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.

The Buddha Wasn't A Fat Guy

This blog began as a meditation on being overweight and what it means (if anything) in relation to my belief in the Dharma, which is the collected teachings of the Buddha and his followers.

And then, last week, I reached my goal weight. My path to that point both was and was not the one I anticipated, but I have, somehow, arrived there. Even I am a bit surprised by this, especially that in the end it seemed to happen almost without my accord, as a desirable side effect to a completely different effort regarding food.

Let me explain: the proximal reason I have been able to lose the weight I have been seeking for years to lose is The Abascal Way (which I wrote about here and also here). Rather than a dietary plan, this really is a philosophical rethinking of one's relationship to food. This accords well with what I have been writing about here for years. But Kathy Abascal has coalesced a way of regarding our issues around food into a practical, down-to-earth guide.

But here's the thing: it is one thing to know that one ought to eat a certain way in order to feel better and quite another to pull it off. I hasten to say that this is not a way of bragging that I have succeeded where others have failed or that I am stronger or more disciplined than anyone else (you only have to read any randomly chosen half dozen of my entries here to see that I clearly am not). So, what made the difference and continues to make the difference for me?

Upfront, I want to say that a primary driver is the fact that I simply feel much better: fewer aches and pains. Abascal's primary focus is not weight or even food, per se—rather, her emphasis is on bringing the inflammation in our bodies under control, which leads to more comfort (less joint pain and the internal results of inflammation). Because part of this is regulating your body's insulin and other hormonal cycles more effectively, weight loss is a (nearly) inevitable consequence.

But why else have I been able to resist the urge to stray from this dietary plan when so many plans and hopes and schemes before have failed me? I am convinced that a large part of my willingness to stick to it stems from my study of the Dharma and from other spiritual disciplines that, in the end, are only tangentially about food or body weight. I find that one of the most potent forms of spiritual guidance I have are the Five Precepts (which I wrote about more extensively here). For the purposes of this post, let me just say that each of the Precepts—to avoid killing, stealing, sexual harm, harmful speech, and intoxication—is a training in the morality of purpose that points not just to being a Good Person, a status to which most of us aspire, but which can infiltrate our lives in ways that are unexpected and unexpectedly rich. This occurs because each opens us up to a broader understanding of our place in the world and our ability to influence that world for the better. In particular, the Precepts each correspond to a quality we can actively cultivate—in order, those of compassion, generosity, responsibility, kindness, and clarity. These are not simple things, and an aspiration is entirely inadequate to their cultivation. Rather, what is required is a long and sustained devotion coupled with a willingness to repeatedly fail and begin again.

In particular, I find the Precept to avoid intoxicants a cogent one. To begin with, I am an alcoholic, so this has a deeper meaning than it may for others. (On the other hand, it's also a great deal simpler for me, since I am obligated to refrain from all intoxicants—that little glass of wine or puff of marijuana are not for me, whereas for others these might not lead to true intoxication).

But this Precept has (as they all do) layers upon layers of meaning. I like to reflect on the fact that the Latin root of the word intoxication simply means "poison" (in Spanish, one of the word for poisoning is intoxicado). Of course, most of us have the wisdom not to knowingly swallow strychnine, but we take into our bodies many things that we know to be harmful to us, that we believe will give us pleasure, peace, and an surcease of pain.

I think I have gone on long enough for today, though. I will expand upon this a bit further the next time I write.

Overwhelmed

I must confess that I am feeling overwhelmed by events right at the moment, so I won't be blogging for long today. Why do it at all? I dunno; I guess I feel a mild sense of obligation, if only to myself. Though I am generally a pretty disciplined guy, there are many things in my life I feel I have let just slide into decrepitude, and I don't want this blog to be one of those.

So, here I am, with a few things to say, mostly personal and not all that Dharmic, but there you have it....

First of all, I continue on the Abascal Plan, as I described in the last few posts. I am not trying to sell you on this, by the way. I couldn't care less if no one else ever does it. But it sure has helped me and is helping a bunch of other people I know. Enough about that. Oh, and I found out by doing this that wheat is not my friend. Without further investigation, I am not willing to say it's gluten that bugs me, though that seems pretty likely. Fortunately, I have never been a big bread eater. And I can still eat it if I want to, I just might suffer some consequences.

I also want to put out there that Kathy and I are going to Ann Arbor next weekend and staying a week to celebrate our daughter-in-law's graduation from graduate school. Yes, by the way, since you asked, it does feel strange to be old enough to have a daughter-in-law who is finishing graduate school. And—good news—she will be coming to Seattle to continue her studies, working toward a PhD at the University of Washington (which is also one of my alma maters, by the way). So, we will have Jamie and my son, Mitchell, here for at least three years! Yippee!

After Ann Arbor, we will be home for about a week and then take off for a week at Disneyland with Mitchell, Jamie, and some friends from California. It's been a long time since I have been there. A little known fact about me: I absolutely love roller coasters. The faster, more dangerous-looking, turn-me-upside-downish the better.

Anyway, there you have it, the reasons I am not furiously blogging away right now, but will instead try to get my life together enough that it doesn't entirely fall apart with all of this gallivanting around. I wish you all well and will write again when I can. Take care.

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.