Zen Diet

One day, a Sutra Master came and he questioned Zen Master Dae-Ju. “I understand that you have attained Satori. What is Zen?’’

Dae-Ju said, “Zen is very easy. It is not difficult at all. When I am hungry, I eat; when I am tired, I sleep.’’

The Sutra Master said, “This is doing the same as all people do. Attaining Satori and not attaining are then the same.’’

“No, no, people on the outside and on the inside are different.’’

I’ve been overweight my entire life. Alternatively, I’ve been the ideal weight all of my life, just three feet shorter than I should be (I’m 6’ 3″). 

Recently, however, it became time to deal with it.  I’ve dieted before, with the usual “rebound higher” issue afterwords, mostly because dieting was an “event”, not a fundamental shift in the way I dealt with things.

I was reviewing Steve and Connierae Andreas’ “Heart of the Mind” recently and was struck by their “Natural Eating Strategy”.  I recommend reading it yourself if you are interested in the details, but for me, there were two critical concepts here.

1. When you’re hungry, consider the things you might eat (what’s in the kitchen that sounds good, appealing looking items on the menu, etc.), the amount you’d eat, and consider not only how much you’d enjoy eating them, but how you’ll feel afterwords.  Will you be satiated, full, overfull? Will eating this item tend to make you tired, give you heartburn, etc.? After you’ve considered the possibilities, pick the one that’s most appealing based on this “now and afterwords” view.  If you’re not sure about an item, try it, and note the longer term affects for the next time.

2. People tend to over-generalize (see The Structure of Magic for the NLP concept of limitation of options by generalization as one of the core issues in psychology), and a common over-generalization is “Hungry - Feel Bad”, “Eat - Feel Good”…  The problem here is that if you just generalize hungry as “Feel Bad”, then “Eat” becomes a strategy for anything else that gets classed as “Feel Bad”—which can tend to explain emotional eating issues.

It was necessary for me to seriously reduce my food intake (not that I ever seemed to be eating that much) for a few days (3 - 4) in order to reliably become aware of what “being hungry” felt like (as opposed to anything else).  Once I had an adequate calibration of that, then I started on the strategy above.

The net result is that I’m still eating what I want to eat, when I want to eat, and as much as I want to eat.  I just don’t want to eat nearly as often or that much. 

This is a much better strategy for me than “diet and deprivation”—I can do this forever, and it’s motivated towards “more good feelings” instead of “less good feelings”.

It’s probably not for everyone, and I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist (and I do take a serious amount of nutritional supplements), nor do I play one on the ‘net, but it’s worked for me so far.  18 lbs in 14 days, and counting.