Religion of Thinness

Infusing a Little Loving Kindness into the “War on Obesity”

2010-04-07T19:18:22-07:00

“You’re a big-fat-meany!” I overhear my six-year-old yelling at his older brother. Somehow, their peaceful game of chess has deteriorated into a power struggle. My nine-year-old is quick to fire back: “Yeah, we’ll you’re a big-fat-meany too! And who cares if we never play again!”

They’re in the living room, and I’m in the kitchen, separating chicken bones and gristle from meat to use for soup, so I holler to them: “hey guys, please work it out without name-calling.” After a short silence, I hear their voice tones start to soften. Still, I feel a mix of sadness and horror. While neither of them is overweight, studies suggest that a growing number of their peers are, or will be. And no doubt many of these kids face a lifetime of ridicule and derision as labels like “big,” “fat,” and the like become some of the most powerful put-downs.

The power of such insults is rooted in a culture that has declared war on obesity. To be sure, there are good reasons to think this war is “just.” As is well-known, the past several decades has witnessed a increasing number of U.S. citizens, including children, carrying considerably more poundage on their bodies. By some counts, as many as two-thirds of adult Americans are “overweight,” and nearly a third of them could be classified as “obese.” Given the multiple ways that excessive heft can compromise one’s physical well being, and given the financial toll obesity takes on our nation’s health care system, it’s not surprising that institutions from various corners of our society—from the medical establishment to the federal government—have joined forces to combat this perceived evil. Beyond institutions, ordinary folks from all walks of life concur that weight-loss is a cause worth fighting for. Indeed, the necessity of downsizing our bodies may be the one thing upon which a nation that is otherwise deeply divided can readily agree.

I share many Americans’ concern about the growing girth of our population. However, I question some of the presuppositions that have turned this concern into a culture-wide crusade. In previous blogs, for example, I have challenged the all-too-facile assumptions that health = thinness and that fitness comes in only one slender size. Here, I want to ask whether the bellicose approach to resolving the obesity “crisis” is, in the long run, an effective strategy.

A combative approach is apparent both in the explicit language used to describe the war on obesity, and in the implicit notion this battle conveys, namely, that fat is the enemy. The trouble with this approach is the trouble with most wars: it exacerbates the very conflicts it is supposed to resolve, while it fails to address the underlying conditions that give rise to the problems in the first place.

The war-like mentality that pervades America’s “battle with the bulge” adds fuel to the fire by fostering an antagonistic attitude towards the body. Most weight-loss diets, for example, foster this antagonism. Based on the principle of regulating your appetite, they instruct you to eat certain foods, in restricted amounts, at particular times, in a calculated manner—regardless of what your body wants and/or needs. Some fitness programs reinforce this regimented approach by establishing standard measures of time, distance, and/or calories burned as the markers of a “successful” workout. Unfortunately, this externally-driven, controlling approach to exercise and eating erodes our internal capacity to listen to the cues our bodies send us (i.e., feelings of hunger, satiety, a need for movement, etc.), which only reinforces the dissociation many people who struggle with their weight already experience.

Another problem with treating fat (and the urge to eat) as the “enemy” is that it leads to the demonization of fat people. This compounds the sense of shame many large-bodied people already feel and may try to escape through unhealthy eating patterns. Indeed, the health problems that some people who are obese experience may be exacerbated by the self-loathing they feel as the result of living in a culture that views them not only as unhealthy but immoral. In the U.S. today, and in white-western culture in particular, the “fat” body is the antithesis of the “good” body. And the presumed virtue of the “good” (read: thin) body is not merely a matter of health or aesthetics. Rather, the tight and trim form has come to symbolize an inner state of self-control—a quality akin to saintliness in a world that often feels like it’s spinning out of control.

Yet even a cursory glance at history reveals the relativity of the thin body’s “goodness” (and, correspondingly, of the fat body’s “badness”). Just over a hundred years ago, plump was considered a desirable, healthy, attractive form, while thinness was seen as scraggily and even sickly. In fact, if one considers late nineteenth-century female body ideals, one would be forced to conclude that, like happiness and beauty, fitness comes in more than one size.

In addition to perpetuating the assumptions and dynamics that tacitly fuel the obesity epidemic, a war-like approach to resolving this crisis fails to adequately address this problem at its roots. Insofar as the “war on obesity” focuses primarily on making people thinner, it runs the risk of ignoring why so many have gained weight in the first place.

There are both social and personal forces that fuel the trend towards bigness, and these forces are intimately connected. On a societal level, we live in an era where cheap, nutritionally-bankrupt, calorie-dense food is abundant. As food journalist Michael Pollan has pointed out (see In Defense of Food), this abundance, itself unprecedented in human history, is deeply rooted in conventional agricultural methods. These methods center on the production of a few basic crops (i.e., corn, wheat, soy), which are grown in large monocultures (wreaking havoc on the planet) and manufactured into “edible substances” (i.e., items that have been so heavily processed that they no longer resemble real food—think Twinkies). With the help of additives, fats, sugars, and artificial flavors, these food-like products contain tastes that, according to former FDA Commissioner David Kessler, can be highly addictive (see The End of Overeating, as well as a recent study that underscores the addictive quality of fatty foods (http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2519.html)

The social and personal roots of the obesity epidemic intersect in this commercially-driven system of production, since for many people, fast, cheap, highly processed food functions as a “drug of choice.” At least temporarily, eating such food can make your problems disappear. For a few fleeting moments, chewing and swallowing a candy bar (or a bag of chips, box of cookies, order of fries, bowl of macaroni and cheese, etc.), can numb the pain, provide immediate comfort, and generate instant pleasure. Such a fix is not only quick and easily available; it’s also legal. No one has ever been arrested for possession of Oreos, gummy bears, or Cheetos. Yet for a lot of folks, these edible substances function in a manner similar to narcotics: they take the edge off of life. And like most addictions, food cravings make certain companies very rich.

At a time when a historic number of people are out of work; when our political divisions seem deeper than the Grand Canyon; when the deteriorating state of our ecosystems mirrors the worsening health of our minds and bodies; when we’re still spending billions fighting wars abroad even though public schools at home are grossly under-funded; when social ills like racism, sexism, and homophobia continue to infect our relationships and communities; when the pressures of balancing work and family engender feelings of depression and isolation, leaving fewer citizens who care about the common good…in short, in a time of great national stress, is it any wonder that more and more people are turning to food as a way to check out?

There are other factors (beyond those I have already mentioned) that contribute to a culture that is making us fatter. These range from our sedentary life styles, to the relatively higher cost of healthy (i.e., unprocessed) foods, to our mindless eating habits, to our fast-paced work days that leave little time for cooking and savoring nutritious meals. All of these (and more) contribute to an overarching pattern that disconnects our “minds” from our “bodies,” makes food a viable means of escape, and turns “fat” into an opponent that must be destroyed for us to be saved.

If we are to move in the direction of greater overall health as a nation—including our physical, mental, and spiritual well being—we need to dig deeper than the current “war on obesity” encourages us to do. We need to infuse this battle with some loving-kindness by understanding the complex causes of obesity and by envisioning a broader, more peaceful path to the wholeness we seek. Such a path would require us to rethink our relationship to the earth (i.e., how food is produced), to our appetites (i.e. what it feels like to be hungry or full), and to our suffering (i.e., how we handle the stresses and pain of our lives). Ultimately, it would encourage us to see that the real enemy is not fat, but fear, apathy, and ignorance.

The Spiritual Dimensions of Recovering from an Eating Disorder: Transforming Suffering and Finding New Sources of Meaning

2010-03-22T06:58:51-07:00

There is a Sufi aphorism that says: “Love the water more and the pitcher less.” Muslim scholar Amir Hussain interprets this to mean that “Too often, when people seek to quench their thirst, they focus on the outward form of the container that holds that water rather than on the water itself” (Oil and Water, p. 176). This is precisely what happens to people who struggle with body image and eating problems. The attention devoted to creating a “good” figure (the “pitcher”) diverts energy away from cultivating a deeper sense of meaning in life (the “water”). The goal of losing weight becomes all-consuming, and the result is the feeling of being eternally hungry (or, to stay with the water metaphor, thirsty).

Relinquishing the holy grail of thinness is far from easy for those who pursue it with religious-like fervor. For however debilitating it can be, an obsession with weight functions as a profound source of meaning, giving those who aspire to a “good body” something to strive for, a goal by which to measure their success and worth (or lack thereof). Indeed, it’s virtually impossible to let go of this purpose-giving preoccupation without finding and/or creating new sources of meaning to replace old attachments and mental habits. This is what makes recovery from an eating disorder a spiritual journey. It is an ongoing process of learning to transform the very pain and emptiness that the obsession functions to cover into a new source of personal growth and well being.

Some people who struggle with eating/body image problems know exactly where the suffering they seek to avoid came from. For example, they can trace it back to a particular person, family situation, and/or incident(s) in their life. For others, however, the origins of their distress are more nebulous. This was the case for me as a young adolescent. My parents, though not perfect, were responsible and loving. I didn’t experience psychological, physical, or sexual trauma. I was successful at school and had plenty of friends. Still, there was a significant part of me that was hopelessly unsatisfied, a part that felt empty, anxious, insatiable. While I projected this dissatisfaction onto my body (with more than a little help from the media images I uncritically devoured), I sought to escape the internal void through food and the quest for a body that would somehow make me complete.

I spent much of my freshmen, sophomore, and junior years of high school bingeing, purging, and wishing I were thinner. By the summer before my senior year in high school, I was scared. I hated feeling so out-of-control; I hadn’t menstruated in years; I was getting cavities for the first time; and I was terrified that someone would find out about my shameful food rituals. I became so afraid of what I was doing, that somehow I managed to stop my bulimic behavior. For the next year, I still counted every calorie and policed my appetite with rigor, but I no longer resorted to gorging and vomiting, and this was a tremendous relief.

Still, the real process of healing for me didn’t begin until I started college. It was there that I discovered new sources of meaning. For the first time, I encountered a world of interesting ideas and supportive friendships. I became aware of society’s injustices towards women and other “others,” and I learned to question some of the religious beliefs I had accepted without question. In the process, I started to envision my life as having a purpose larger than the size of my body. I wasn’t sure what that purpose was, but I knew, in the idealism of my college youth, that I wanted to help make the world a better place. The sense of emptiness wasn’t gone, but through my education, particularly my study of philosophy, history, literature, and religion, I was beginning to understand that it was something to be explored, rather than avoided. This insight this opened up new possibilities for self-knowledge and self-definition.

My own experience illustrates the spiritual process of finding/creating a larger sense of life’s meaning to replace the never-ending pursuit of a “better” body. However, I don’t mean to suggest it as a norm. As a professor, I know plenty of young women for whom college has not been a time of flourishing but rather a time of exacerbated struggle with body image and eating problems. Indeed, there is no one-size-fits all method for finding/creating a deeper sense of purpose in life. Nor is there a universal answer regarding what that purpose might be. Ultimately, the search for a larger sense of meaning is a spiritual journey that each person must travel in her or his own way. Whatever the particularities of your path, you will need enough courage to let go of the security of easy answers and enjoy the mystery of life’s great questions.

Many people come to a spiritual path in life because they are unhappy. What they often discover is that this very unhappiness—that feeling of perpetual dissatisfaction—offers enormous possibilities for personal growth. This is precisely true in the case of eating disorders. Both the suffering they cause and the suffering we seek to avoid through them have enormous potential to transform us. Such suffering can open our minds, expand our hearts, and free our spirits—if we are brave enough to be present to it. Pain itself will not change us. But becoming conscious of it, sitting with it, getting to know it, and eventually letting it go can help to wake us up spiritually. As the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr points out, “Spirituality is what we do with our pain.”

Some of the most simple and effective spiritual tools for transforming pain and finding new sources of meaning are the “big questions” we can ask ourselves. These include:

• What is most important in my life?

• To what should I devote my energy and attention?

• How should I deal with suffering?

• To what or whom am I accountable?

• How do I understand my life’s purpose?

For those who have devoted much energy to losing weight and “improving” their bodies, such questions may seem impossibly large or immensely heavy (puns intended). And, of course, they are—if you assume the goal of exploring them is to arrive once-and-for-all at an absolute answer. But if instead you approach them with a sense of adventure, they can replenish your sense of purpose in life, reminding you that life is much bigger than the size of your body, and it’s worth the risk to explore it more deeply.

Whether you are new to a spiritual path, or a veteran traveler along the way, you can use these questions to keep you grounded in and motivated by an awareness of what is sacred in your life. And when you’re feeling lost and/or insecure, it may help to remember something Zen teacher Bernie Glassman observed, namely, that “there is little energy in answers.” This includes the “answer” of a “perfect body.”

More than an Image: Becoming Mindful of Your Body from Within

2010-03-08T19:34:17-08:00

More than an Image: Becoming Mindful of Your Body from Within

One of the consequences of living in an image-saturated society is that many of us develop a rather superficial, image-oriented relationship with our bodies. Our nearly non-stop exposure to advertisements, TV, films, the internet, and other media trains us to see, understand, and experience our bodies as “moving pictures”—that is, as images for others to view—rather than as the moving home and ground of our being.

Looking in the mirror is the first thing many women do after they get out of bed in the morning. This seemingly innocuous daily ritual is just one of the ways we identify ourselves with our physical appearances. With time, many of us become more invested in what we look like than in who we are. Women in particular learn to see and experience ourselves through the eyes of others (or the lens of a camera), and we measure our beauty and goodness based on shallow facades. Depending on how much we allow mass-produced images to influence our self-perception, we may largely neglect our interior life and limit our self-reflection to the ruthless (and often cruel) examinations we perform in front of the mirror.

It’s hard to feel comfortable in a body that is constantly self-scrutinized and perceived to be perpetually on display for others. What’s more, this preoccupation/identification with how we appear disconnects us from how our bodies feel on the inside.

What if instead of focusing our energies on our external appearance, we paid more attention to our inner sensory experience? Indeed, an essential facet of practicing peace with your body, which is the theme of this blog series (started Jan. 19^th), is shifting your attention from how your body looks on the outside to how it feels from within.

There are a number of ways to do this. One of the easiest is to focus on your breath to help you become mindful of your internal physical experience. You can do this by sitting or lying down quietly and directing your attention to the sensation of your body pulling air in, and letting it out. This may sound easy enough, but in our hurry-up, overscheduled, double-tasking culture, the simple act of sitting or lying still long enough to observe the rhythm and sensation of your breathing is a radical act of kindness towards your body that requires some effort.

Once you have found a solid but comfortable position—one that allows you to relax and breath naturally from your lower belly—close your eyes to filter out external distractions and focus your attention inward. Spend a few minutes just feeling your body breathing in and out. If your mind starts to wander, as it probably will, simply return your attention to your breathing, feeling yourself inhaling and exhaling. Gradually, then, let your awareness expand so that you notice what else (i.e., in addition to breathing) is happening in your body. Gently, without judgment, you can simply observe any physical sensations you are experiencing in the moment. Using your breath to anchor your awareness inside your body, notice whether you feel any pain, discomfort, or tension. Is your body as a whole relaxed? Anxious? Tired? Tight? Is your stomach hungry or full (or neither)? Can you sense the subtle but vital energy field that pervades your entire physical form, animating every organ, cell, and limb? Fundamentally, your body is a dance of billions and billions of moving particles. See if you can sense the energy of that movement. You may experience a slight tingling or buzzing, or some other sensation where your awareness is concentrated.

Slowing down long enough to be present to your breathing and to check in with how your whole body feels from the inside is a skill that develops with practice. If you get frustrated or distracted, or feel like you don’t get it, don’t worry. Just take your time, and/or try this exercise again later in the day (or tomorrow) to give yourself a chance to learn what it feels like to experience your physical form from within. (For more exercises designed to increase your ability to live comfortably in your body, see my book The Religion of Thinness: Satisfying the Spiritual Hunger behind Women’s Obsession with Food and Weight).

Often, our attention is so preoccupied with our external appearance that most of us are not accustomed to tuning into what Eckart Tolle calls the “inner body” (see The Power of Now, Chapter 6). Years of exposure to media images and messages that encourage us to identify ourselves with our physical appearance have trained us to live primarily in our heads, where we make judgments about our worth (or lack thereof) based on what we look like. Yet this simple practice of sitting or lying still for a few moments can, with time, train you to pay attention to your body in a new way, one that allows you to inhabit it more fully, move your energy out of your head into your whole body, and transform your judgmental attitude toward yourself into one of compassion and presence.

Fortunately, you can try this exercise almost any time and anywhere, not just when you’re sitting or lying quietly. Whether you are stuck in traffic, sitting at your computer, or folding laundry, you can always shift your attention inward by taking a few mindful breaths and becoming present to your physical experience in that moment.

Developing an awareness of your internal sensory experience can help you discern what your body really needs in the realm of desire. In her excellent book What a Body Knows (www.whatabodyknows.com), philosopher and dancer Kimerer LaMothe makes the case for retrieving the wisdom of the body by acting/moving in ways that harmonize with the body’s inner movements, especially its desires for food, sex, and spirit.

LaMothe recognizes how our culture trains us to ignore the inner life of our bodies by encouraging us to move and act in mind-over-body patterns, as if our bodies were puppets and we the puppeteers. In a blog entitled “Movement Manifesto 1” (http://www2.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/200910/movement-manifesto-part-1-2), LaMothe observes:

In our contemporary age, movement has been co-opted by the language of exercise and fitness, and moralized into a task we should perform. We congratulate ourselves when we succeed in spurring our seemingly sluggish bodies into action, and then measure the minutes spent, the miles clocked, and calories counted. We treat our bodies like pets we must put through their paces, so they will continue to obey our commands. We earn our just reward of fitting in to clothes, cliques, or the conceptions of beauty that barrage us.

As LaMothe points out, such cultural training alienates us from the wisdom of our bodies, particularly the wisdom of our desires for food, sex, and spirit. This alienation gives rise to a culture of dieting, divorce, and anti-depressants—all symptoms of the way we have lost touch with our inner urges through our attempts to control and contain them. Just as counting calories distorts our ability to notice what hunger and the satisfaction of hunger really feel like, so our society’s fixation on sex as the ultimate pleasure disconnects us from our need for physical touch and connection.

Retrieving the body’s inner wisdom requires us to tune in to our sensory experience, to pay attention to the inner life of our bodies. Instead of treating our physical desires as unruly forces that need to be tamed, we can learn to experience these desires as guides for giving us the satisfaction we seek. If we tune into our inner bodies, they will tell us what we need and how to move in ways that leave us feeling connected to ourselves and the world around us.

To practice peace with our bodies we need to learn how to relate to them as more than an image. We need to break through our fixation with how we look and delve into the deep and powerful experience of being (in) a physical form. By doing so, we end the cycle of female identification with appearance, create a spiritual appreciation of our physicality, and learn to enjoy what a gift our bodies can be.

Moving Beyond an Eating Disordered Definition of “Healthy Food”

2010-02-25T19:10:52-08:00

In this series of blogs (started January 18^th), I’ve been encouraging you, the reader, to forego the standard New Year’s promise to improve your figure and focus instead on practicing peace with your body by treating it with kindness and giving it the care it needs. This suggestion has special relevance during Eating Disorders Awareness Week. Yet some readers have worried that my emphasis on being kind to your body and critical of our society’s devotion to thinness somehow endorses an unhealthy lifestyle. Perhaps this concern is a reflection of just how much our culture—from the popular media to conventional medicine—encourages a disordered approach to food and eating by promoting the assumption that being “healthy” automatically means being thin.

To challenge our culture’s obsession with thinness is not to endorse a lifestyle that promotes obesity. Rather, my suggestion is simply that, in the long run, cultivating a nonviolent relationship with your body is actually a more viable road to overall health (physical, mental, spiritual) than torturing yourself with restrictive diets and weight-loss fantasies.

In fact, a crucial aspect of pursuing this kinder, more peaceful approach to your body is eating foods that genuinely nourish your body and spirit. This means that instead of deciding what to eat based primarily on caloric, fat, or carbohydrate content, you try to eat foods that maximize your physical health. It also means eating them in a way that is attuned to how much your body really needs and that enhances your sense of gratitude and pleasure.

Let’s start by defining “foods that nourish your body,” that is, those that help keep your body well-functioning, strong, well, and energized (notice: I didn’t say “thin”). Perhaps the simplest way to identify what kinds of foods belong in this “healthy” category is to look for foods that are real. According to author and food activist Michael Pollan, “real foods” differ from the “edible foodlike substances” that line the aisles of most supermarkets today (see In Defense of Food, p. 1-2). Real foods are those that haven’t had the life force processed out of them. They are not filled with additives to enhance their taste, color, and/or shelf life. They do not contain ingredients that are nearly impossible to pronounce. They have not been modified to make cooking easier. And they typically don’t come wrapped in shiny labels that make spurious-sounding claims about their amazing health benefits. In short, real foods are whole foods, the kinds people have eaten for most of human history (i.e., prior to the rise of industrial agriculture, nutritional science, and commercial food markets). As Pollan points out, they are foods your great grandmother would have recognized. And they have been rapidly disappearing from the American diet in recent decades.

To be sure, defining “healthy foods” as “whole foods” is hardly news these days. Yet strangely, this is not the definition that comes immediately to mind for a lot of folks. Instead, the term “healthy food” conjures up an assortment of items that are fat-free, and/or sparse in calories, and/or low in carbohydrates.

In our weight-loss obsessed society, “healthy food” is often defined by an eating disordered mentality, in which “healthy” means first and foremost foods that won’t add to your girth, and/or foods that might even help you shed pounds—regardless of how processed they are, how they were grown, how far they were transported, or how many artificial additives or unpronounceable ingredients they contain. Indeed, a $60 billion a year diet industry would have us believe that aspartame is a “healthier” choice as a sweetener than a calorie-laden whole food like honey or maple syrup. In this eating disordered paradigm, a box of “non-fat” cereal, whose second ingredient is high-fructose corn syrup (that cheaply made sugar substitute, which is heavily processed after being produced by land-destroying industrial agricultural methods), is better for you than a bowl of plain oatmeal and raisins.

Now some of you may say: “Okay, but who wants to eat a bowl of plain oatmeal and raisins for breakfast?”

The point here is not that everyone should be eating oatmeal and raisins for breakfast (though perhaps that wouldn’t be a bad direction to take). Instead, I’m suggesting something bigger, namely, that whether or not a particular food is nourishing depends on much more than the amount of calories, fat grams, or carbohydrates it contains.

To be sure, “healthy” may be an accurate descriptor for a variety of non-fat, low calorie whole foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables (particularly those grown without corporate-made pesticides and fertilizers). However, it is a questionable designation for any number of manufactured “diet” foods, despite the miraculous health benefits their labels promise. Ultimately, if we want to make healthy food choices, we need to break the automatic associations between “healthy,” “lo-calorie,” “no carbs,” and “fat-free,” particularly when it comes to processed foods.

At the same time, the reality that, given the choice, many of us would gravitate towards corn-syrup-filled cereal (rather than oatmeal and raisins) intimates the extent to which commercial food markets have tapped into our survival-based, biological predilections for morsels that give us extra layers. It behooves us to understand this conundrum if we wish to move beyond an eating disordered definition of “healthy food” to a more holistic paradigm.

There’s little question, for example, that the fast-paced growth of weight-loss industries in the second half of the 20th century paralleled the expanded manufacturing and marketing of highly-refined, sugary, salty, fatty, high-calorie foods. According Pollan, these items “push our evolutionary buttons”—our innate preference for certain tastes. But they do little to satisfy our nutritional needs, and this may be one reason we are prone to consume them in large quantities. In In Defense of Food, Pollan quotes renowned biochemist Bruce Ames, who suggests that the insatiable hunger many people experience when eating highly processed foods, “may be a biological strategy for obtaining missing nutrients” (123-124; 150). It makes sense that a body that is largely fed on sugar, salt, and fat is not getting sufficient nutrients and will be inclined to continue eating in the hope of obtaining them.

Because whole foods are more nutritious and generally higher in fiber than their processed counterparts, they tend to be more satiating in the long run, and we are less prone to over-eat them. This points to the spiritual benefits of eating real foods. When you leave a meal feeling satisfied instead of still craving, you are free to move on and engage in other meaningful, creative aspects of your life. Anyone who has ever struggled with compulsive eating understands the advantages of this approach. But even if you have never suffered from wanting to eat more right after finishing dinner, you may recognize the benefits of feeling satisfied and energized by a meal.

Whole and fresh foods also have the capacity to make you more present to the process of eating because they tend to demand more effort to consume. Consider the effort it takes to chew a carrot as opposed to a cookie, or a mouthful of brown rice compared to white). By requiring a little more exertion, whole foods offer you the opportunity to slow down and enjoy what you’re eating, to notice when you have had enough, and to be grateful to those who grew, harvested, cleaned, and prepared your meal.

In many ways, our relationship to food is an expression of our relationship to life. Perhaps more than any other daily activity, what we eat reflects our values and connects us to the rest of the world. Whether our approach to eating is characterized primarily by fear, suspicion, calculation, and control, or openness, gratitude, enjoyment, and presence is manifest in the choices we make day in and day out. Choosing foods that nourish our bodies and spirits is not just a way to practice peace with the physical dimension of your existence; it is also a way of expressing our gratitude to life, for life. How wonderful to have that opportunity to feel thankful and connected to this creative power three times a day, 365 days a year.

When Already-Skinny Women Obsess about Thinness: Time for a Little Soul-Searching

2010-02-17T07:22:57-08:00

This is the third in a series of blogs designed to elaborate my suggestion (originally posted January 18^th) that you make a different kind of New Year’s resolution in 2010—one that replaces the conventional pledge to downsize your figure by going to war with your appetite with an alternative commitment to practice peace with your body.

A fundamental part of this alternative resolution is learning to recognize the desire to be thinner for what it is. You can start doing this by asking a few simple questions, like: What am I really looking for when I yearn and strive for a “better” body? What does the weight I wish to lose really represent? As these questions suggest, a resolution to practice peace with your body is considerably more complicated than the promise to simply lose some weight. It involves some serious soul-searching.

In reflecting on the questions stated above, I’m reminded of a radio interview I did a few months ago. I was talking about my recent book (The Religion of Thinness) on a Philadelphia talk show called “The Women’s File” (http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Scheivert_Emily_486105011.aspx). The host, Emily Schievert, didn’t waste any time getting to the heart of the matter. “Why is it,” she asked, “that so many of my female friends who are already skinny are still obsessed with being thin or losing more weight?” It’s a great question, I think, because it points to a fundamental insight, namely, that the pursuit of thinness isn’t simply about a slender body.

The reason many already-slender women want to be even leaner is because a size 2 figure (or whatever the low number) isn’t really what they are looking for. Essentially, what they want is not to be thinner, but to be happier.

Regardless of your current body size, if you look deeply at your desire for a “better” physique (and if you don’t have this longing, you no doubt know someone who does), what you’ll find is a desire for peace and well-being—a yearning for happiness and health that is part of the human condition.

If beneath the pursuit of this physical ideal, there is an even deeper quest to be happy, no wonder many women feel they can never be thin enough.

In fact, this yearning to be happy is a sign of our vitality. The problem is that in the course of the past several decades (particularly in the U.S. and other affluent nations and especially for women), the happiness we crave has come to be associated with a narrow but ubiquitous image of physical “beauty”: the fat-free female figure.

The symbolic associations between slenderness and happiness have several sources. They are repeatedly produced and reinforced by commercial culture. A multi-billion dollar a year market for weight-loss products depends on advertisements and rhetoric that convince us that our satisfaction is just a few pounds (lost) away. If you listen carefully to the promises of Jenny Craig (“We Change Lives”), Weight Watchers (“Stop Dieting, Start Living”), or the sales pitches and jingles of countless other weight-loss companies and products, you will notice what they all have in common is the assurance that a thinner you is a happier you. Before-and-after photographs illustrate this message with cliché clarity: a depressed-looking, slouched over, frumpy-dressed person with a bad hairdo (in the “before” picture) stands in stark contrast to the same happy-faced, well-postured, finely coiffed person (in the “after” image).

Ads featuring “before-and-after” photos are only the most obvious example of the promise of being “born again” through weight loss. A plethora of other visual representations coalesce to reinforce the connection between happiness and thinness. The images themselves, and the dramas they are part of, need not be focused primarily on body size to convey the message that thinner=happier. This lesson is tacitly taught through the stories and pictures of popular culture (i.e., TV shows, films, magazines, the internet, and so forth) that repeatedly show smiley-faced, successful, and beautiful women in just one size: tall and narrow. The message that thinness will make you happy is also implicitly conveyed through the paucity of alternative images—including the representation of diversely-shaped women who are happy, healthy, successful, and beautiful.

Understanding the consumer-oriented, media-driven origins of the myth that happiness=thinness is an important step on the path of practicing peace with your body. But further movement on this path requires us to dig a bit deeper. At some point, each of us who has bought into the Religion of Thinness needs to stop and consider: what makes us vulnerable to believing this myth? When we do, we may discover an inner unhappiness we have been avoiding—a kind of malaise or dissatisfaction we project onto our bodies.

Maybe it’s not those “extra pounds” that are keeping you from being happy. And maybe it’s not even the weight itself that you really seek to lose. Maybe what you really want to get rid of is not the flab but the unhappiness you have learned to associate with it.

What if you could be happy without having to change or “fix” your body?

What if you replaced the quest for the holy grail of thinness with the pursuit of real happiness?

The kind of happiness I’m talking about here differs from the temporary good feeling that comes from getting what you want, or accomplishing something in the eyes of others, or satisfying an urge. It’s much deeper and more abiding, and it’s rooted in a sense of peace and well being that cannot be “gained” or “lost” because it is always already part of you.

Ultimately, this deeper happiness is the product of spiritual practice. More specifically, it is the fruit of repeated acts of kindness, love, compassion, forgiveness, patience, courage, and responsibility towards self and others. For these are the means by which we bring true happiness to our lives and to our world.

Cultivating this kind of happiness is a way to practice peace with your body. But here’s the catch: your desire for well-being must be stronger than your attachment to thinness. Your yearning to be peaceful and whole needs to be bigger than your ego’s craving to be “beautiful” and “admired” in the eyes of our culture.

Here are a few simple strategies for cultivating real happiness by practicing peace with your body:

1) Be kind to your body (instead of engaging in cruel self-talk and/or physical torture)

2) Show your body love by nurturing it with enough good food (i.e., real, whole food) and physical movement that you feel relaxed and energized rather than stuffed and depleted

3) Practice compassion for your body by slowing down enough to listen for signs of suffering – i.e., a sore back, upset stomach, head ache, tight shoulders, etc. – and give yourself/your body the care it is asking for

4) Forgive yourself for not being physically or spiritually “flawless;” instead, embrace yourself as a whole human being who is a work in process and whose destination is the journey

5) Exercise courage when you feel the urge to escape uncomfortable feelings or situations by depriving or indulging your appetite. Seek instead a middle path of staying present to what is

6) Act responsibly towards your body by caring for it in a way that promotes overall health and well being—mentally, physically, spiritually

These are just a few ways that you can learn to feel at home in the body you have, while cultivating the deeper kind of happiness, peace, and well being that no diet or promise to lose weight can give.

From Punishment to Pleasure: Developing a New Relationship with Exercise

2010-02-07T19:34:37-08:00

Last week I posted my blog encouraging readers to stop criticizing their bodies and start critiquing our society's obsession with thinness in the Huffington Post. I must say I was intrigued by how many readers responded to this suggestion with anxiety that I was somehow (intentionally or not) promoting obesity. I'm grateful for a chance to clarify this point. In my view, refusing to participate in our culture’s obsession with thinness doesn’t mean abandoning the pursuit of good health. My suggestion is simply that practicing peace with your body—i.e., developing a more harmonious, kind, nurturing, accepting, and loving relationship towards it—is a more viable path to health than going to war with your flesh by getting caught up in weight-loss aspirations and fantasies of thinness. In fact, one of the best ways to practice peace with your body is to give it the exercise it needs.

Exercising in a way that promotes harmony, kindness, nurturance, and acceptance of your body may require a paradigm shift in the way you think about and pursue fitness. Studies suggest that the vast majority of women who work out do so with the primary aim of losing weight or maintaining their figure. In a society that idealizes the slender body, exercise has become virtually synonymous with burning calories. The problem is that this approach turns the pleasure of physical movement into a form of punishment. According to this mentality, you need to spend hours pounding the treadmill to “atone” for the “sin” of having eaten dessert. But the “sacrifice” of your sweat is worth it because of the feeling of “purity” it engenders.

The religious overtones of such a workout ethic are not coincidental. This weight-loss oriented approach to exercise is an integral part of our culture’s widespread devotion to thinness. Advertisements for fitness programs or products encourage us to seek redemption by burning fat. “Health” magazines proffer 10-minute workouts that promise not only to “tone your body” but “lighten your spirit.” In short, this commercially-sponsored, exercise-to-lose weight paradigm reflects and embodies the quasi-religious, cultural myth that being thinner will somehow “save” you, that with every pound you lose, your problems will also disappear.

Unfortunately, this sacrificial-punitive approach is hardly enticing for those who would most benefit from more hearty physical exertion. Nor does it offer much wisdom or balance for those who are prone to working out excessively. And yet, this is the dominant way exercise is thought of and pursued in our image-obsessed culture: forget about how your body feels before, during, and/or after a workout; the crucial thing is how it looks—and this is especially true if you’re female.

Advertisements for fitness products and programs contribute to the notion that the ultimate purpose of exercise is losing weight and being “attractive.” “Join Now! Shed Pounds! Look Great!” a commercial for a fitness center entices. Shamelessly, such rhetoric conflates physical fitness and appearance. Despite the reality that neither health nor beauty come in one shape or size, the message we get from popular culture is remarkably consistent: exercise>lose weight>be healthy>look good>feel better. Indeed, the ubiquity of this formula obscures other approaches to exercise, particularly those that do not put you at war with your body.

The subtle violence embedded in the exercise-for-weight-loss paradigm is captured in the metaphor of “burning.” Whether you are encouraged to burn calories or fat itself, such rhetoric tacitly fosters a antagonistic relationship with your body, as if your body were “the enemy.” Ironically, this very antagonism is at the root of many unhealthy eating and exercise habits.

Developing a more harmonious relationship with your body means learning to enjoy physical activity that gets your heart beating. This is where this paradigm shift comes in.

What if, instead of seeing exercise as a road to thinness, you focused your attention on the ways it makes you stronger, increases your energy, relieves stress, strengthens your mind/body connection, and thereby promotes your general well being?

When it is not tethered to the goal of weight loss, pursuing fitness can be a source of integration, pleasure, and healing—a way to practice peace with your body.

Exercising for energy, stress-reduction, and strength can take multiple forms. The key is to find activities you enjoy. If you’re not inclined to working out at the gym, you might join an athletic team, practice tai chi, play tennis, or go golfing, hiking, dancing, or rollerblading. You need only observe the natural tendency of children to run, jump, skip, and play to understand your body’s need to be physically active. This need does not disappear as we grow older and spend less time at the playground, and our spirits suffer if we ignore it. Whatever you do, let go of thoughts about burning calories. Simply take pleasure in the opportunity to move and be more present in your body.

Enjoying your body through exercise depends on knowing its limits. Exercise does not have to be overly taxing to be effective. Anything from mowing the grass to going for a walk can give you a way of processing distressing thoughts and difficult emotions. If you have a history of exercising excessively, your challenge is to pay attention to the physical cues your body gives you. Instead of adhering to rigid time or distance requirements you may have established for yourself, you can practice being flexible by slowing down and taking a break when you start to feel tired or achy. If you’re worn out from running, for example, you might shorten the distance, slow your pace, or try walking instead. These are acts of kindness towards your body that can replace the punitive habit of pushing it beyond its limits. The point is to find forms of movement that harmonize with your actual physical needs, rather than adhere to some ideal or standard you have in your head.

While for some people exercise can be addicting, others find it nearly impossible to get moving. This is not because they are “weak-willed” or “lazy.” Exercise resistance is a complex problem and there are many reasons to feel unmotivated. Traumatic experiences that involved our bodies, including unwanted sexual experiences, can impair our connection to the energy that moves us. Many of us grew up with social or familial messages that reinforced an inactive lifestyle. Some of us who enjoyed playful activity when we were younger lost interest when it became focused on competition. Whatever your physical history, identifying the impact of such experiences is a vital part of re-inhabiting and enjoying your flesh.

Practicing peace with your body means finding a balance between the activity and the rest you need. In this paradigm, overall health—mental, physical, and even spiritual—replaces weight loss as the primary goal of exercise. Of course, this approach does not preclude the possibility of losing weight as a result of physical exertion; it simply doesn’t make it the primary or ultimate goal.

When exercise is not motivated primarily by a drive for thinness, it can be a kind of spiritual practice. Think of the way that physical exertion changes your breathing. Is it any coincidence that, etymologically speaking, “breath” and “spirit” are connected? When we get the exercise we need, we breathe better, and our bodies/spirits are healthier because of it.

If it sounds strange to think of physical exercise having a spiritual dimension, this is only because the dualism of our modern mindset (i.e., since the time of Descartes) convinces us that our “bodies” and “minds” and “spirits” are unambiguously separate. But the simple fact that exercise—when done for the sake of pleasure, health, energy, stress-relief, and strength—makes you feel better is a testament to the deep and indivisible connection between these various aspects of ourselves.

Stop Criticizing Your Body and Start Critiquing Our Culture's Devotion to Thinness

2010-01-28T14:53:10-08:00

In my last blog, I encouraged you to make a different kind of New Year’s resolution. Instead of vowing to do whatever it takes to lose weight and “improve” your figure, how about committing to practicing peace with your body? In other words, why not make a conscious effort to accept, appreciate, nurture, and enjoy body you have?

I borrowed the phrase, “practicing peace with your body,” from my friend Cissy Brady-Rogers, who is a therapist specializing in the treatment of women with body image and eating problems. She coined the phrase to emphasize that making peace with your body is an ongoing process, rather than something you achieve once and for all. In a culture that worships the slender ideal and constantly encourages us to go to war with our bodies—to monitor, control, restrict, punish, loathe, “fix” and fixate on them—learning to live harmoniously in one’s own flesh is the journey of a lifetime.

This journey begins when we wake up to the false promise our society has sold us, namely, that our happiness resides in the size of our bodies. This promise is part of a culture-wide devotion to thinness that has many of the features of traditional religion, including beliefs, images, myths, rituals, and moral codes that teach us to define our value and purpose through the pursuit of a “better” (read: thinner) body. Learning to recognize and critique this “Religion of Thinness” is a crucial first step on the path to overall health and well being.

This critique involves a paradigm shift: from the illusion that losing weight will “save” you (i.e., by somehow solving your problems and making you happy) to the insight that various industries and markets are profiting from the sense of inadequacy so many of us, particularly women, feel about our bodies. Indeed, this new perspective understands that weight-loss markets in particular benefit from the very sense of shame they are so good at stirring, particularly in women. Shifting our paradigm thus entails examining the taken-for-granted notion that healthy, happiness, and beauty come in one uniformly narrow size, and asking: who benefits when we buy into this belief?

Such questions are central to the practice of cultural criticism, which means questioning the dominant norms, values, and assumptions that circulate in our society and that are largely taken for granted; and it means investigating whom these norms, values, and assumptions really serve.

Cultural criticism of the Religion of Thinness begins with the simple insight that women are not born wishing they were thinner. Rather, we are indoctrinated into this belief by a society that glorifies the fat-free female figure. Years of exposure to media images of “beautiful” women who are uniformly thin conditions us to associate slenderness with beauty. Though it is virtually axiomatic in our society, this association is actually far from natural. In fact, if we had lived just over a hundred years ago, a well-cushioned body would be the ideal to which we would be encouraged to aspire, though probably fewer of us would have developed the kind of intense preoccupation with physical perfection that women experience today because back then people were not bombarded day-in-and-day-out with mass media images of the ideal.

In our image-saturated culture, it doesn’t take long for us to internalize our culture’s devotion to thinness. One study found that eighty percent of fourth-grade girls interviewed in the Chicago and San Francisco areas said they had already been on diets. Roughly the same percentage of women in the mid-fifties report a desire to be thinner. For many, this desire amounts to a life-long ambition. Whatever our age, unless we are aware of its pervasive influence and vigilant about challenging its authority, we easily, without giving it any thought, internalize our culture’s dictates about body size into our own psyches, bodies, and spirits.

But when we identify the messages our society sends us about the importance of being skinny—when we notice how advertisements target our insecurities and promise us fulfillment through a slender body; when we scrutinize magazine images that equate “women’s health” with a fat-free female figure; when we ask why all the “sexy” women on TV and in movies are uniformly thin—these messages have less power over us. Such conscious, critical awareness gives us the freedom to think differently: to think for ourselves. As we begin to realize that we have been culturally conditioned to distrust our bodies and believe that there is something wrong with them, we can redirect our criticism away from our own thighs and tummy towards the industries and ideologies that seek to profit on the very feelings of shame and alienation they stimulate.

Here are some basic questions you can ask to practice cultural criticism of the Religion of Thinness, particularly in relation to media images (i.e., advertisements, magazines, movies, TV, internet, etc.):

1) What messages does this image give me about my body? Is the message conveyed in a way that is explicit? Or is the message more hidden? (Practice looking for both kinds of message—the obvious and the subtle)

2) Who produced this image and what do they want me to feel when I see it? Who benefits if I buy into the message this image is conveying?

3) What vision of “health,” “happiness,” and/or “beauty” does this image depict? Does it suggest that these qualities only come in one size? What alternative visions of “health” and “beauty” does it leave out?

4) What other qualities or assets are associated with slender bodies (i.e., affluence, romantic success, self-control, etc.)? How do these associations add to the appeal of the tight and trim figure?

These are just some of the questions you might ask as you develop a critical perspective on our culture’s devotion to thinness. There are countless others and I encourage you to come up with your own ways of unmasking the lies we have been taught to believe about the ultimate value of the slender body.

Though it requires intelligence, practicing cultural criticism is not just an academic exercise. I also see it as a kind of spiritual practice because it is about transforming our consciousness so we can be more awake to ourselves and to the world we live in. In this sense, practicing cultural criticism of the Religion of Thinness is more than an antidote to the persuasive power of our culture’s obsession with being slim; it is also an alternative source of purpose and self-definition, one that is far more meaningful than the shallow quest for that slender ideal.

Beware of the New Year’s (False) Promise of the Born-Again Body

2010-01-20T07:15:25-08:00

It is already past the middle of January. Is it time to re-evaluate your New Year's resolution?

Indeed, each New Year arrives filled with the possibility of rebirth and renewal. It presents the opportunity to start over again, with a slate so clean it’s easy to envision yourself at your very best: happy, healthy, living life to the fullest.

As we examine the reality of ourselves as we are, compared to the image of who we could be, what stands out most for many us—especially women—is the seemingly sorry size of our bodies. The flab, sags, bulges, and heft do more than remind us we’re another year older; they symbolize our imperfections and weaknesses, along with everything else in our lives that we think needs fixing.

Of all the New Year’s resolutions we make, our vow to trim down and shape up is enormously enticing, perhaps because the physical transformation we dream of seems clearly within our reach. If we could just cut out those extra helpings, give up snacks and forego desserts, spend a few more hours pounding the treadmill, and at long last lose those “extra” 10 pounds that are keeping us from being happy…

Full of hope at this new beginning, the fantasy of getting our lives in order plays itself out in the pursuit of a born-again body—a body freed from our former transgressions and slavish desires, a body that no longer gets in the way of our happiness and success.

Lured by the prospect of such freedom, we resolve to start dieting (again).

But what do our New Year’s resolutions to lose weight tell us about who we are and who we aspire to be? What do these vows reveal about our culture? And what are we really hoping for when we commit to renovating our figures?

I see the promise of a “born-again” body as part of a broader societal network of beliefs, myths, rituals, and moral codes that encourage us to find “salvation” (i.e., happiness, health, and fulfillment) through the quest for a better (read: thinner) body. I call this “The Religion of Thinness,” for it has many of the features of traditional religion (i.e., beliefs, myths, rituals, images, moral codes, etc.) even though it fails to deliver the salvation it promises and sadly shortchanges the spiritual needs to which it appeals.

Of course, most people don’t associate their desire to be slender with religion. But for many—women in particular—the prospect of a “good” body comes to function as a kind of “ultimate purpose,” a goal that gives their lives personal meaning while connecting them to a much wider cultural devotion to thinness.

The Religion of Thinness is sponsored by a $60 billion a year weight-loss industry that promises to help us “fix” our physical “shortcomings.” Some of the same companies that peddle products and programs designed to help you “change your life” by transforming your figure also manufacture and sell foods that are high in fat, sugar, and calories. Nestle, for instance, famous maker of yummy chocolate, now owns Jenny Craig. How convenient to offer us candy bars on the one hand, and “healthy” (i.e., processed, packaged, lo-calorie) dinners on the other. This is just one example of the bulimic-like mentality that pervades our culture’s approach to appetite and eating. We are simultaneously instructed to refrain and to indulge, to withstand and to give in, to forego and to supersize our desires. Small wonder so many of us feel out-of-balance when it comes to food and our bodies.

In addition to its obvious commercial sponsors, The Religion of Thinness also finds implicit support in certain traditional religious ideas and narratives. Consider, for example, the story of Eve, whose unruly appetite led to humanity’s downfall. Throughout Christian history, this mythical incident fostered a view of female desires as untrustworthy and women’s bodies as shameful. Again and again, church fathers recycled the story of Eve to find evidence that women are more “carnal”—more defined by and tied to “the flesh”—than men, and thus more prone to give into temptation, and therefore in more need of supervision, regulation, and salvation. No doubt, the author of the Genesis creation myth did not intend to send a message that women need to contain their appetites and be thin in order to be happy. Nevertheless, the symbolism of the story—particularly the nexus between female appetite, temptation, sin, and shame—continues to have resonance for many women today.

The belief that female bodies are shameful and in need of regulation/redemption continues to permeate our culture. Most women today don’t think of their dissatisfaction with their bodies as related to the legacy of Eve, but the wars they wage against their own flesh reflect our culture’s deep-seated association between women’s appetites and sin, as well as its widespread myth that getting our bodies under control will make the rest of our problems disappear.

Ultimately, what makes The Religion of Thinness so persuasive is that it is so pervasive. The very omnipresence of its unspoken creed—“I will be happier when I’m thinner”—makes it extremely difficult to question.

But what if, rather than buying into the false promise of a born-again body, you resolved to accept, love, nurture, and enjoy the body you currently have? What if, instead of perpetuating a war against your flesh with diets that dictate what you can eat and self-loathing directed at your thighs and/or tummy, you made an alternative New Year’s resolution—a decision to practice peace with your body?

What would such a commitment entail?

What I have in mind are some fairly specific ways you can choose to live more harmoniously in the body you have. Some of them involve a good deal of soul-searching, while others are more practical in their orientation. None of them make weight-loss a priority, though I suspect that each of them will move you in the direction of greater health—mentally, physically, emotionally, and perhaps even spiritually. And isn’t that what you were looking for in the first place?

What follows is a list of suggestions for practicing peace with your body. While it’s not exhaustive, it is enough to help you get started in building a more healthy relationship with food and physicality. In a series of future blogs, I will elaborate how each of these suggestions can play a role in moving you beyond the superficial fantasy of a “born-again” body to a deeper sense of happiness, well being, and purpose.

1) Practice cultural criticism of The Religion of Thinness. This means questioning the assumptions behind our society’s images, beliefs, rituals, and moral codes that encourage you to find “salvation” through a thinner body, and asking who benefits when you buy into this narrow promise of fulfillment.

2) Recognize your desire to be thinner for what it is. Look deeply at your yearning to lose weight and see the desire for peace and well-being beneath it. Then, ask yourself if losing weight will really give you these things.

3) Cultivate a new relationship with exercise. Shift from a fitness paradigm of punishment to one of enjoyment by creating exercise rituals and habits whose primary aim is not to help you burn calories but to reduce stress, strengthen your body/spirit, promote overall health, and take pleasure in physical movement.

4) Eat foods that nourish your body and spirit. Instead of deciding what to eat based on caloric content, commit to eating more whole, organic, local, and fresh foods, as well as those that are prepared with love and kindness. As often as possible, try to eat in a way that is mindful of others and that enhances your enjoyment of what you are eating.

5) Practice awareness of your body from within. Shift your attention away from how your body looks on the outside to how it feels on the inside. Use meditation and breathing exercises to do this.

6) Contemplate your larger sense of purpose. Ask yourself: what is most important in my life. Take time to explore some other big questions: What is the meaning of my life? To what should I be devoted? How should I deal with suffering? To what or whom am I accountable?

7) Recognize your need for a sense of community and connection. Spend more time with those who nurture your overall sense of well-being, and choose not to invest in relationships that fuel your feelings of bodily inadequacy and competition.

8) Examine the icons you look up to for inspiration and self-definition. Consciously choose role models—real people or historical figures, famous or unknown—whose lives exemplify the compassion, bravery, love, and service to which you aspire. Discard those that are not worthy of your esteem, energy, and devotion.

9) Transform your right-and-wrong approach to food and your body. Instead of judging your body for being “less-than-perfect” and obsessing about “good” and “bad” foods, widen your moral perspective to highlight the connections between the health of your body and the well-being of the planet.

10) Practice mindful awareness. Observe often what is happening in your body and in your thinking in the present moment. Use this awareness to practice acceptance of your body/yourself and compassion for others.

These are just some of the ways you can pursue a new kind of New Year’s resolution this January– one that enables you to relinquish the never-ending quest to improve your body, and embrace instead a path that allows you to accept, appreciate, care for, and enjoy your physicality. I look forward to elaborating each of these suggestions in the weeks to come.

Our Addiction to the Illusion of a "Better" Body

2010-01-13T11:09:37-08:00

I recently finished Chris Hedges’ new book, Empire of Illusions: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of the Spectacle. It’s a trenchant critique of the various ways our society encourages us to escape reality by retreating into the array of fantasies it offers through various forms of popular culture. While the fantasy of the “perfect” body is not a focus in the book, it certainly falls into the category of “illusions” that divert our attention from the real issues and challenges of our lives, and thereby perpetuate the very suffering we want to alleviate. Perhaps the worst part about this illusion is that so many of us, women in particular, have become addicted to it.

In thinking about women’s addiction to the fantasy of physical perfection, I am reminded of what Karl Marx (the late 19^th century German philosopher) said about religion. He referred to it as “the opiate of the masses.” He was especially critical of Christianity’s tendency to direct believers’ attention away from the brutal and unjust realities of this world to the heavenly bliss of the afterlife. In Marx’s view, such other-worldly, fantasy-laden religious beliefs not only functioned to numb people’s suffering in this life (particularly the suffering of the exploited working class of his era), but in so doing it left them with little motivation to challenge, much less change, the actual, this-worldly sources of their misery.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to grasp the insight of this analysis, particularly as it applies to The Religion of Thinness. In many ways, the comparison is perfect. Only instead of encouraging us to ignore the reality of our suffering here and now with the promise of happiness when we die, The Religion of Thinness teaches us to relieve our current distress by focusing on the fantasy of a “better” body. Those who become trapped in this illusion come to depend on the temporary relief it provides by diverting our attention away from our everyday problems and pains towards a picture of ourselves physically perfected.

This addiction has both social and psychic sources.

On a societal level, the illusion that losing weight will give us the satisfaction we seek is rooted in a $60 billion a year weight-loss industry that thrives on the very sense of shame it seeks to stir and promises to cure. In fact, half the time when I log on to this website to post a blog, there are advertisements for diet products, promising to help us downsize our bodies! Even as we swim in an endless sea of commercial promises to help us “fix” our figures, our culture simultaneously feeds us a steady diet of advertisements enticing us to satisfy our cravings, to go ahead and give in, to splurge, to supersize. The schizophrenic messages we receive about food—refrain and indulge—make it very difficult, to say the least, to develop a balanced approach to eating. But more than that, in different ways, these mixed messages tell us we can diet or eat away our pain.

Of course, the illusion is also bolstered by the media images we are bombarded with daily. Whether moving or still life, glossy pictures of models, movie stars, and other celebrities are part of the larger

“empire of illusions” that sponsors the fallacy that our freedom from anxiety and/or depression depends on being slender. Through our repetitious exposure to these images, we come to associate the wealth, fame, power, and beauty we are taught to crave with the tight and trim figure. Gradually, we come to believe that if our bodies were as smooth and seamless as the ones we see on TV and in magazines and movies, so too our lives would be.

The illusion that having a “better” (read: thinner) body will somehow magically make our problems disappear doesn’t speak to reason. One some level, we know it’s illogical to believe that shrinking our form is the key to living happily ever after. Like all good myths, the fantasy hooks us by appealing to our more-than-cerebral sensibilities. It grips that vulnerable part of us, the part that is hurting and wants to be healed. This takes us to the psychic sources of our addiction to the fantasy of thinness: we come to depend on this illusion because we lack more adequate means to transform our suffering.

But how do we begin to transform the difficulties of our lives?

Obviously, there is no singularly correct answer to this question. But it’s worth noting that, historically, religion has played a central role in the transformation of human pain. In various times, places, and cultures, people have turned to the wisdom of their spiritual traditions to help them make sense out of their problems, to find inspiration to work through them and grow beyond them. Traditional religions have various stories, symbols, and rituals to represent this transformative process, from the man who was crucified and resurrected, to the lotus blossom that is rooted in mud and yet blossoming towards the sun, to the lighting of candles as the day darkens to welcome the Sabbath and celebrate the creative, liberating, and sacred power of life (to name just a few examples).

And yet, as Marx’s critique suggests, religions have not always been vehicles of transformation. That they have also functioned to sanction violence, oppression, and various other forms of cruelty is a key reason so many people today justifiably feel disconnected from them. I’m not suggesting that we try to fill the spiritual void that draws us to the illusion of thinness by returning to (or tightening our connection with) traditional religions. While this may be helpful for some, my point here is that each of us needs resources for metamorphosing our problems into opportunities that teach us what we need to learn.

In the absence of such spiritual tools for staying present amid our distress, for accepting “what is” even when we don’t like it, for letting go and moving on—even when we feel most stuck, we are vulnerable to the false promises of The Religion of Thinness.

Ultimately, we cannot let go of the illusion of a “better” body without replacing it with something more meaningful. What will fill the void so many of us have learned to escape through the fantasy of physical perfection?

Perhaps instead of answer this question directly (since I seriously doubt that there is one answer), it is more helpful to offer a set of questions that can move us from the illusion that thinness will make us happy to the insight that—contrary to the messages we receive from popular culture—we are more than our appearance. Such questions include:

“What is the meaning of my life?”

“What do I hope to accomplish during my lifetime”

“To what should I devote myself”

“How should I deal with suffering—both within myself and in those around me?”

“How do I want people to remember me when I die?”

“What kinds of ideas, activities, relationships nourish me mentally, spiritually, physically?”

“How do my personal thoughts and actions affect the lives of others?”

These are just a few questions that can shift us out of the “false consciousness” (Marx) that prevents us from seeing our own oppression and keeps us fixated on pseudo-solutions. Taking the time to probe such questions can put us in touch with our deepest values and thereby give us the strength to evolve through, rather than run from, the challenges and changes of our lives.

A New Perspective for a New Year

2010-01-01T04:50:10-08:00

Starting the New Year with a New Perspective

To whom does your body belong?

The answer to this question seems so obvious that I find myself reluctant to ask it. Everybody knows that each human body belongs to the person who inhabits it (or who is it, depending on how you understand embodiment). Isn’t it abundantly clear that each person is the owner and master of her or his own flesh? Doesn’t your body belong exclusively to you?

The Vietnamese Zen master, peace activist, poet, and scholar Thich Nhat Hanh, suggests another perspective, one that might be especially beneficial for those who have felt isolated and imprisoned in their bodies because of a preoccupation with food and/or thinness.

In For a Future to Be Possible: Buddhist Ethics for Everyday Life, Nhat Hanh notes that “In modern life, people think that their body belongs to them and they can do anything they want to it.” In nations like the U.S., the law itself supports the claim that “It’s my body and I’ll do what I want to with it” (62). The mentality behind this assertion is familiar to those of us who have sought to empower ourselves by controlling our bodies. Exerting mastery over our flesh (by refusing to eat or by exercising to the point of exhaustion, for example) gives us a temporary taste of the power we long to experience in our lives. Moreover, the possibility of reinventing your “self” by renovating your body holds immense promise in an image-driven society that upholds the autonomous, self-made individual as the paragon of “success.”

But according to Nhat Hanh, the notion that we own and control our bodies is a manifestation of our culture’s individualism—an ideology that creates suffering on both personal and societal levels because it ignores the fundamentally interrelated nature of reality. Not just mystics but scientists as well have recognized this basic interdependence. Albert Einstein called humans’ tendency to experience themselves as separate from others as “a kind of optical delusion of...consciousness.” According to Einstein, this delusion becomes “a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires,” blinding us to the beauty of reality as a whole.

Both Nhat Hanh’s and Einstein’s insights underscore what many people with eating and body image problems already know all-too-painfully well, namely, that a life focused primarily on personal achievement—epitomized in the relentless quest for a “better” body—is a set-up for misery. It’s not that the drive for thinness proves that we are bad and selfish; it’s that this quest is essentially out of alignment with our basic nature, which is interdependent with everything else and thrives through that interconnection.

In a mistaken attempt to alleviate the various sufferings we accumulate in our lives, many of us turn to the project of perfecting our bodies as a way to experience some relief. The feeling of personal accomplishment that accompanies our weight-loss efforts (when we succeed) can temporarily allay feelings of depression, anxiety, powerlessness, and grief. But the kind of strength and stability we really need in order to feel grounded and growing through the changes of our lives cannot be kindled through counting and burning calories. The project of a perfect body is much too small and self-absorbing to bring us the happiness and well being we are looking for.

Fortunately, there is an alternative way to understand and experience your physicality. Instead of thinking of and treating your body as a kind of personal possession, you might understand the physical part of yourself as belonging to a much wider web of relations, including your ancestors, family, and potential descendants, the larger human community, and the earth itself, with its infinite variety of bodies— animals, plants, insects, rocks, clouds, etc.—all yearning to experience life to the fullest. In this view, Nhat Hanh writes, “to keep your body healthy is to express gratitude to the whole cosmos, to all your ancestors, and also not to betray the future generations” (62). This perspective is not unlike the Christian understanding of the body as “a temple of God,” which needs to be treated with care and respect.

What if instead of starting the new year with a decision to “improve” your body through the latest diets and weight-loss regimes, you resolved to devote your attention to living in greater harmony with your body and with all the other bodies with whom you share the planet?

Adopting this alternative resolution, and the perspective embedded in it, helps us see and embody the inextricable connection between our personal well-being and the welfare of all beings. This new ethic would encourage us to eat in ways that nourish our own flesh while caring for and respecting the earth that sustains us. Instead of deciding what to eat based on caloric content or fat grams, for example, we can choose foods that are whole (i.e., unprocessed), organic, grown in a sustainable way, local, and fresh, and we can eat them mindfully to increase our enjoyment of them as well as our appreciation for those who grew, harvested, transported, and prepared them.

We can also show our appreciation for the bodies on which our own bodies depend by getting the exercise we need. This requires us to tune into our need for physical activity so that we know when we need more movement and when we’ve had enough. Neither too much exercise nor too little will give us the physical-mental-spiritual balance that keeps us healthy and enables us to flourish. When we exercise in ways that get our hearts beating and enjoy our bodies’ capacity for movement without concern for how many calories we’ve burned, we are simultaneously expressing gratitude to our ancestors while giving the gift of our health to future generations.

Ultimately, exchanging the personal pursuit of physical perfection for the larger aim of living harmoniously in your body amid the wider web of human and non-human life brings the kind of peace and well being that is truly satisfying. Each choice we make to nurture, appreciate, and respect our bodies and the bodies of others reverberates throughout the cosmos. Each time we choose to eat and exercise in ways that nurture our bodies’ real needs, we are expressing our gratitude and extending our healing to all beings. At the same time, we are moving out of the lonely prison of preoccupation with food and thinness and reconnecting with the rest of the world.

This seems like a wonderful perspective to take at the start of this new year.