Eating Enlightenment

In Buddhism ignorance is the problem.

Awareness is the solution.

Eating is the same.

In this episode Jared Levenson rants about the fundamental eating delusion which keeps people trapped in cycles of food craving.

Join us every Monday at 10am for next podcast release.

I recently read Christie Harrison's New York times opinion piece about yoyo dieting and other cultural issues around weight.

This video I'm going to give my reaction to several talking points that I read in her article

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/op...

Here are Andy The RD's Three Nutrition Principles:

1. Protein Variety

2. Commitment

3. Kale (symbolizing your unique food preferences)

Have you ever had a train of thought disrupted by self hatred thought?

You're just going about your day running errands or sending out emails and all of the sudden you're mentally beating the crap out of yourself because your body isn't an Instagram model?

These negative thoughts are the reasons why we are our own worst critics. This post explores:

Why we are our own worst critics Two skills to be nicer to yourself 2 techniques to make your brain shut up

First let's understand why we are our own worst critics.

It all begins innocently. Perhaps your parents would always weigh themselves each day and make an off-hand remark to you about whether they gained weight.

Even simple visits to the doctor's office where you are weighed can lead you to place much of your self-esteem on a proper weight and body image.

Of course there are many people who have verbally abusive parents, whose parents teased them about their weight.

My experience tells me that the majority of people had pretty good parents, good enough parents but their parents came from an older generation that was ignorant in terms of dieting.

Nowadays we know that dieting doesn't work. In fact we know the opposite is true - that dieting is actually harmful and causes weight gain.

Yeah the previous generation didn't know this. They grew up in a generation that didn't even know smoking cigarettes was bad for you. So they were raised with much different beliefs and would much less sensitive about weight.

So for all these reasons you may have a developed an inner critic simply because your environment growing up was hostile to weight.

Okay so we are our own worst critics, now what?

The old generation was all about willpower.

If you are overweight, go to the gym. If you weigh too much, eat less. Simple as that.

Obesity was because you were lazy.

And even worse, if you were obese, then teasing you and shaming you was considered proper behavior. I've talked to people who believe that shaming people who are obese is the proper way to treat of these people and it just saddens me.

But nowadays thankfully, we know better. We know that willpower and controlling our thoughts and our appetites simply doesn't work.

It's like trying to build a house to live in with Legos. Legos make things nice and simple but when you actually tried to do it in real life, it doesn't work out. The same is with willpower.

So instead of willpower we use two primary skills.

The first skill is skillful effort to redirect and refrain your thoughts.

The primary way we do this is to examine the truthfulness of our thoughts.

There's a big misunderstanding that we do need to clarify before going on. We do not get upset at ourselves for having these automatic thoughts. We must remember that these automatic thoughts we grew up with as children and these thoughts were embedded into us through our childhood.

So this right here is really important. We expect these automatic thoughts. Because we expect them we don't get mad when they arrive.

So for example, if you suddenly think to yourself "God I'm fat and ugly and hopeless" we realize this is an automatic thought and don't get mad at ourselves for having it.

Instead, we seek to examine the truthfulness of these thoughts.

How do you examine the truthfulness of a thought?

You turn the thought into a question.

So for the "God I'm fat and ugly and hopeless" thought, you could reframe as a question by asking if you were really hopeless. Is it really true that you are hopeless?

The answer is no. You are not entirely hopeless. Therefore, the thought needs to be modified.

How do you modify a thought?

You try to come up with a more realistic thought that actually reflects reality.

You can say instead of being hopeless, that you feel hopeless, but are actually successful in different areas of life.

So that's it for this video. Let me know - what's your preferred technique on stopping negative thoughts, mindfulness or effort?

What is a Life Weaving Conversation?

It's a conversation where separate strands of life are strung together in a coherent way contributing to greater understanding.

The first thread in my conversation with David centered about tunnel vision. Tunnel vision is where your reality is restricted to a limited view, and in David's case, tunnel vision meant religious fundamentalism.

Learning to ask questions and to question his assumptions was a critical foundation for David's journey into working as a counselor in private practice and helping veterans with invisible injuries.

The second thread in our conversation explored the difficult in getting out of tunnel vision. Because it's one thing to talk about tunnel vision, but a whole different thing to actually be stuck in tunnel vision.

Relationships, it turns out, are crucial to changing your perspective.

Relationships form the backbone of our life. Even in Buddhist philosophy, everything is recognized as interconnected.

Relationships are far more important than willpower. Willpower is oftentimes why mindfulness and cognitive therapy can be misunderstood.

Both mindfulness and cognitive therapy can go to battle with thoughts. You might try to 'will your thoughts' away. However, battling your thoughts only causes resistance.

So the key is to change your relationship to your thoughts. As David notes, you don't act on every one of your thoughts during the day. Thoughts are more like a structure of reality.

However, you can learn to accept your thoughts without getting lost in tunnel vision by having a clear understanding of your vision and values.

Finally, we talked about vision and values. Particularly in a world where there's so much noise, it's perhaps the most important thing for us to form relationships and explore our values consciously.

Without conscious exploration, we'll be greatly hindered in our quest to live our best lifes and to be able to respond to situations flexibly.

David has a private therapy practice and he works with people all over the world in different timezones.

For more information, please visit David's Life Weavings website here.