pile on, you get a clear indication that you’ve steered off course. What an accurate barometer. Our defects or neuroses are the signals that we are living out of sync with our true inner natures. They are our coping mechanisms to fend off fear and help us survive. Some folks never examine their true motives and needs, and instead relapse back into excesses and old behaviors. Instead of changing old responses, they retreat into familiar patterns of resentment, guilt, arrogance, and control. In the end, they binge. I wonder if they are the 98 percent of us who regain lost weight.
A spiritual life involves risk. To lose the fat risk, you must live at risk. This journey must be carried on with a forward momentum. You can ill afford to hang back and stay asleep. There is no escape into unconsciousness. Your soul knows. It will not allow dawdlers on the path. Staying locked in fear and inertia leads back to excessive eating. You must reach for your fate instead of a plate.
Sometimes people seek to avoid risk by running into analyzing. Looking back at when I opened the nation’s first eating disorders unit, I regret that I contributed to this problem. On stage and screen I was quite vociferous about the disease concept and the similarities between overeating and other addictions. I encouraged looking at the obsessive eating problem as a medical malady. I’d seen how that approach had benefited alcoholics, addicts, and their families. It helped them stop punishing themselves. I encouraged attendance at twelve-step meetings and offered an addiction model as a course of treatment.
However, some practitioners have taken this approach too far, stopping at diagnosis and not surrendering to the spiritual path of not knowing, of having fewer succinct answers. They strongly emphasize ideas about “food addiction” and are fearful of any sugar or white flour and insist on a concept of abstinence. They haven’t accepted that those who struggle with food obsession are given a problem that needs daily and continual renegotiation, and often the sufferers have to proceed blindly with no clear-cut answers. These practitioners fail to mention that many foods break down in the system to sugar anyway, and there are issues of timing and exercise involved with how the body processes these substances. They also fail to allow for any moderation or flexibility, not adapting food consumption to real-life situations. They are afraid of what Buddhists propose as the “middle path.”
Many people can survive the big traumas of life by battening down the hatches, gliding into their ninja stance, and getting ready for the onslaught. They’ve grown accustomed to stress and don’t feel that they deserve any peace. It’s the good life that presents a variety of challenges. Most don’t even know what peace looks like, or have a clue about how to be happy and content. What happens to that human fighter energy? How does one show up quietly to live an ordinary day as an average Jane?
After the initial introduction to a new way of life without excess, you need encouragement and support from someone slightly ahead of you on the path, to show you how to “keep on keepin’ on.” In addition to advice from experts, you need modeling and direction from those who’ve walked before you. They can help you to forgive yourself as well as others. That’s why I encouraged attendance at twelve-step groups. I know how much people need help further down the line after the initial zeal and firm resolve wanes.
My whole purpose in developing eating-disorder units along the lines of addiction treatment was to offer overeaters an opportunity to get off their own backs. I saw that helping people acknowledge and accept that they had already tried their best would make them available to receive help from others. They weren’t bad people trying to get good, but rather sick people trying to get well. I also saw the similar psychological makeup between overeaters and alcoholics/addicts, and realized that they needed similar types of group and family therapy and similar spiritual interventions. But all needed an initial surrender, and each individual must find his or her own way.
Maturity is the ability to live with unresolved problems. Living with fewer answers can help you to open up to the wonder of life. If you want to heal and grow, you must become a spiritual adult. Whether you had a battered childhood or not, whether you grew up in poverty or not, even if you were “disadvantaged” in every way, you can begin a brand-new life today. Surrender allows you to be master of your own fate.
Even if life is risky, you can walk more gently and positively, as if the outcome is already written. You do the best you can to direct your intentions toward the outcome you’d like, and then gratefully hold the results with a loose hand.
Eventually you might even be grateful for your struggles with food. Sir William Osler, an early teacher in American medicine, advised that the key to longevity was to develop a lifelong, chronic illness and focus on taking care of it. That is the purpose your food obsession serves. It keeps you awake, keeps you paying attention, and keeps you motivated for self-care—that is, if you keep paying attention. According to the National Weight Loss Registry, which accumulates data on those who’ve maintained large weight losses over time, two important behaviors show up across the board: people who weighed themselves regularly and kept some form of food journal were most successful. They remained conscious and awake.
Those of you who struggle in your relationship with food have an extremely persistent problem. You are prone to relapse and will probably revert back to compulsive eating. The only constant principle will be: get back on the horse. No matter what, each day, every day requires saddling up and getting back on that horse. Day after day after day, get back in the race. It is best to make sure you are riding in the direction the horse is going. If not, don’t complain about a saddle horn up your rump.
A great spiritual leader once said, “You be the change you want to see in the world.” It is when you take on acts of loving kindness, like saving a spider or doing your job without ego just because it needs to be done, that your actions change you. You get the feeling of peace and responsibility because that’s what you outwardly project. You become what you want to be. What three things could you do differently this week in order to demonstrate the way you would like to be treated? Try it and see if you don’t get back what you give out.
You may balk at my proposition that overeating represents a crisis in spiritual development. You may be like many of my patients who were avid churchgoers, organizers of many charities, dedicated to helping others, behaving in what they felt was a spiritual manner. They all looked the part, even the 600-pound father of eight who told me he could not adhere to my recommendations because he had to devote most of his free time to the church. He died in a pew.
He and many others were not able to balance self-care with overly zealous caring for others. They didn’t adhere to the airline instructions to grab for your own oxygen mask before attending to your babies. They didn’t honor the sacredness of their own bodies and psyches. They gave and gave and gave, then felt depleted, and filled themselves with excess. Is this you?
Or are you a person who takes on self-care as a spiritual quest? An essential part of you seeks your own lightness. You have probably spent years talking about seeking a lighter body weight. I’m suggesting a different lightness (spirituality), which, once found, will help your body contour to its proper size and heft and stay there. As my lecture career moves into its fourth decade, I meet up with people who’ve heard me speak many years before. Though they note that my body is still slim and healthy, they comment, “You were really hellfire and brimstone in the old days. Now, you seem so much softer.” Taking an honest look at yourself and seeking compassionate understanding can often help you to soften up as well.
Please use this book as your personal fabric softener. When I initially proposed the disease concept for overeaters, it gave them permission to accept themselves and soften a little. This offered a justification to take time out of a busy life to attend self-help meetings, or a license to ask the waitress to take back the tossed salad and bring one with the dressing on the side, or a way to say “no” to a demanding family member piling on more work, or even as permission to take a legitimate thirty-minute lunch break. Attending to their malady made them stronger people. When you accept that you have a disease, you take yourself seriously,
