Comfort. Food.

Why do you eat?

You'll all say, "because I'm hungry," or "because I have to to live." I'd be willing to bet that anyone over age--maybe 10--has already started eating for a dozen other reasons in addition to hunger. These reasons will include but are not limited to:
boredom
sadness
the food's in front of me
celebration: there's special food being prepared
eating=being social
it's mealtime
food addiction (sugar is as addictive as cocaine)
distraction
huge portions at restaurants (and we probably all eat out too much)
sedative effect of certain foods (milk, alcohol, sugar) this is probably subconscious

Do you ever notice how a little kid will go from crying out of hunger to eating to leaving a half-full plate to go off somewhere else like it's yesterday's breakfast? And we freak out and say, eat! eat!

Well, it might be a shocking concept but: maybe the little kid isn't hungry anymore. He or she has instantly lost interest in their food because they have had enough. This is what it looks like to just stop when you're full.

Are we really all coincidentally perfectly full at exactly the time the plate is empty? I doubt it.

I read an article about the Slow Food Movement which basically is just about chewing your food thoroughly, stopping when you're full, paying attention to your body, not distracting yourself when eating, and being aware of and grateful for your food.

This also, incidentally, allows satiety signals to reach the brain which tell us to stop eating. If you wolf down a cheeseburger and fries in 7 minutes, you have no idea if you ate too much. You didn't give your body enough time to tell you.

Today at lunch, I made a sandwich and small side salad. While I made these, I also snacked on a handful of chips and hummus. After the snack and salad, I realized I was full (I was trying to pay attention to my stomach while I ate which I normally don't do!). I was amazed that so little had filled me. If I hadn't just read the article, I would not have noticed! I would have ate the sandwich anyway. I left it for later. I am now at a coffee shop, drinking the soy chai I would also have had even if I'd over-eaten at lunch, and I am still not hungry. (I even skipped my cookie today! I'm being so good!!) If I'm hungry in a couple of hours, I'll eat the sandwich. But if not, I guess I'll be having it for dinner.

The author of the article, after simply paying complete attention to hunger and fullness (and even through some family celebrations where she admittedly over-ate) still lost 5 pounds in a matter of weeks. She was already thin and not in major need of losing weight...but it was still that easy. I was amazed by that.

I also just read a very interesting book, Women Food and God by Geneen Roth. The author conducts retreats for people who are overweight and puts them through grueling exercises: making them all wait until every single person has been served before eating, for instance. She says they stare at her with daggers coming out of their eyes. These may be people with serious eating disorders, but how many of us feel the same anxiety when we sit down if we make ourselves wait long enough to, for instance, say grace? It's pretty startling to read these embarrassing facts and realize you are really not much different, just to a lesser degree.

The women at these retreats generally all had the same problem which was excessive eating to push down various emotional pains. I don't have any serious emotional pains I'm aware of, but I definitely have boredom or a desire to distract myself from things I should do but put off instead. That turns into going out, getting a snack somewhere, or sometimes drinking a couple glasses of wine. None of them life-threatening, but still--what's the point? Why burden my body because I'm feeling "off" today?

Is pain so painful? Mark Twain said (I paraphrase from memory), "In my long life, I've seen many hardships, some of which actually happened." We put ourselves through so much more misery than even comes close to what we technically go through.

I read a fascinating account of a woman who gave birth without painkillers. She explained how she coped with the pain, and what she said was to imagine you are in the ocean and there are waves coming at you. Rather than keep your head up and let each one smack you, what you want to do is put your head a little lower and immerse yourself in the water where it will push you but not knock you over.

When you feel pain, go into it. Immerse yourself in the feeling, dive into it. Energetically, what happens when you do this is that you actually put fresh, healthy energy and light into that area which will have manifested as congested, blocked, grayish energy in your aura. You can visualize this process too, if you want. When that happens, the gray energy dissipates and is released. The pain is gone. This is self-healing. It's that simple. If you resist negative feelings, you push them into yourself, and they stay. You will have to keep pushing them down to avoid them. This is very unhealthy and will manifest as disease eventually.

Pay attention to your body. The size of your stomach is not a mistake. Let it tell you when it's had enough. Don't exhaust your precious energy by giving your body a stuffed belly to cope with. You will love the feeling of lightness you have when you are never full to the brim with food. I've noticed I feel "thin" when I don't over eat, regardless of the size of my body, and I feel "fat" when I over eat, regardless of the size of my body. Do what feels good!

I watched Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story and have also been reading A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and I have to say it's given me quite a different perspective. Most of us see our economic system and government as generally fine, only needing certain legislation here and there to fix the problems of the day.

What Capitalism: A Love Story suggests outright and what the book forces the reader to consider is that the economic and political systems that largely run our lives are fundamentally flawed and not fixable while still within them. I did not previously think a complete overhaul was necessary to solve our problems (poverty, joblessness, environmental degradation) but I now do.

What A People's History absolutely proves is that corporations must be dragged, kicking and screaming, to consider any interest outside of their bottom line, and that their lack of care for simple human dignity literally costs lives. Well, duh, but it's fascinating to read the history of this. We didn't start out generous and idealistic and nice. We started out conniving, controlling, manipulating, and cruel.

How well does an economic system "work" if the average person and-hopefully-politician has to constantly, relentlessly bully each industry, one by one, to pay a decent wage, stop polluting the environment, etc. It's horribly inefficient and, of course, maddeningly frustrating. Yet it's all marketed so brilliantly that even the sufferers of this pathetic machine support it.

I'm so often reminded of the children's story, The Emperor's New Clothes. Will anyone just point out the obvious here? Well, people do, but they are essentially ridiculed.

We live in a country where businesses have actually convinced us that they have rights. That, like people, they deserve help from the government (ex: subsidies) and that they have interests that should be considered. Like they are living and breathing, and they will suffer like any life-form if they don't get protection. (They're not alive!!!!) They are not people, who ask only to survive with enough food, shelter, and clothing. Businesses ask something completely different: obscene profits, increasing stock prices, exorbitant salaries, power, status, and--what it boils down to--food for their big, gigantic, enormous ego. These rights are somehow seen side by side with a request for simple human dignity and are weighed as though they have similar degrees of importance.

I was shocked to learn after Obama's student loan reform bill just got signed, that the government was previously handing out subsidies to private loan organizations. Excuse me? The government is giving money to banks or whomever so they can give me a student loan at 4 x the interest rate I would get if I'd gotten a government loan? But some schmuck business guy convinced the government to give his bank money to "help" students go to college. Why don't you just hand them profits in an envelope?

What Howard Zinn's incredible book shows is that the U.S. government formed for really one purpose: to protect the money of the elite of the country, and to make more for them through business and trade. This sounds like a cynical statement, but it is laid out very simply with direct quotes and hundreds of citations. It is too complex to detail here--please read for yourself before making up your mind. To describe the issue as a "conflict-of-interest" would be a pathetic understatement. It is hard to even come close to describing the corruption involved in the birth of this country. Our political party system is little more than a disguise to give us the impression of choice, freedom, and control, when everything has been set up ever-so carefully so that the interests of the rich "capitalists," as you may call them, can never actually be threatened.

I wish everyone would just read a hundred pages of this book and see the desperate, desperate attempts made to be simply allowed a 10-hour workday (instead of 16) and a 6-day workweek instead of a 7-day workweek. The marches to stop child labor. Requests for simple safety in the workplace. The strikes, demonstrations, arrests, union efforts, etc, etc, went on for decades. The corporations enlisted the National Guard to squelch strikes. The government itself used the military to kill people for asking for the tiniest dignity.

We may have evolved since those times (though I would argue that the evolution really means that what we used to be able to get away with in public we now have to do in secret), but it is important to see where these present-day institutions come from. They do not come from a tradition of charity, generosity, "freedom and justice for all." We must be at least educated and realistic.

Know what I read the other day? Pharmaceutical companies actually control medical school education in America. You can be sure your doctor never learned a thing about health in all those years of college--only disease and drug prescription. They can draw the chemical composition of Lipitor but don't know that eating oatmeal is proven more effective in lowering cholesterol than drugs.