Craving Clarity: A Journey Into Mindful Eating

There is a listen online button at the bottom right of this email, and you can click that to listen to this article if you wish to. It is not recorded in my voice, and I am using a tool in Beehiiv to do so.

The COVID-19 pandemic was about two things—the coronavirus and food. When India went into lockdown in March 2020, the first few days were filled with dominant thoughts about food.

How do I procure food? How do I make the food last? When will my favourite food be back in stock? When can I go out to eat? Will it be safe to eat street food? What else can I make? Why does food preparation and cleaning take so much time?

I woke up in the morning dreading the question, “What do I eat now?” Thoughts about food pervaded every empty moment during the day—between meetings and meals—and they intruded on my meditation practice.

Every meditation was filled with tantalising images of foods I could not access.

Half of my meditation was spent thinking about where to procure groceries and vegetables as supermarkets quickly ran out of stock.

During this time, I also put on tons of weight—I was at my heaviest! Just before the pandemic, I consulted a nutritionist, who, with great difficulty, helped me lose 5 kg. A year into the pandemic, I had put back 10 kg.

I consulted another nutritionist and went on a diet, but my mind was filled with thoughts about food all day. I also had to make multiple decisions and preparations to eat a certain kind of diet so that I could lose weight and fix my plethora of food problems.

It was exhausting and tiring.

I went on Amazon and bought books on a variety of topics related to eating: what to or (not to)  (diet-related books), when to eat (fasting-related books), and how to eat (intuitive and mindful eating). By then, YouTube had also spawned many influencers in the food and health space and every single day, I received videos related to food and health from friends and family. The advice was decisive, contradictory and confusing (nearly impossible to implement).

Amidst this cascade and overload of information about food, I found the book, “Mindful Eating: A Guide To Rediscovering A Healthy and Joyful Relationship With Food” by Jan Chozen Bays.

Jan Chozen Bays is a paediatrician and a long-time Zen meditation teacher. She says in the preface, “I am writing this book to address an increasingly widespread and unnecessary form of suffering. Our struggles with food cause tremendous emotional distress, including guilt, shame and depression. ”

In this book, Jan explores how we can bring the practice of mindfulness to one of our most basic activities of existence: food. She says, “When we are able to fully appreciate the basic activities of eating and drinking, we discover an ancient secret, the secret of how to become content and at ease.”

When I picked this book up, I was so confused by the barrage of information and contradicting advice. I was becoming more obsessed with thoughts about food, and I longed not to think so much about food. Food had become confusing and scary and a source of guilty pleasure that did not last. I longed for comfort and ease with food, which this book promised.

When I read this book first in 2021, my main takeaways from the book were

• Hunger is a sensation. Do I know what it feels like in my body?

• I don’t have to be mindful throughout my meal. I can be mindful of the first morsel of food.

• Having complex, confusing thoughts and feelings about food is okay.

As I read this book again slowly, mindfully, and taking my time now, I have savoured it. It has revealed deeper insights that I had missed during my first read.

Here are some of my key insights, which we will explore over the next four editions of the deep dive series based on this book.

1. What am I afraid of? What scares me about going hungry?

2. There is not just one type of hunger but nine types. All of them need to be satisfied so that we feel content and at ease. But food is not the only way to satiate many of these hungers.

3. Walking the middle path as taught by the Buddha. Cultivating the skill of gently extricating myself from craving, clinging or aversion to food. No strict rules or extreme measures.

4. Rediscovering my inner nutritionist. I could build trust that my body will tell me what I need when I learn to listen to it non-judgementally, with kindness and awareness.

5. Approaching eating as a sacred activity. Eating provides the door to deeper involvement, increased intimacy and the gateway for awakening.

She writes about how we can transform eating as a source of suffering into a source of renewal, self-understanding, and delight.

In this book, Jan teaches various transformative mindfulness exercises that help us explore our relationship with food, bring awareness and acceptance, and walk the middle path towards improving our relationship with food.

Jan lists some elements of a healthy relationship with food; one hit home for me.

Food has indeed been a reliable source of pleasure and satisfaction, and most times, the only source. Jan tells us that we are not alone in having a complicated relationship with food. It is only human.

In the book, Jan uses many personal examples of her challenges with food, her cravings, her temptations, and her challenges. She uses humour to help the reader enter a shared reality about their struggles with food—that they are not alone and that there is a way out of that suffering. It is a warm, kind, and loving book that Jan has offered to everyone.

There is an audio companion to all the exercises listed in the book. The reader can download them via a link provided in the book to deepen their exploration of mindful eating. There is also a companion book, “Mindful Eating On the Go,”  a collection of meditative eating practices to use wherever you happen to be.

I’ve really enjoyed reading the book the second time around. I hope to use this book and the practices to develop a middle path towards food and eating. With this, we round up this edition of the newsletter. I hope you pick up “Mindful Eating” by Jan Chozen Bays and deepen your relationship with food.

We will dive deeper into this book over the subsequent four editions.

And we finish this edition with a tiny story.

💌 Siri