your life and make your body’s desires less threatening. Deep breaths, sensuous oils, smelling fresh flowers, and other small luxuries of embodiment will help you to eventually give yourself over to the pleasure of a nice, healthy meal, trusting yourself to stop at “enough.”

The “not too much factor” is only a little bit about the mechanics of your food choices. It is actually far more about your willingness to integrate attention to your body into your daily life. This is the yoga part of the equation of the yoga of food. I find that most of my clients with food issues treat their bodies as an inconvenient afterthought that needs to be showered and presented to the world, but is otherwise ignored. Consequently, stress, tension, and fatigue build in the body throughout the day leaving you extremely uncomfortable and worn down. The ready pleasure of food can easily become a trigger to “just let it all go,” leaving you quite miserable in its wake. The “not too much” factor requires that you begin thinking about your body on a consistent basis, which includes planning what to feed “it,” and how to soothe and care for “it” through the day. And, actually, you begin transforming this “it-ness” into tolerance, then acceptance, and finally appreciation for the vital body that houses your Being. Think of the yoga of food as letting your patterns with food and hunger be steppingstones toward developing a more loving relationship with your physical body.

So, let’s move on to this more subtle, embodied aspect of the “not too much” part of the equation. This is really getting into the yoga of food because it asks you to be embodied and to notice how you feel when you are eating. You may have heard the advice to eat until you are 80 percent full. This is obviously a subjective assessment. “80 percent full? What the … ?” Unfortunately, there is no meter available that you can hook up to your innards to measure this: “Ding, ding, ding … time to stop.” I used to joke with a like-minded friend in college that it was too bad that you couldn’t have the equivalent of an orgasm when you had had enough food. “Quiver, quake—ahhhhh—I’m done!” Alas, the 80 percent rule is far more subtle. It requires some deeper engagement with your body, and when our everyday mind is captivated by external things, it is not much help with this. That said, the ability to attune to this aspect of satiety is a skill you can develop through practice and patience. Remember that it takes some time for your brain to register that you are full. I am sure that you have had the experience of enjoying a wonderful, mindless feed and a half hour later feeling wretchedly full. Especially when you are habituated to overeating, it can feel normal to eat to a point of extreme fullness. This is not a good idea, and not only because it is uncomfortable. From a purely physical standpoint, the excess food creates strain in your system, and when repeated frequently over many years, this strain will take a toll on your body. The reason that you feel uncomfortable when you are too full is that your body is trying to send you a message. The good news is that by developing a new habit (the 80 something % full habit), you give your body room to fix any damages that may have been done.

When you are habituated to undereating, you are hyper-attuned to feeling full and stop when you notice any expansion in your belly. Habitually undereating is also problematic because you live in continuous state of deprivation. My suggestion for both sides of the equation is for you to cultivate pauses in your meal, where you stop, breathe and recalibrate. “How am I now?” Then ask the question posed earlier by my client: “Is this good for me?”

Now, I have a rather radical suggestion to make at this point in the discussion. You may discover through this process that you don’t particularly enjoy eating. I remember years ago watching a friend of mine eating a banana with peanut butter. It looked quite delicious, though she confided in me at the time that she wished that she didn’t have to bother with eating at all and would prefer to just take a pill that would satisfy her needs so she could be done with the whole messy process. I’ve also heard people exclaim (and have felt this myself) during mindful eating exercises, “Who has time for all that chewing?”

Eating food is a grand claim to embodiment. It entails giving yourself permission to take up space and to receive. Making a conscious, deliberate choice to do this proclaims the fact that you are worth it. Yes, you are worth it! So I ask you to reflect now on whether you feel this way. Are you really worth it? Are you worth the time, attention, and expense of eating good, healthy food? When you don’t think so, you find yourself snarfing unhealthy substitutes in desperation due to the inability to claim your right to a healthy, whole embodied existence. The yoga of food asks you to take this step and to claim the right of embodiment.

Homework for Developing Positive Eating Habits

1. Choose a few small, positive changes you would like to make in your eating habits. A negative goal is something like “cut out sweets,” while a positive goal is “increase one portion of fruit and one portion of vegetable a day” or “cook one meal a week.” It is vital that you don’t overwhelm yourself with changes that feel unnatural or forced because you will rebel. Give yourself at least two weeks with one change before adding another.
2. Here is a list of positive changes that are helpful for people who are attempting to shift from SAD to GLAD.

• Increase fruits and vegetables by one serving over several weeks until reaching the recommended nine servings. Remember to give yourself at least two weeks with each addition.
• Cook one home-cooked dish a week. Over time, increase your repertoire. It might inspire you to buy a healthful cookbook and begin exploring the world of beans and grains. Try quinoa, chickpeas, lentils, and other earthy foods. Decide when you will do your cooking, when you will shop for the foods, and how you will handle your resistance (“I don’t have time!”).
• Increase water intake to around 64 ounces a day. I recommend replacing soda gradually with water or tea. Soda, especially diet, does you no favors. It is plush with chemistry that has an unknown effect on your body and it is acidifying to boot. I recommend that you drink water in large portions (8 to 16 ounces at a time) rather than sipping throughout the day. Your kidneys work hard—give them a rest!
• Add a cup of green tea with lemon to your daily intake (lemon increases absorption of antioxidants in the tea).
• Replace white bread and pasta with the whole-grain variety. Over time, you will come to prefer it. Really.
• Commit to sitting down while you eat your meals. That means no car eating or refrigerator-door eating.
• Take five deep breaths before eating your meals. Check in with your tension levels—what do you discover?
• Replace your bottled salad dressing with a homemade one made with a wholesome oil (olive, grapeseed, sesame, etc.), garlic, and spices and an acid such as balsamic or cider vinegar or lemon.
• Check out your neighborhood farmers’ market.
• Shift to organics on the “dirty dozen” (in terms of pesticide residue). The list is always changing, but usually includes celery, peppers, and soft fruits such as nectarines, peaches, strawberries, and cherries.
• Roast some root vegetables such as turnips, parsnips, or beets. This is not hard. Peel, wash, chop, drizzle with oil (olive, grapeseed, sesame), put in the oven and bake for 20 minutes or so at 375 degrees F.
• Try replacing two meat meals a week with some non-meat proteins. Sauteed tempeh is good and is a less processed choice than tofu, lentils have a high protein profile, beans and rice are a favorite and can be quite delicious if done with a good salsa, a little avocado, and/or some diced onion.
• Increase your omega-3s with some fish. Canned wild salmon is a low-mercury, high omega-3 fish. Just rinse it off to get rid of the can residue and salt. Other low-mercury choices are small fishes such as anchovies or sardines. Avoid too much tuna, especially the white albacore variety. Tuna is a large fish and consequently chock-full of mercury.

The Karma of Movement

Karma is a concept referring to our ability to intentionally apply causes that bring about desired effects. This allows us to take a more empowered role in the creation of our lives and ourselves. Empowerment and choice are vital components of a healing process. Our culture promises relief from all discomfort if we just get the right shampoo, or car, or bag of chips. Our airwaves are teeming with substances, accoutrements, dressings, and doings that will relieve us of all discomfort. Consequently, we have learned to abhor discomfort. We deem it positively unnatural and some of us make it a full-time job of avoiding it. And the more we try to avoid it, the more it nips at our heels. Yoga teaches us to create “right pain,” consciously walking into discomfort so as to, as Iyengar suggests, become experts regarding our habitual response when things become, as they inevitably do, (“Oh, no!”) uncomfortable.

Iyengar tells us, “Willpower is concrete, not ethereal.” As I have mentioned, he slaps a man’s thigh and says, “Willpower is here.” Willpower is embodied and not in our minds at all. Grim determination is in your mind and is sorry fuel for the long haul of a meaningful change process. Grim determination is rife with criticism, judgment, and inappropriate expectations. You must learn to tap into a more vital source of energy in order to sustain a change process. The source that I suggest is your body, which you learn to turn on through movement. It is only through active engagement of your body and your heart that you will expand your limits and your endurance.

Let us consider this reconfigured idea of willpower in relation to food. Most commonly, willpower is thought of in terms of your ability to say “No” at the table. “Oh, you have so much willpower,” you are told when you pass on the cake. You are thought to demonstrate willpower through your restraint. Iyengar’s definition of willpower is very different because it is based upon an active doing rather than passive restraint. Willpower, in this line of thinking, is a forging through, confronting your limits while remaining firm in your intent. This is empowerment in action. How different this is to saying “No” to a piece of cake! Willpower is about actively making yourself larger and more powerful—quite different from defining willpower in terms of holding yourself back. (“No cake, thank you.”) However, your everyday mind is a woefully inadequate tool in this practice and enhancement of willpower. It is very easy to succumb to the more familiar, rigid, and deprived place that is ruled by “No.” Most of us have a deep abhorrence of this because it is based on avoidance and restraint and will eventually, if not immediately, rebel. The yoga of food helps you to access willpower by turning on your body in a way that enhances and develops your physical strength and personal power.

I’d like you to pause for a moment and reflect on a time that you faced a difficult challenge. Perhaps you made a speech in front of a group of people. You may have been very nervous and considered finding a way to get out of it, but you ended up facing up to the challenge with a good outcome. In this example, you said yes to something that was difficult, you allowed yourself to be uncomfortable, and you followed through with your intentions nonetheless. Afterward, you feel good, stronger, and proud of yourself for the accomplishment. This is an example of willpower in the way I am using the term. You use your will, or intention, to power through a difficult challenge. When it comes to making healthier food choices, I am asking you to reconfigure your idea of willpower in a similar way. Rather than succumbing to a shame-based, deprivation model where you sorrowfully pass on the nachos, pizza, and beer, envying your compatriots who can “get away with it,” you instead use your will/intention to empower choices that enhance the health of your body. You are saying “Yes!” to health-enhancing vital foods. You are saying “Yes!” to feeling better in your body. You are saying “Yes!” enhancing trust in your ability to follow through on your intentions. And because your body is such an accessible tool, you can tap into its power at any time to enhance your experience of willpower. When your mind slips into “Woe is me. I’m so fat. Why can’t I have some chips?” you can turn on your willpower through your body. This is where yoga and physical movement become the companion, and eventually the motor, behind your efforts to change.

Yoga invites you to notice and become more informed about your habitual response to bumping up against limits. The ability to acknowledge and breathe into, rather than tighten against, discomfort can be cultivated. Consequently, the physical aspect of yoga is an extraordinary help in your efforts to change your eating habits and to become a stronger person. What you will find through your yoga practice is that you are stronger than you think. (Remember, sometimes what needs changing is your habituated thoughts about yourself. If you don’t try something because you think you can’t do it, you prove your original negative premise. It’s a vicious cycle.) You will also learn that, lo and behold, strength develops over time. This knowledge is only developed through lived experience and the yoga mat, which, as opposed to a diet, is a far more dynamic way to discover this vital fact of our lives. I remember someone giving me advice once about dieting. “You know,” she told me, “when I have to spend time doing something I don’t enjoy, if I’m on a diet, I think, ‘Well, at least I’m losing weight.’” I took this to heart as a young girl and would sit passively, reveling in my “ability” to lose weight. I would think to myself, “All I need to do is sit around, not eat, and kill some time losing weight.” Not a very empowered mind-set! Doing something that builds your power, rather than sitting around becoming smaller, is a far healthier (and more interesting!) path to wellness.

Iyengar suggests that you “Learn to find comfort even in discomfort.” At first blush, this may sound masochistic, or at the very least, counterintuitive to the point of absurdity. But let us hear him out. “To detect diabetes, one takes a test to see how well sugar is tolerated in the body. Similarly the practices of yoga show us how much pain the body can bear and how much affliction the mind can tolerate. Since pain is inevitable, asana is a laboratory in which we discover how to tolerate the pain that cannot be avoided and how to transform the pain that can.” This statement flies in the face of our cultural abhorrence of discomfort, yet I must agree with Iyengar’s somewhat stark sentiments. Discomfort in life is inevitable. The sooner we accept this and stop trying to avoid it, the better. The practice of yoga strengthens your capacity to bear up to life. Consciously creating and walking into discomfort reinforces your willingness to be uncomfortable and builds upon your capacity to cope. This strength is a reservoir that you can call upon at the dinner table, or the vacuous times between meals when you feel sucked up by your “hunger.” You realize that your intentions are stronger than your transient sensations and that uncomfortable feelings, like the discomfort of holding a pose, ebb and flow in an arc that more often than not opens up into something different. You experience the reality that you are larger and stronger than the fluctuations in your body every time you practice yoga. You grow in your capacity to bear up to your own impulses, and eventually to life.

A yoga teacher at my neighborhood studio commented right before the back bend series that back bends get easier as you go. I realized on number four or so that she was right. I also began to notice this same principle when I was running or cycling. My beginning steps are often laborious and weighted. Once I get started, it gets much easier, gathering momentum and confidence as I persevere. What an interesting phenomenon. The more you do, the more you can do. That’s positive karma in action! When I am holding a long back bend, such as bridge pose, my initial reaction is often a fear-based retraction, “I can’t do this.” Learning to set aside this predictable seizure of my mind is now second nature. The effort becomes burning in my legs, opening through my core, beating in my heart, and I have entered the experience. Sometimes I hate the experience and I notice myself hating it. I am known to make rather animal-like noises as I release the energy of pressing up against the limits of my body and mind. My husband sometimes calls into the room, “That doesn’t sound very yoga-like.” Or my daughter will query through the closed door, “Mom! What are you doing in there?” When it is over, I am spent by the effort, and I am left with a flush of competence wrought from what my body can do regardless of the limitations of my mind. How I eat now is often in service of providing my body with the best source of sustenance in order to enable me continue to both study and challenge the limits of my fearful mind. This is willpower in action. Notice it is not a practice of restraint, but rather, a practice of expansion and exploration.

Reflections and Goals for Movement

1. What is your relationship to physical movement? What kind of physical activities do you enjoy? How often do you exercise?
2. Explore your relationship to physical discomfort. How do you respond to physical exertion? For some people, especially those with trauma backgrounds, physical exertion can bring up feelings of shame, inadequacy, panic, and even rage.
3. Are you willing to add consistent physical exercise into your daily regime? What kind of exercise/movement is most appealing to you—solitary exercises like running or walking, or group activities like team sports or a spin class? How much time are you willing/able to commit on a daily basis (or five or six days a week)?
4. What are your preconceptions about yoga? Some people have an idealization of yoga, thinking that practicing it will somehow bring them to a higher plane, while others see it as weird and esoteric. If you find it attractive, how would you like to incorporate a class or a practice into your weekly schedule? You may substitute this for your exercise, though unless you are practicing power yoga, it is important to have some aerobic activity in your repertoire.
5. Make out a schedule of your exercise/yoga commitment, including what you will do, when, and for how long. If you are new to regular exercise, start out very slowly, say with ten minutes of a gentle, nonthreatening activity (such as walking or dancing) twice a day. I am recommending short, frequent intervals to help you acclimate to the activity while also keeping the commitment manageable.
6. If you would like to learn yoga but feel intimidated by a public class, there are great DVDs and CDs to learn from. Some gifted teachers include Rodney Yee, Patricia Walden, and Baron Baptiste. HeavyWeight Yoga, by Abby Lentz is designed specifically for heavier individuals.

Your Core Body Beliefs

Core beliefs are a key principle in cognitive behavioral therapy. According to the theory, core beliefs are laid down in childhood in the form of mental schemas about the self, others, and the world. Schemas are organized patterns of thoughts, feelings, and ideas that exist at an unconscious, or at least preconscious, level. What this means is that we are not aware of our beliefs systems, rather, they comprise the water we swim in and the air we breathe. Cognitive therapy aims to make your schemas more explicit (in other words, more conscious), thereby allowing you to modify dysfunctional beliefs. Imagine a fish swimming around in a little murky fishbowl who is suddenly lifted up and able to peer into the bowl— “Well now, that sure is a lot of crap I’m swimming around in!” Cognitive therapy allows you to clean up the waters you swim in, thereby creating a different and more hospitable milieu.

Cognitive behavioral therapy does not explicitly address this, but I believe that we develop a core belief system about our physical body that sets the groundwork for how we relate to and inhabit our body throughout our lives. Particularly when there is abuse or trauma, the self-body relationship becomes distorted and creates the foundation for the perpetuation of abuse and negativity toward our own body. The real tragedy is that we don’t even know that we are relating to ourselves in a punitive, self-destructive way. Or maybe we know that we are self-destructive (“I shouldn’t eat so much, dammit! I’m such a fat pig!”), but we attribute it to our own shortcomings rather than to deep programming that was laid down in childhood when we had no say in the matter.

I had been working with Cindy for over a year. Cindy is a larger woman who is attractive and intelligent—one might describe her as “intense.” She looks at me with a strong gaze and can be a challenging client, shifting between being very vulnerable and childlike to more dominant and even verging on arrogant at times. She suffers greatly, not just because of her weight, but from her vacillating moods, chronic self-doubt, and lack of direction in her life. She questions her marriage, being a mother, and berates herself for not having a career. When we are working together, my presence is gentle but firm. I attempt to ground her in the present and help her identify clear, workable goals. “Let’s help you embrace what you have created in your life,” I’ll encourage. “How would you like to enhance your commitment to your health this week?” When she has an “aha!” moment (“Oh, I get it,” she’ll say softly), her whole demeanor shifts and her face is illuminated with a gentle light of recognition. Her vision clears and she is able to see outside of the narrow confines of her unhappiness and its limited options. At these moments, she is receiving rather than defending, which she was trained to do during childhood. I can feel her taking my words in and not shooting down my suggestions as irrelevant to her needs or the enormity of her unhappiness. Her habitual style of defending is an ingrained habit of warding off potential threats to her well-being. Other people are seen as potentially dangerous rather than nurturing. This defensive stance toward the world is rooted in early experiences of trauma, when basic security has been threatened beyond a child’s ability to cope.

Therapy edged around her history of abuse. “I want to talk about ‘the abuse,’” she would often say. Bits and pieces came out as the conversation disclosed and then avoided the excruciating details. Her father was harsh and at times very cruel. She witnessed him beat her mother and was herself often the brunt of his violent discipline. She recalls humiliating beatings as a child and at seventeen being chased up the stairs by him and beaten on her leg with a shoe. She wonders if the life-threatening blood clot she developed on that same leg during her pregnancy is related. Her body speaks unspeakable truths. Perhaps even more damaging was being teased about looking like a boy and the veil of shame she donned early in her life due to her weight, her bed-wetting (until the age of fifteen), and lack of peer acceptance. Cindy’s grandmother provided solace in her life. Her grandmother’s body was large and plush. Her home was quiet and orderly. Cindy would go there after school and there she could have “as much as I wanted.” Apple pie, that is. At grandmother’s, there were no limits, no humiliations, and the comfort of cookies and baked goods always awaited her. At grandmother’s, Cindy was able to let down her guard; however, receiving love came in the form of food, which is how grandmother also soothed herself.

One day in therapy, we were talking about Cindy’s weight. She is in her mid-thirties and is well aware that her weight contributes to her health problems, most recently her hysterectomy and the ongoing possibility that her bladder might prolapse. Cindy described her delicious lunch that day—“A BLT with onion rings. I really didn’t eat that many onion rings,” she said in a tone of mild defiance. A few minutes later, she announced that she wanted to talk about “the abuse,” not food. I told her that we were talking about the abuse. That her method of comforting herself, her “love” of food, reenacted the scenario of pain (“I’m overweight/bad”) and comfort (“At least I can eat”). Later in the session, Cindy wept as she questioned if she even wanted to live without the comfort that food provides. Her core beliefs about her worth, and really about life itself, lay right between the lines of her story about food.

The following week, Cindy came in looking a bit lighter than the week before. She began the session in her more impassioned, didactic tone, discussing the evils of the American diet and her new abstinence from coffee and junk food. During this session, we discussed integrating this empowered self with the shamed, hopeless self lurking in the background. “That frightens me,” she said. I told her there is nothing to be frightened of, and instead she can embrace this more vulnerable, shamed side of herself with awareness and not abandon her power. She can integrate the firm, somewhat rigid self (“I’m never late,” she announced early in her therapy, and she never was) with the chaotic, wetting the bed, bingeing, messy self. This underbelly represents the core beliefs that haunt her and sabotage her deep wish to change.

When I was in my early teens, my best friend was most teenage girls’ worst nightmare. At that stage of life, many of us are fully caught up in allowing the physical body to determine our value as a human being. And my best friend happened to be blessed with smooth, tan skin; round, perfect breasts; silky brown hair; and long, slender legs curving into hips that were just enough. I remember being awed by the rhythms of her appetite. Barely a piece of pizza and she was “stuffed.” She left French fries on her plate. Mornings I would gleefully finish off her microwave pancakes. Behind my glee was a strong sense of discomfort—“Why can’t I be more like her? What’s wrong with me?” But my hunger was so strong that I didn’t stop to linger in that discomfort for long. Instead it became buried as an accepted fact about me. I was one of those people who ate too much, too fast. I had no idea that this was a malleable fact about me, or that these strong impulses to eat could be held and accepted and worked with in a loving manner. Sadly, my “hunger” became linked to core beliefs that there was something defective, needy, and “too much” about me.

Perhaps you too have always felt inferior in your body, like something is fundamentally wrong inside and the pleasures of the flesh outside of eating are not accessible to you. Or perhaps you consider yourself all too wedded to the pleasures of the flesh, helpless before them. You may feel that the karma of movement does not apply to you. I certainly remember feeling this way. I had dragged my recalcitrant flesh out for a few attempts to run in my early teens and remember feeling that the oft exalted “runner’s high” simply did not apply to me. I wrote it off as something that I was excluded from—my body was obviously somehow deficient. “Might as well eat.” How I wish I had had a gentle hand at that time to guide me toward more respect and curiosity about my body, though not as “perfect” as others, but with a right to Be nonetheless. It is strange nowadays, some thirty years later, to be looked upon by others as having that coveted thin body, observed from the outside as a smooth economy of intake and expenditure, without the anguish of unmet hungers and cravings. The truth is, and I think this is true for most thin people over the age of twenty-five, that thinness is made up of certain habits that work more of the time than not to balance hunger with satiety. But there is nothing magic about it—it is a door open to anyone willing to do the work. I do not mean thin is available to all, since it is also a product of genetics and body type. But comfort in your body and a sense of ease with the rhythms of appetite, satiety, and exertion can be cultivated by everyone.

When you have food or body issues, you likely feel defined by your weight, as if others judge you based on your body and label you as “fat,” rather than seeing you as a whole person. When you feel you are perceived based on your physical body rather than your inner self, it is dehumanizing. Your ego registers this and can easily don the cloak of negative identity given to you by others. Frances Kuffel eloquently describes this experience in her memoir Passing for Thin. “I was ‘fat.’ A noun, not a modification, to my ears it was my definition and destiny. Not remedial but remediless.” She goes on to describe a conversation with her father: “‘What does—’ I paused to spell out the unfamiliar word—o-bee-see—mean, Daddy?’ ‘Obese,’ he grunted. ‘That’s you.’ I knew exactly what he meant. The word tocked across my head like a cuckoo clock. ‘That’s you. That’s you. That’s you.’”

For you, there may not be such a defining moment. However, solidifying your self-image around your body as it is seen by others is a common experience for people with weight issues. When your self is defined in this one-dimensional way, you exist as a body that is unacceptable. This negative identity then influences your behavior, which serves to reinforce the negative identity. Again Frances Kuffel chronicles this experience. “A few motivations for eating—safety, satisfaction—prompted half a lifetime’s compulsive eating, which in turn made me a fat girl/woman to the world and a whore to food in my heart.”

When you struggle with weight, you struggle with core beliefs about your physical competence. While you may be highly competent in many areas of your life, your negative body schema is lived out in daily defeats experienced in relation to food. “I have no willpower” is a conviction that is made true with every sigh of resignation and deferral of a healthy choice. This core belief can be challenged and changed when it is made conscious. When you are able to enter your body and turn on its vitality, you become capable of much, much more than you think you can do. Your body is a miraculous instrument and that is literally right under your nose. When you dare to enter the world of the flesh, you become aware that you are so much more than the apologetic image staring back in the mirror.

This is where some degree of faith is necessary. Remember, we are like snowflakes, all of us are sharing a similar structure and similar capacities that differ only in their unique articulation. You must have the humility and the courage to relinquish your convictions about what is and is not possible for you and throw yourself on the mercy of your flesh. According to Iyengar, “you can always do a little bit more than you think you can.” It is here, in the space of reaching beyond what you think you can do, that strength and competence grow. And with every limit that is challenged, more becomes possible after that. Your body can become the canvas, the tangible actualization of your courage to push beyond your beliefs about what you can or can’t do, what is or is not possible for you. The trick to this, however, is not to make your faith conditional, based upon external results. And, given your humanness, this is quite a trick indeed. Because we all want proof. Our faith is tepid, timid, waiting for a sign that we are right, or at least on the right track. Learning how to go through the motions in the present, with vacillating degrees of faith, acting as if … This is the space of change.

Reflections on Your Core Body Beliefs

1. Reflect upon your core beliefs about your body. What words come to mind when you sweep your body with your mind’s eye? Give yourself a few minutes with this exercise to allow a relaxation of your consciousness.
2. Did you have a defining moment in childhood that solidified a negative identity in relation to your body? What happened and how did this affect you? How do you perpetuate this identity in your daily habits?
3. What are some ways that you can modify your behavior so as to shift away from the reinforcement of your negative belief system? Some examples may include experimenting eating foods you “hate,” like broccoli, or incorporating daily exercise into your routine even if you “hate” to exercise.

Non-Violence Toward Your Flesh (Ahimsa)

Ahimsa is a yogic principle discussed at length in many texts on yoga. It is one of the yamas, which are the ethical principles guiding a yogic lifestyle. Ahimsa refers to non-violence in speech and action toward others, and for our purposes, toward your body as well.

Due to our cultural obsession with weight and “thinnitude” (to borrow a term coined by Frances Kuffel), we often overlook the sheer violence that marks our efforts to shape our bodies into acceptability. Kaiser conducted a study among its patients, largely middle-class people with health insurance, and determined 66 percent suffered maltreatment as children, and noted a clear correlation between childhood adversity and chronic health problems later in life (Psychotherapy Networker, Sept./Oct., 2010). We learn to treat ourselves as we were treated. The tragic story behind our nation’s declining health is that many of us are reenacting tales of despair and dysfunction precipitated in childhood. It is in childhood that you learn a basic attitude toward yourself. If the attitude is one of love and affirmation, you are truly blessed. If it is one of frustration, invalidation, and inappropriate expectations, you have lots of company. The work of healing is learning how to reshape your attitude toward yourself, starting with your attitude toward the very flesh you inhabit.

The first step in embracing the principle of non-violence is to recognize the sheer superficiality with which you likely relate to your flesh. As I have discussed, most of us are so captivated by the appearance of our bodies that we miss out on the miraculous world that lies just beneath our skin. Blood, bone, and vibration. Who thinks about this vibrant, pulsating, synchronized world unless blood work comes back wrong or something hurts? And then the gaze is one of disappointment, frustration, or fear, rather than the appreciation and awe your physical self deserves. There is a long-suffering nature to your body, a willingness to endure many insults, often without a peep, until it becomes just too much. Or maybe your body is peeping, even squawking, but it is too scary to look beneath the skin, or there is too much else in your life that you think you have to do.

Practicing ahimsa toward your body is a commitment to reshaping your patterns of self-care, and even more importantly, reassessing your basic attitude toward your flesh. What is your basic attitude? For many of us, it is judgment, judgment, judgment. The shift in perspective required for a change process to begin is to see the external condition of your body as merely the result or manifestation of what is unseen beneath the skin. The yogic perspective brings you inside yourself and has nothing to do with your looks. So, rather than berating yourself for being “fat,” or for not exercising enough, which manifests an attitude of violence, you decide to rehabilitate something that is glorious, albeit in need of work. In Iyengar’s words, “You have to create love and affection for your body, for what it can do for you.”

The pervasive message we receive in our culture is that we are all in need of “fixing.” This is the byproduct of our consumer-driven society. We are products in need of improvement. There is a simplicity in this focus—it pares down the enormity of your work as a human being to something seemingly manageable as you bear down on your own flesh. It gives you a sense of control and purpose in the face of the darkness. However, when you fixate so much on the concrete—your body, the appearance of things—you are cut off from the mystery. This starves a vital part of yourself—your need for meaning and connection—and makes you more vulnerable to turning to food, the concrete, for comfort. “It’s as if you were in a spaceship going to the moon, and you looked back at this tiny planet Earth and realized that things were vaster than any mind could conceive and you just couldn’t handle it, so you started worrying about what you were going to have for lunch … hamburgers or hot dogs. We do this all the time,” according to Pema Chödrön in her book Start Where You Are.

Food provides a ready focus for us all. For those of us with food/body issues, food is intimately wrapped up with fixing and rehabilitating ourselves, and so stems from self-denigration and negativity. The yoga of food asks you to approach food and your body in a more loving, life-enhancing way. This helps you move beyond your deeply human tendency to fixate, to worry about what’s for lunch in order to gain ground in the vastness of the universe.

The Practice of Loving Kindness (Mitri)

May I be filled with loving kindness
May I be peaceful and at ease
May I be well
May I be happy

Mitri is a Buddhist practice that cultivates warmth toward all Beings. Although this is not a concept from Classical Yoga theory, I include it here because it highlights the capacity to love as a quality that can be cultivated within yourself. In the West, it is often recommended that you begin this practice by starting with yourself. Many teachers, including Pema Chödrön, have commented upon the pervasiveness of self-hatred in the West. I have heard that the concept of self-hatred had to be explained to the Dalai Lama because he had never heard of it before and had no frame of reference. Self-hatred is the inevitable byproduct of the culture of narcissism in which we all have been reared. We learn from day one how special and wonderful we are. Or conversely, and perhaps more pervasively, we do not learn this at all and instead are subjected to glorified views of others through the media whom we idealize and envy. At the root of it all are inappropriate expectations about life, about ourselves, and an overvaluation of self that breeds profound isolation.

Mitri means “loving kindness.” Nurturing this attitude toward yourself is a radical act and is a precursor toward developing compassion for others. It is antithetical to how we are shaped in this culture. Loving kindness connotes an abiding respect for, and acceptance of, your own experience, no matter what it is. So if you are “hungry” five minutes after dinner, you hold the feeling with curiosity and warmth, rather than the frustration and self-denigration with which you might normally greet such unwelcome stirrings from below. This is not easy work. It requires a radical shift in perspective. Judgment against yourself, bearing down internally, these are habitual patterns that are pre-reflective. Meaning, you don’t even know that you’re judging yourself, clenching your teeth, or gripping your abdomen. Bringing these patterns into consciousness is the first step toward change. But, and this is an important but, just because you are hungry five minutes after dinner and you are holding this feeling with more warmth and acceptance does not mean that you automatically have to react to the feeling by eating. As Pema Chödrön reminds us, mitri is not just about being “sweet” to yourself, or put differently, it is not self-indulgence. Mitri is an attitude that opens up space. We so often react automatically and in so doing we close off internal space. When you feel anxious and “hungry” in the evening and have a bowl of ice cream, you close off space by filling it up with stuff. Mitri helps you to cultivate a lighter, more curious attitude toward yourself, allowing you to dare to sit in empty space a little while longer. Learning to identify your internal patterns of judgment, or violence, takes practice. Who hasn’t felt the quake of a nameless emptiness after dinner and before bed, the stretch of evening fading into the darkness that has no end in sight? The nights you are able to hold the emptiness in awareness without immediate reaction are small victories that help you to feel a little stronger in the face of life’s uncertainty. And the evenings that you don’t show such fortitude? These are the times to lighten up internally and notice the judgment hovering at the corner of consciousness ready to pounce.

Janice, in particular, has been shocked by the amount of abuse she heaps upon herself. “I say things to myself that I would NEVER say to a friend.” “Like what?” I urge, curious for more detail and also wanting Janice to make explicit with me what is a largely private, toxic habit. “Oh, I don’t know. If I make a mistake, I’ll berate myself. I’ll call myself fat or criticize my body.” Janice is trying very hard to stop this. In fact, during sessions she will often stop herself mid-sentence when she catches herself making a self-denigrating comment. Janice is certainly not unique in this habit.

Kimberly, who is a determined member of a twelve-step program, told me matter-of-factly that she once tried to eat herself to death. “What do you mean?” I queried. In a straightforward manner she explained to me that after being turned down for gastric bypass surgery, due to not being heavy enough, she grimly attempted to gain weight. Her efforts culminated one evening in a rage-driven assault from the inside on her hated stomach, which she intended to stuff to the point of explosion. Death by food. Thankfully, it didn’t work and when I met her several months later she was firmly entrenched in her twelve-step program and the day-by-day task of taking responsibility for her stuff. She still hates her belly with a passion, often quivering with distaste when we talk about it. But at least she is not acting it out on a daily basis with food. As with Janice, when you make your self-hatred more conscious, you are empowered to change your behavior and intercept your habitual thoughts. You are on your way to creating a more affirmative, eventually loving, relationship with yourself.

Reflections on Ahimsa and Mitri

1. How much violence do you perpetuate toward your body? This may consist of actual self-injury in the form of cutting, or less conscious self-injury in the form of unhelpful eating and exercise habits. It may also be more at the level of thoughts, such as incessant criticism toward yourself.
2. Subtle forms of violence consist of chronic tension and negativity, signifying a habit of closing down your internal experience. If you have a compulsive eating problem, you are stuffing internal space with stuff (material things). This points to difficulty experiencing your internal world. Do a body scan from head to toe looking for pockets of tension. What do you notice?
3. In psychoanalytic theory, depression is envisaged as “anger turned inward,” or violence toward the self. If you suffer from depression, consider how this idea may be relevant to your mood problems.
4. Unconditional positive regard for yourself is the practice of curiosity and compassion for your own experience. As explained above, this is not about self-indulgence, rather, it is a willingness to be open to and affirm your feelings no matter what they are. How might this practice be of help to you in healing your relationship with food and your body?
5. What are some concrete commitments that you are willing to make in the development of loving kindness toward yourself? Some ideas are creating a self-gratitude practice (remembering what is good about you), or nurturing activities such as walks in nature, hot baths, or regular massages.

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