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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 is wrong. It is a searchlight signaling for rescue boats. When pounds 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, and you ask for the same consideration from others.

Walking the planet more softly and developing openness and lightness and a more inquiring mind is a fundamental, but long-neglected, part of treating your food obsession. On this walk, you will meet and greet a lost essential self. This meeting is absolutely necessary to achieve permanent weight loss. Whether you need professional mentors, friendly support, or travels to distant lands, stay awake and pay attention.

How will you know when you meet your Buddha on the road? What does your spiritual self look like? What does “spiritual” mean? Could a gutsy, tough, and headstrong New Yorker be spiritual? Or does being spiritual mean giving up to become a dishrag? Can you just wave a white flag and be zapped thin? How would a person know if he or she actually surrendered?

You’ll know you’ve surrendered when you notice the following:

Symptoms of a Spiritual Awakening

1. Acting spontaneously without past fears.

2. Loss of interest in judging people.

3. A tendency to let things happen, giving up control.

4. Praying toward heaven while rowing toward shore.

5. Loss of interest in conflict.

6. Appreciating the body’s function rather than its form.

7. Loss of the ability to worry.

8. Frequent reminders that “if you spot it, you got it.”

9. Understanding that “they do it not to you, but for them.”

10. Trusting of your instincts, others, and nature.

11. Attitude of gratitude and abundance.

12. Personal acceptance, warts and all.

•••

“If you are willing

to serenely bear the trial

of being displeasing to yourself,

then you will be for all

a pleasant place of shelter.”

St. Thérèse of Lisi eux