Unlock Your Inner Nutritionist

And Break Your Habitual Eating Patterns (4/5)

Author

Shirisha Nagendran
September 27, 2024

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.

When I was young, my mom would urge me to eat keerai (greens). In India, we get a wide variety of greens all through the year, and they form an integral part of our meals. They are rich in micronutrients, and every week, there are at least three varieties of greens in our meals.

But I hated the limp, blanched keerai that did not give out a burst of flavour when eaten. I would refuse to eat it, and my mom would insist that it was good for the body, that it provided iron and calcium, and that I must eat it without being fussy.

I’d steadfastly refuse by saying, “Even if it is good for my body if I eat it without liking it, it is poison to my body.”

My mom would toss her head and eventually gave up on asking me to eat my greens.

That particular statement I had made, out of whatever wisdom arose within me at that moment, stuck with me. Throughout my life, I have not forced my body to eat something I had a visceral dislike for, even if it was the healthiest thing on the planet.

In the book Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food, Jan Chozen Bays, a Zen Teacher and Pediatrician, discusses a remarkable experiment that she says can never be reproduced.

“In the early 1900s, a paediatrician in Illinois studied fifteen infants in an orphanage who were newly weaned and had not eaten solid foods. As she noted, they “could not have been influenced by the ideas of older persons and so would be without preconceived prejudices and biases” regarding the foods they were given. Only whole, simple foods were used, unseasoned even by salt, and not in combinations such as soups, bread or even cereal with milk.

Chapter 7, “Mindful Eating with Children,” in the Mindful Eating book, includes a list of 37 different kinds of whole and simple foods that were given to the children.

“The children she studied ate only what they wished. All of them thrived, Davis wrote:

The infants’ appetites were uniformly good. They often greeted the arrival of the trays by jumping up and down in their beds, showed impatience while their bibs were being put on, and once placed at the table, having looked the tray over, devoted themselves steadily to eating for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then, their first hunger satisfied, they ate intermittently for another five or ten minutes.

They all ate as if guided by an internal nutritionist. They ate a proper balance of nutrients and the proper amount of calories. Some of the children arrived undernourished, and five of them had rickets due to vitamin D deficiency. All five were cured through their self-selected diet. Only one had such severe rickets that he was offered cod liver oil (rich in vitamin D) in a small glass on his tray, which he drank irregularly until his rickets were healed, and then he stopped.”

Jan describes the experiment and its findings in a few more paragraphs and rounds off by telling us how we can rediscover and be guided by our inner nutritionist.

“We could translate this into the language of mindful eating for adults. When we eat mostly nutritious, unprocessed food, when the anxious mind and especially the inner critic do not interfere, when we allow twenty to twenty-five minutes to eat, when we open to our senses (the hungers of eye, touch, ear, nose, and mouth), and when we re-learn the feelings of fullness and satisfaction (stomach, cellular and heart hungers), we enjoy eating, eat well and become healthy.”

The above paragraph encapsulates the book on how to approach mindful eating. As I was writing the deep dive series, the concept of nine hungers stayed with me. Last night, I was in bed and couldn’t sleep, and I thought at 10:45 pm, “Oh, I am hungry”.

I am on an intermittent fasting schedule, and some nights, I get some serious hunger pangs. They are super hard to resist, and I can normally resist them only when I have ample mental energy. Last night was not one of those days.

I checked in with all nine hungers and their intensity on a scale of 0 to 10, and this is what I discovered.

  • Eye Hunger - 0

  • Ear Hunger - 0

  • Mouth Hunger - 0

  • Nose Hunger - 0

  • Touch Hunger - 7

  • Stomach Hunger - 6

  • Heart Hunger - 9

  • Mind Hunger - 4

  • Cellular Hunger - I had no idea how to observe this hunger

As I checked in, it became apparent that my touch and heart hunger were very high, and my stomach hunger was at a 6. I knew that stomach hunger was the easiest to satiate, so I started mentally scanning the food that was available for me to eat.

But I just paused, thinking of the last meal I had eaten. 

It was three hours ago. There is no way my body is asking for nutrients when it has probably not even digested the food I took in for dinner. I also realised that my dinner was eaten in an utterly mindless fashion. I was on a phone call with a friend, and I swallowed down my three rotis and brinjal curry in less than 10 minutes and hadn’t even paused to relish the taste.

I acknowledged my heart and touch hunger and decided that eating wouldn’t solve any of these hungers, which were higher on the scale than stomach hunger. I just rolled over, went off to sleep without willpower, and avoided the late-night snack.

It was a small victory but a break in pattern nonetheless.

In Chapter 3, Jan talks about exploring our habits and patterns with food.

“How can we break old habit patterns? The answer is deceptively simple but not so easy to carry out. We break old habits by being aware of them and by not moving.

‘Being aware and not moving’ means not speaking, not doing anything with the body. Moving either the mouth or body is what Buddhists call Karma.

When we stop an automatic behavior, when we create a gap between a thought and the action or speech that usually follows it, we are wedging open the door to the prison made of thousands of conditioned habit patterns. Eventually, after years of practice, the door will stand wide open. When the old habit patterns surface, we will have a choice.”

I hopefully put a wedge between my thoughts and actions yesterday by pausing, checking in with my body, reflecting, and doing something different.

This has given me a tiny ray of hope that I can work with my cravings and not give in to them every single time. When I do indulge in them, I can do so mindfully and savour whatever food I have chosen to eat without judgment of my choices or the food itself.

With this, I will round up this edition of our newsletter, in which we continue deep-diving into Jan Chozen Bays’s book Mindful Eating. In the next edition, we will explore how eating can be a sacred activity and a gateway to enlightenment and liberation from suffering.

Tell me what has stood out for you if you read the book.

And we finish this edition with a tiny story.

Every minute Zen

Zen students are with their masters for at least ten years before they presume to teach or take the role of a master. Nan-in was visited by Tenno, who, having passed his apprenticeship, was expected to be a teacher. The day happened to be rainy, so Tenno wore wooden clogs and carried an umbrella. After greeting him, Nan-in remarked, “I suppose you left your wooden clogs in the vestibule. I want to know if your umbrella is on the right or the left side of your clogs.”

Tenno was confused and did not have an instant answer. He realised that he was unable to carry his Zen every minute. He became a Nan-in pupil and studied for six more years to accomplish his every-minute Zen.

P.S. I have now willingly embraced the superfood that keerai is. There are at least three meals in a week, where I add the keerais in season in my dal, sabzi and chutneys

💌 Siri