I recently had a physical and found out I am prediabetic. Which isn’t that surprising given my past eating habits and my genetic and family background. It is still at a level where it can be controlled through lifestyle changes: eating healthier, exercising, losing some weight and taking better care of myself. I had been coming to the resolution myself in recent months that I need to eat more mindfully (reduce emotional eating) and exercise, as I have a five year old daughter and another daughter about to be born next month. The test results solidified this resolution.
I got onto a scale at home for the first time in years. I made a resolution to not buy ice cream. I am going to get 30 minutes of at least moderate exercise most days of a week. But the biggest change is I got onto Noom. It a health improvement app which helps you track what you eat and also gets you in touch with a wellness coach who can guide you periodically. It was free through my health insurance, and that pushed me over into trying it. So far I like it. It makes the whole change I am trying to do feel more real and that I am accountable to my resolution – tracking what I eat and talking to the coach makes me feel like I can’t live in my own head about this and that’s a good thing.
What’s clear after just a few days of this lifestyle change is how absolutely fundamental our relation to food is. Not just that we need food to survive. But that food functions as a way to structure our lives and to give it meaning. The greatest challenge I feel in making this lifestyle change is letting go of the emotional associations I have with food.
I was getting hungry at lunch time yesterday. My wife and daughter were out of the house. Usually this makes me feel I can eat what I want, so maybe I would go get some pizza or if I am feeling particularly “deserving”, then a meat ball sandwich or a veggie burger from a nice burger place. It would be a way to pamper myself, to reward myself for what I deserve, for what it is ok to for me to have.
What is the attraction of the pizza? It’s clearly not just the taste. The pizza is a substitute for what I feel I am missing or have missed out on in my life. Like most people, I daily go through the feeling that my life didn’t turn out the way I imagined it would. That there is a different life path I should have had, one which realizes my potential more. Let us call this feeling the alternate path. The attraction of the pizza is my brain, mind and body has over the years made a deep association between pizza and the alternate path such that pizza has come to feel like a substitute for the alternate path. The appeal and the draw of the pizza is the sense of relief it gives from my current, actual path in life – the path which I experience as being trapped in and which feels alien to me.
In fact, it is not just the physical properties of the pizza itself which my mind associates to the alternate path. It’s the whole thing of getting the pizza and eating it while reading some book or watching a movie. Going to the pizza place, ordering the pizza, being out and about, out in the world, amongst people while eating pizza – all of that reenforces the alternate path feeling, as if the way I am in the world and move about in the world in the pizza eating mode is somehow a gut level subsitute for moving about in the world as I would in my imagined better life which I missed out on.
From a purely psychological and physiological point of view, this is fascinating. How can food come to seem like a substitute for a way of life? It seems like a category mistake, as if I were mistaking eating pizza with interacting with people. But pizza isn’t a person. It’s food. It’s just food, one ways to say. Where is all this added emotional and social meaning that I am adding to it coming from? Is it just an illusion?
Read More »
The Radiant Path 