Did I Mention That The Buddha Wasn't A Fat Guy?

This is the last post in a three-part series about the food choices I am making and how that all fits in with everything else in my life (big topic!). The first part is here and the second here. You might want to read those to make more sense of what I am writing about in this post.

I am not suffering, I hope that is evident. I remember before I gave up other of my addictions (alcohol and tobacco in particular), one of the primary reasons I gave myself for not wanting to stop was that I would no longer have any fun, that these things were what gave me pleasure and without them my life would be dull and featureless. I felt much the same way about my food indulgences.

I was just speaking with someone yesterday who was curious about what I ate and I began to list off the things which I no longer consume: alcohol, drugs, tobacco, caffeine, sugar and all sweeteners, almost any processed food, nearly all fried food, meat, gluten, and most oils other than olive oil. I eat dairy sparingly. What a  bore my eating life must be!

But it isn't. Just as with alcohol and tobacco, I was kidding myself that these foods gave me pleasure. I should also point out that I did not give these things up all at once. I have been a vegetarian for nearly 20 years. I quit smoking 25 years ago, drinking 16. I haven't indulged in any drugs for even longer. And every choice I made regarding these things was made from a desire to avoid suffering. I have no impulse to be a purist, I really don't. But each of these had in some way or another caused me pain or difficulty.

As mentioned in an earlier post, one of the magical moments in following the elimination part of this dietary plan is the discovery, when foods are added back, how much they have been causing difficulties. My sister-in-law, who is also following this plan, went through a particularly stressful event not long ago and decided to treat herself to some ice cream. A lot of ice cream. Though previously she would not have attributed the consequences to the sugar therein, she had given it up entirely prior to this and knew that the body aches and pains and other bodily struggles had to be because of it. It was for her a revelatory moment.

But here is the most important thing: I am enjoying eating more than I ever have. In the absence of sweeteners, fresh fruits and vegetables taste more flavorful than ever. Grain salads (gluten-free, of course) are delicious to me. A dish full of (sugar-free) yogurt is a treat. A slice of good cheese is a delight. I made an eggplant Parmesan the other day that was to die for. I don't miss chips or ice cream (well, not much, anyway), chai tea lattes, donuts, cakes, pies, or cookies. I don't miss the digestive issues, the body aches, the tiredness, the malaise, the hangovers of indulgence. I feel better than I have in years. And I am no longer a fat guy.

And isn't this the very nature of what the Buddha meant when he talked about the end of suffering? At one point he said (I am paraphrasing) that what we believe gives us pleasure is precisely what causes suffering and what we believe causes suffering is what leads to freedom, which is the ultimate pleasure. While we pursue the short-term satisfaction of desire, we remove from our lives all possibility of Nirvana, which is not a place but a state of being that can only be found through concerted effort. But this effort is not that of conforming to a certain ideal. Rather, it is an internal investigation to find what is true for each of us. What Dharma means, after all, is Truth. And the only way we can find this Truth is to look closely at what causes us to suffer and what causes those around us to suffer.

I know this all doesn't sound like much fun. I wish I could convey to you more clearly that it is, in fact, the ultimate joy. It is as if we are surrounded by beauty and looking down at the dirt wishing for beauty. All we need to do is look up. Look up.

The Buddha Still Wasn't A Fat Guy

I promised last time I wrote that I would return to the subject of the Precepts and how they apply to my (at this point successful) effort to lose weight and get to a healthier place in my relationship to food. If you have not done so yet, you might want to go back and read that previous post, because this one will make a whole lot more sense if you do.

The last of the Precepts the Buddha taught was that of avoiding intoxicants. We don't usually think of foods as intoxicants, that is, as things that create a literal state of intoxication. A few words about definitions, then:

• In the Buddhist sense, intoxication might not even be the right word. I can't read Pali, so I have no idea how the original word or words might be translated. But I interpret an intoxicant to be anything that diverts you from the ability to pursue your ultimate fulfillment (whatever that may be). This can also be something that does not affect you physically at all, such as intoxicating scents or music. And many foods—even healthy ones—can be used to mask our emotional states, which is another form of intoxication.
  
• As mentioned in the last post, the root word for intoxicant also means poison. In the broadest sense, then, an intoxicant could be anything that treats your body badly or causes you to abuse or not fully support it.
• Intoxication is not necessarily an event. Intoxication can occur over a long period of time and, as such, you may not even be aware of its effects until it stops.
• However, intoxication is a state, at least in the way I am thinking of it. The Precept says that we avoid intoxicants, but I think it is more accurate to say that we avoid intoxication. Though monks and nuns entirely eschew alcohol and all drugs, this is not necessarily the standard by which modern, Western lay practitioners (and their teachers) would judge intoxication. In other words, that occasional glass of wine is not generally seen as an intoxicant under those circumstances.

But, what does this have to do with food? Well, here's the thing. About that third point above: I think we have become entirely inured to the effects of certain food choices and have taken for granted that the harm they do is incidental to the pleasure we get from them. But this is actually far from being the case. Everything we put into our bodies has an effect, some of it desirable, but with many of them not. Especially in this world of highly processed, sugary foods, we are ingesting unimaginable amounts of stuff and much of it is doing us harm, whether subtle or more serious we can't always know.

Now, here's where we get into really touchy territory, and I want to proceed carefully. While talking about these issues, I have found that most people are very protective of their right to eat whatever they choose. Please hear me loud and clear: it is not now nor has it ever been my intent to judge or change anyone else's behavior around food. God knows, I have had to free myself from a huge number of intoxicants over the years, including alcohol, drugs, and nicotine, and I never once benefited from someone telling me that I was a bad person or was doing a bad thing. So, please don't think that what I am about to say is a judgment on what you choose to eat. It's all just information I have gleaned from my experience with this.

One of the primary tools of the Abascal Way and of any plan that aims to help you make wise choices about what you eat is the elimination diet, wherein you eliminate all those foods that might cause you to have a harmful reaction. The problem with the day-to-day ingestion of these foods is that the inflammation and other ill effects are often happening at such a low level they are not immediately noticeable. Or, they have been happening for so long that we simply consider them to be a normal part of our lives (joint and back pain being a prime example for those of us over 40). An elimination diet takes these out of our consumption for long enough for these effects to go away. You then add them back in one at a time to see which might cause you to react negatively. In this way, for example, my wife and I both discovered that we don't do all that well with gluten. We love our bread, but gluten was causing problems we never realized.

Another example (and here I move with trepidation) is sugar. I know, I know, every single person to whom I have ever mentioned this food plan has gone along with me right up until I say, "Oh, and by the way, sugar is simply gone forever. No more sugar", at which point they want nothing more to do with me. But, as much as I never wanted to admit it to myself, after eliminating it and then trying a little bit again, I am entirely convinced that sugar is an intoxicant. Our bodies are not designed to process sugar in such a refined form, and our bodily reactions are both predictable and negative. It creates inflammation and kicks you into a biochemical state from which your body has difficulty recovering. It also creates a craving for more of the same, so if you are not meticulous (and more highly disciplined than I am) you will continue consuming it, which will exacerbate the ill effects and set up a cycle of ever-increasing harm.

These effects are no joke. Sugar is a major player in the epidemics of both obesity and diabetes around the world, and these two conditions also predispose one to heart disease and stroke, not to mention many other inflammatory-induced harmful states such as arthritis and other body pain. All that from a doughnut? Sadly, yes. At least, that's how I read the evidence that is accumulating around the consumption of sugar. Don't believe me? Eliminate sugar (by which I mean ALL sweeteners of any sort—yep, no stevia, either. Nope, no honey, sorry) for three weeks and then eat some again. To make this a fair trial, you should eat a substantial amount of it when you add it back or else the effects might be too subtle to notice and you will assume they are not present. Believe me, you will feel the pain.

And the damn stuff is everywhere, have you noticed? Have you tried to buy a salad dressing without sugar lately? Good luck. It's even in most commercially produced soups, though God knows why, and nearly all microwaveable foods.

But all is not lost! When I write again, let me tell you about the joys we have found in consuming foods that do not cause all of these reactions. Because, even though I have a long list of foods (and other substances) I am no longer consuming, I enjoy eating more than ever. It turns out we don't even know what we're missing when we turn to intoxicants to feed us both physically and emotionally.

Abascal Dharma

[A note: this is a continuation of last week's post and parts of it, in particular my references to the Abascal Diet Plan, might not make as much sense if you haven't read that one.]

For one who wishes to take up in earnest regular meditative practice, it will be very desirable that he should be moderate in eating.

--The Buddha

For eight years, I worked as a burn ICU nurse. I encountered hundreds of badly burned patients in that time. What struck me as most remarkable is that a certain proportion of them, say a tenth or so, told me their lives were better, had more meaning since they were burned.

A study some years ago looked at people who had won the lottery and attempted to determine if they were happier since having become millionaires. What the researchers discovered is that if the winner was happy before getting all that money, they continued to be happy; if they were miserable before, the money did nothing to change that.

I have worked with some paraplegics and quadriplegics and heard stories of many others (and you probably have, too), who said that their lives had more meaning and purpose after the accidents that paralyzed them than they did before and that they were, for the most part, happier than when fully able-bodied.

For 15 years I have worked as a nurse in an HIV clinic. There is a subculture of deep emotional and material support for those who are positive that many never felt before they contracted the disease. We surround them with help that they could not have gotten prior to having the disease and their community often gives them a level of understanding that was absent before.

It is a fact that nearly all persons who survive a suicide attempt report regretting the choice and having more pleasure in life and less of an impulse to further suicidal behavior afterward.

Of course, I am not saying that one ought to seek out being badly burned, poor, paralyzed, a suicide survivor, or HIV positive in order to find meaning in life. Rather, I raise these examples to point out a very basic reality at the core of what the Buddha taught: we do not know what is good for us. In fact, the Buddha in many places argued that precisely what we believe will bring us happiness is what is most likely to cause suffering. We are certain where happiness lies and we are often absolutely, completely, utterly wrong.

Since food is what this post is about, let's take an example from that realm: sugar. We think sugar makes us happy. It tastes nice, it touches a primitive pleasure circuit in our minds, it feel luxurious. But what we choose to ignore is that it also causes suffering of both an immediate and long-term nature. Almost immediately our insulin goes wild trying to accommodate the overload of sucrose and makes us feel worse. A craving for more sugar kicks in and this can in turn cause a cycle of binging that makes us feel terrible. Long-term, as we all know, it can cause many ills, including dental caries and weight gain out of proportion to the calories consumed as sugar. It is implicated in the development of Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, stroke, and heart disease.

Yet, knowing all this, we continue to consume an enormous amount of it. I am not speaking out here against any and all consumption of sugar: I am a fan myself and intend to have it every now and then once I am off the strict part of this diet plan. But I am trying to make the point that we are more or less clueless when it comes to what will make us happy, and sugar is a pretty good illustration of that.

I called this post Abascal Dharma, not because Kathy Abascal had this in mind when she came up with the plan, but because it fits so neatly into the idea behind the Dharmic principle of Renunciation. The Buddha did not believe in self-punishment or deprivation. In fact, he was a proponent (and an example) of the Middle Way between self-indulgence and asceticism.  But he also recognized the basic fact I have been pointing to here, that our intuitive sense of what will make us happy, what will bring joy to ourselves and to others, is misguided. We could speculate endlessly about why this is, why our most basic impulses are so off course. The theory most tossed about (and which has the greatest appeal to me) is that these predispositions are hard-wired into our primitive brains as a mode of survival that no longer serves us well. For instance, our strong affinity for sugar might be a residual impulse from a time when sweetness in food made it highly desirable for survival because it supplied sorely needed calories. Much as the fight or flight instinct in us was useful when we were a young species but now causes untold suffering, our desire for sweetness often leads to a sourness our hunting and gathering forebears could never have imagined.

There are many teachings of the Buddha, but the one with which he began, and which constitutes the core of his philosophy is that of the Four Noble Truths, which, stated simply, is that there is suffering and there is an end of suffering. He went on to say that the source of all suffering is craving, which is the desire to have that which we do not, or to not have that which we would rather not. This is where Renunciation comes in. Renunciation is in a very real way an experiment. Something deep down in us believes that if we do without something, a certain food, tobacco, sex, a shopping trip, alcohol, that we will feel worse. It seems intuitively true: something that makes me feel good in the short term must be good for me overall. But we know this isn't always true. What the principle of Renunciation asks us to do is to be scientific about it, to do without something and see if our joy increases or decreases. The Buddha bet his spiritual life that we would discover, as he had, that it would increase.

Abascal Dharma is understanding that during this three week elimination phase of the diet, when I asked myself not to consume sugar, wheat, peanuts, dairy, or dried corn, as much as it at first felt a bit like deprivation, is actually the source of a sense of freedom. Though I have made many good food choices over the years, I feel as if I am coming (slowly, gradually) to a true wisdom about those choices and how they influence my life. And how they can lead to the end of suffering.

Abascal

Those of you with long memories may recall that the original intent of this blog was to explore my relationship to food and what it meant to be a person who embraces the Dharma and is also overweight. I hasten to add that this was not a personal judgment, but an exploration. The question was not (and is not) whether or not it was somehow wrong to be overweight and a practitioner of the Dharma, but what the connection is between the two.

I suppose the first question really must be whether or not is in unskillful to be heavy. Does that seem like an odd question? To put it in context, one might ask a similar question: is it unskillful to be angry? At first blush, one might say that it is clearly unskillful to be angry, since it disquiets us so badly and often does damage to ourselves and others and the relationships between us. But what underlies the anger? Why is it there? What does it feel like in our bodies? What is the real meaning of the anger? In other words, what precisely about anger makes it an unskillful emotion in this particular instance?

What I was trying to do, way back then, was explore similar questions in my relationship to food. So, rather than asking whether or not it is unskillful to be a fat guy (it clearly is not), what I was asking is, does the fact of being overweight speak to a larger reality? Am I dodging something that I would rather not face and using food to do it? That, of course, would be unskillful, because it is resistance that leads to suffering and this kind of suffering leads us away from the path to ultimate freedom.

It's a complicated thing. As I have written many times here, food is packed with emotion and memory and history and comfort. Food is the first comforter, straight out of the womb, and it doesn't really change much for the rest of our lives, as far as I can tell. Though we begin with breast milk, we soon branch out to creamed peas and French fries, a trajectory that has the potential to end in the booze aisle. We continue to seek comfort and if we can't find it where we are, we will go on seeking it until we do. And because most if not all of these things cannot provide the comfort we crave, we are setting ourselves up for failure and further suffering.

Which all comes back to the question of Renunciation. This is also tricky to talk about because it can feel very Catholic, as if we are giving things up in order to be good (an appropriate thought for this time of year). But that is not what the Buddha was talking about. When we renounce things in this context, we are letting them go so they don't stand in the way of our happiness. Or, put another way, the very things we think will give us comfort actually have precisely the opposite effect. By distracting us from squarely facing what stands in our way, they exacerbate our suffering, somewhat like pretending a rapidly spreading cancer is just a few aches and pain, which leads inevitably to yet greater suffering.

And so, the Abascal Plan. Kathy started doing this a few weeks ago and had such good results that I decided to give it a try. Here's the basic deal: first of all, all crap goes, which really just means sugar, chemicals and overly-processed foods. Then, for the first three weeks, the elimination phase, you also delete dairy, wheat, dried corn, and peanuts. After the three weeks you add these back one by one to determine if you have a problem with any of them. If you do, they should stay out of your diet forever. And throughout (which is to say, for the rest of your life) you eat proportionally, two thirds fruit and vegetables to one third protein and/or grain.

The basic idea behind the Abascal Plan is that inflammation causes many of the health issues we experience and that quieting this inflammation by eating the right foods for our bodies will help us have more energy, less pain, and will lead to natural weight loss. Though I remain skeptical, I am hopeful.

So, I have begun (I am on my sixth day of the elimination phase). This post has already gone on long enough, so I will close here. But next time I will go into more detail about how this relates to my relationship to the Dharma, because that connection is very cogent for me, and I hope to make it so for you.

Happiness is...

I struggle sometimes with an ill-defined sadness. Mostly I am a fairly cheerful guy, not a jump up and down type, but generally optimistic and hopeful. Then there are these other times.

I have written about this here before, so feel free to skip this entry if you have heard this already. I am writing mostly for my own benefit anyway, though I suspect most or all of you know exactly what I'm talking about.

It can begin with a book, as it seems to have this time. It can begin with a slight, an offhand remark from someone, an unskillful remark of my own. It can begin anywhere. It can be exacerbated by an unintentional cruelty (I know they didn't mean to, but they hurt me when they did that), like this time. A movie can set me off. A poem. A death. A birth. Someone's success (which sometimes makes me feel like a failure).

And here's something strange: for years it has seemed clear to me that I must channel the sadness and anxiety of others, though I only feel it when it is particularly strong. And the holidays are terrible times for many people, even those who love it, times of anxiety and fear and trepidation. We don't talk about that much, but there is an undercurrent of real human suffering under all that holly and mistletoe. Ho, ho, fucking ho.

Not that I am a Grinch or a Scrooge. I love the tree and the presents, the wreath and the lights (mine are always up the day after Thanksgiving, rain or shine, and god, did it pour this year). I love the music and the visits and the cookies and cakes and pies and candy (until it gets to be just too much, then, ick). I love the true, deep, human feeling this time of year. Oh, shut up, you cynic. I know that this time of year is a commercial bloodletting. But it's more than that. There really is an inexplicable good will we practice (well, most of us) that is kinda hard to explain.

Yet the anxiety is there, too, if only the anticipation of Santa Claus or what might be under the tree. I remember that feeling of disappointment as a child, not that I didn't get what I wanted (I mostly did), but when it was all over, all of that counting on things, my belief in magic, in the end this only yielded stuff. Of course, I could never have expressed it in so many words back then, but the magic of Christmas always devolved to this pile of stuff that was not very magical at all. Welcome, treasured, wonderful. But no longer magic. And I wonder if that is not some of what the end of the season brings. And that I am feeling it on behalf of others.

And it's the first day of a new year. (As if the caterpillar or the crow knows the difference. And if it weren't for our ritualistic defining of time and practice of rituals, we wouldn't know it, either). It's the first day of a new year and it brings with it both new hope and a sense of futility. Because nothing really changes much.

I thought about writing down my anxieties and sadnesses today. I opened a file in my electronic notepad titled "Anxieties", just to see what was there. The list must have been made a year or so ago, but I didn't need to change much to update it for today. A tweak here and there. The same issues, the same problems, the same worries and concerns. Far from being depressing, though, it felt freeing. "Oh, yes", I thought, "having been happy most of the year and beginning from this place, my happiness must have mostly to do with how I deal with things, how I am in relationship to them. Much more so than the circumstances, which have, quite evidently, not changed much at all."

And so I set forth on another year.  I will turn 59 at some point in this one, will celebrate 35 years of marriage, and will have spent 25 years at my current employer. Someone I love very dearly (who shall remain nameless) will turn 60. I will carry on. I will thrive. I will open my heart. I will weep a bit (because it's sad around here, in case you hadn't noticed). I will crave and understand it as craving. I will hate and understand it as such. I will blame and rage and resent. I will do my level best not to create any more suffering in the world. And I will laugh. I will love. I will be. 

Sugar

I have mentioned in this blog before the concept of renunciation, which is the Buddhist cosmology has a special meaning. Unlike the temporary giving up exemplified in Lent for certain Christians, renunciation in the Dharma is neither an abasement nor a sacrifice. Rather, it is a way of bringing to the forefront the ways in which we attempt to escape from the present moment into the trap of diversion. This form of renunciation can be permanent, such as my renunciation of meat and alcohol, or may be temporary, as a way of bringing these ways of thinking into sharper relief. A good example of this is a renunciation once taken on by the teacher Sylvia Boorstein in which she gave up purchasing fresh cut flowers for a full year. She truly loved buying these flowers, but had recognized the attachment she had to this practice and wished to come to a deeper understanding of this urge.

Over the years I have done some of what I call special renunciations, too. I once gave up ice cream for a year. Other of my renunciations have been more personal and private, but most have revolved around food. Recently I realized how much sugar has become a part of my life and have been contemplating a year-long renunciation of it.

First of all, it is important to realize that there are no rules to such a renunciation beyond those which are self-imposed. The Buddha did not say anything about the details of such a practice. For instance, though I say I intend to renounce sugar for a year, I understand that this can only be done within certain parameters, because naturally-occurring sugars exist in all fruits, vegetables, grains, and other food. It would be silly and possibly fatal to do away entirely with carbohydrates in my diet. What I use as my guide in such situations is a return to the reason for my renunciation. I must ask the question: to what, exactly, am I addicted?

Because addiction is what I'm really talking about here. This term can be overused, I know, but a definition of I like is this: an addiction is anything used as a way of avoiding the truth of one's existence. When thought of this way, one can see that such things as television, the internet, sex, shopping, focusing on the problems of others, exercise, gossip can all be addictive. I have certainly used sugar this way. This blog began as a quest for the meaning behind the reality of my inability to keep my weight within a range that is normal for a man of my age and size, and sugar has been a huge part of that struggle. One certain sign that this is an addiction for me is that the consumption of any processed sugar inevitably leads to a craving for more.

On April 13, 2011, Gary Taubes wrote a provocative article in the New York Times Magazine identifying sugar as a toxic substance. He paraphrased the pediatrician and specialist on pediatric hormone disorders Robert Lustig as saying that our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them." He refers to sugar as literally poisonous. Both Lustig and Taubes define "sugar" in this context as any source of sucrose (brown or white sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup. They argue that the problem isn't merely that these substances are empty calories, but that the way our body processes them is entirely different from the way we process other sugars, and that the difference is inherently toxic.One of the ways in which this toxic reaction may happen is that the liver cannot easily process the fructose in these compounds at the rate at which they enter the blood stream. This inability in turn induces insulin resistance, which is a problem in both diabetes and obesity, both of which have seen a meteoric rise over the last two decades. Sugar may also be implicated in some cancers and heart disease. A pretty damning indictment.

My own addiction to sugar does not take the predictable form of sodas or pastries or such things. I am more likely to get my sugar fix from ice cream or candy, from cookies, candied ginger or cocoa, lattes and mochas. No better for me than those others, certainly, but a bit more subtle. Which is part of the problem.

Another issue is the degree of comfort I get from these foods. If I am suffering from insomnia, there is nothing that works better for me than to have a big cup of cocoa. Never mind that there is caffeine in chocolate and the sugar is more likely to rev me up than calm me. Mine is clearly a psychologic rather than a physiologic response. The same applies to ice cream. It is for me the ultimate comfort food, as can be deduced from the fact that I felt the need to do a year's renunciation of it.

When I first contemplated doing a year-long sugar renunciation I thought it would be fairly simple. Cut out the candy and the cookies entirely and voila! it's done. Not so fast, bucko. The more I looked, the more I realized how much added sugar there is in so much of what I enjoy. Which brings up another question: at what point is the risk of possible toxic effects worth the pleasure it gives me? Clearly, if one is consuming a six pack of soda a day, the risks are far too high. But a dish of ice cream once a week? What could be the harm there?

(Then I went to the doctor this week and had my blood drawn. Mostly things are fine, but my HDL cholesterol is low and the first thing I thought to myself was, "Do I have to be freaking perfect just to be healthy? *Sigh*)

The answer for me, and for many such contemplations when the Dharma is applied to them, is what I referred to earlier: to what spiritual use am I putting these foods? Am I trying to (ahem) sugar-coat my experiences as a way of not having to actually live them? For me, the answer is clearly, yes, quite often that is the case.

I'm afraid it will take me a while to figure out exactly how to proceed with this renunciation plan. I will share my process with you as I go. This won't be easy but, as has been observed by those wiser than I, very few things worth doing are.