Intro Obesity as a Spiritual Crisis
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity affects over 33 percent of Americans—that’s one-third of adults. Medical costs associated with obesity are estimated at $147 billion, and obese adults are at a higher risk for coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, liver and gallbladder disease, and respiratory problems. In addition, obese adolescents are more likely to have prediabetes, a condition in which blood glucose levels indicate a high risk for development of diabetes. Americans are some of the fattest people on earth, gorging at elegant tables, all-you-can-eat buffets, and fast-food drive-thrus, or competing in hot dog–eating contests. We are slowly and complacently adapting to “more is not enough” as we seek excess food to cope with our lives, which speed along in overdrive. Our quest to fill that bottomless plate not only affects our health, but also takes a toll on the animals and plants with which we share our Mother Earth. Sadly, as a result, some of us vomit to escape the consequences, and some, like I did, simply overeat and accumulate excess weight.
Despite our extensive knowledge about calorie counts, food combining, pulse rates, and body fat indexes, we keep putting on more and more weight. Great and wonderful tomes have already been written that explain how cultural expectations of unnatural thinness have created this national epidemic. It may be that advertisers have contributed to the anorexia-bulimia-obesity triad, but there is more to it than the model culture, fitness crazes, heart disease, diabetes, or other food-related maladies. We are facing a spiritual crisis and are eating to quell the pain while avoiding our fears. Advertising ploys work because they address America’s abundance conundrum: we have so much, and we still long for more, and yet we fear living with the consequences that come from wanting and getting more.
Fat is fear? Do you even know you are afraid? President Franklin Roosevelt addressed a fearful nation with “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Once the nation acknowledged that feeling, it could then face those fears and show up with courage, resolve, and pride.
Some of us thought the women’s movement of the 1970s would change things, but instead women showed up acting more like men. Despite all the feminist gains, we still live in a male-oriented culture that seeks to avoid feeling fear at all costs. Striving for and competing against are now our mantras. On national television shows, we pit obese sufferers against each other. Thin viewers laugh at the contestants while the obese cry and feel further hopelessness. We tragically compete at weight loss. America’s national epidemic is evidenced in the bulbous softness of our bodies, while we fear letting too much softness and kindness into our hearts. Fear, if unacknowledged, has to go somewhere. For many of us, it’s piled onto our plates and eventually lands on our hips, thighs, and stomachs or waits in ambush inside our arteries.
Could it be that our national obesity crisis is based on this cultural denial? Denial stands for Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying. Rarely do we sit down to just say out loud, “I’m afraid.” Acknowledging the fear doesn’t mean succumbing to it. It just means you embrace who you are and what is going on in your life. The word fear is sometimes read as an acronym: False Evidence Appearing Real. A raunchier way to describe fear is F_ck Everything And Run. As you begin your personal journey as witnessed in this book, fear will come to mean Face Everything About Resistance.
A Tibetan monk, who was an honored guest at a Manhattan literati party, was approached by a full-of-herself popular novelist. She asked, “So what is Buddhism, anyway?”
He smiled. “Do you want the short version or the long one?”
She replied, “The short version. It’s a party, after all.”
“Well, the short version is ‘Pay attention.’”
Baffled by not enough information, she prodded, “Well, the long version, then.”
He responded, “The long version is ‘Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention.’”
When you practice paying attention, you will find that there is a lot more going on than you ever noticed before. When excess eating is curtailed, your senses will be heightened, and you will feel your emotions in a much deeper and more vibrant way. You will enter the spiritual dimension with a sense of awe.
Coincidences may begin to occur as you start to realize that your actions will often produce instantaneous and direct consequences. You will notice your own part in creating problems in your life, and you may find yourself watching your new, gentler behaviors with amusement. As you do things in a whole new way, your love affair with food and excess will change. Sometimes your attraction to food will be a mere shrug, as if to say, “No big deal.”
I find it a great cosmic joke that most of us are impatient and intolerant individuals who have been given a body that won’t lose weight on our timetable. Instead, it produces unexpected cravings, nonscheduled undulations, gaseous emissions, and clamorous noises beyond our will. Over time, I found that I would have to learn to trust that body as my conduit to spirit. I was advised early on, since I wasn’t a believer and rebelled against any mention of God, to try the Quakers’ concept: “God is the still, small voice within.” This body of mine that seems to have a mind of its own will be my goddess, my transmitter, my dilemma, my teacher, and my karma.
Karma is what my addict patients would refer to as “What goes around comes around” and what my Bible-thumping friends would quote as “You reap what you sow.” My Jewish relatives would advise that you reap your rewards here on earth in this lifetime. My existentialist professors would caution that there are always consequences, and that “not to decide is to decide.” For those of us who love to eat, karma is best explained as “There is no free lunch.”
It seems that many of us avoid surrender and avoid accepting how gifted and special we really are. Perhaps you might be afraid to truly live the big life intended for you. Perhaps you might be hiding under a rock, refusing to let your little light shine. As sentient beings, we are chosen to express a deep spiritual longing, what Carl Jung called a “cosmic homesickness.” Buddhists explain that we seek “the Eternal.” We know there is more going on than our minds can dream up. For all the Freudian, or scientific, or mechanistic thinking posited during the twentieth century, today we are suffering large-scale addiction and out-of-control obesity—our modern plague.
Many may think becoming spiritual will make them look good. They hope to achieve an angelic pose, positioning themselves above the fray. Actually, becoming spiritual may make you look worse for a while. You will truly open up an avenue to your own dark side, and you may want to hide. St. John of the Cross called such periods the “Dark Night of the Soul.” Forgiving yourself may become the ultimate spiritual awakening, causing transcendence into what some twelve-steppers call “the fourth dimension.”
This transcendence occurs slowly as you take an honest look at yourself. It takes time and effort and initially seems like excessive self-obsession. One addict patient told me, “My head is permanently tuned to Radio K-F-_-C-K, all me, all the time.” Taking that honest look means acknowledging all your assets, as well as your liabilities, rendering you a little more humble. You might uncover motives and behaviors you find embarrassing. That embarrassment helps you become teachable. You’ll learn to love your neuroses, and your quirks and foibles, as signposts indicating your next spiritual breakthrough. Until you can learn to laugh at yourself, you haven’t really surrendered to the spiritual path. Eventually, self-obsession will lead to an honest appraisal of your motives and values and you’ll begin thinking more of others. You might even find them interesting.
At some point, you might even feel blessed and thankful to have a food obsession. You’ll see that your compulsive eating is a signal that something
