You do not have time to eat healthy food

You really don't. But, I might have an alternative way to live.

Friends, I’m up to my neck in unpacking and repacking what with trips and moving, so I have a throwback post for you this week, adapted from my other blog, Mom of No Rank.

I know it seems like I talk more about the candy corn part and less about the Zen part around here, but actually, both are infused into every word, in true non-dual Zen fashion. All this time I’ve been making and tasting things that are both terrible and terrible for you, I’ve also been embracing what I think of as step 1 in any behavioral change:

Let go of judgment.

An example of a meal that requires cultivation of non-judgment: Sliced Gumby’s pepperoni roll salad.

Easier said than done, I know. That’s why they call it Zen practice. It takes a while to even notice where you are hooked, much less manage to loosen some of them. That’s okay — that is the normal process that everyone undergoes. The following essay is about carving out a meditation practice, but the approach works for making friends with a variety of foods, too. I think a lot of people assume that as a dietitian, I have a restrictive mindset when talking to clients, but I talk to as many people who have difficulty eating enough to keep their bodies healthy as I do people who have difficulty with not eating more than their body needs to function best. It’s not about restriction — it’s about experiencing your food, embracing it, noticing your physical and emotional and mental activity around food and eating. What are your aversions and preferences? When you eat a meal, what are you prioritizing? Enjoyment, convenience, health, comfort, control? What assumptions are you making about what is healthy, what is good, what is bad, what is needed? Because, I can almost guarantee you that there is not enough time in a day to really address those assumptions about what needs to be done and what resources you would need to do that. You have to spend hours preparing food you don’t like with time and money and equipment you don’t have, right? Well, I have good news…all of that is bunk.

Tassajara Zen Mountain Center kitchen altar, with a friend’s bagged lunch that I wouldn’t let her move for the photo.

Read on, and keep reading this space, because I’ll have more to unpack later about what this means for food. For now, remember this approach the next time you eat something, anything, and just pay a little bit of attention to one bite. Notice the flavors, textures, colors…and any judgments you may have, whether good or bad, and try to let them go as you return to your sensory awareness and your body’s responses.

Berries, almonds, yogurt, chipotle, lime zest.

From Mom of No Rank, 2017:

You do not have time to meditate.

It's true. You don't. I don't, either. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but it's absolutely hopeless. Things are never going to be different. Extra time is not going to appear. There are already way too many things to do, and if you add another thing, there is something on your current list that will not get done. This is just fundamentally true, and there is no changing it.

I mean, you need a specially-equipped, quiet place to meditate uninterrupted for a certain period of time. To get that, you will have to both go somewhere else, or ask everyone else to go somewhere else, and also leave something off your current list. Yes.

That's just reality. Unless, there is someone you could ask to cover you for that time and do the things that would otherwise get left off the list. If you don't have that, or a special, quiet place totally insulated from your life, you don't have time to meditate. No.

I wish it weren't so, but you really do not have time to attend to the present moment. The present moment can only be observed in a special, quiet place, with other special people, people more special than you, right? Special, calm, quiet people. The people usually around you are not calm, that's for sure. They laugh or yell or cry at the drop of a hat, and you do, too. The floor is dirty. The boss is yelling. Everyone just wants take-out again.

The kicker is that it can only be done if you have a lot of present moments all in a row together. Like, at least 30 of them. Time to really breathe, you know? Slowly in, slowly out, in a long, unbroken wave. This breathing that you usually do, where it's affected by the things happening to you, and it's too fast, or too shallow, or it's like you haven't even noticed it in days, that's the only thing you usually have time for. Total dealbreaker.

Also, you need the right clothes. And the right cushion. Bonus points for a little lotus printed on the label.

If only there were some kind of loophole, where you could count a regular moment -- just precisely the way it already is -- as a present moment, and you could just observe it a little. If all these moments that you have loads of, where you are wearing what you already wear, standing around or racing off or sprawled on a lumpy couch, and there is all kinds of chaos inside and out -- if those were real moments, without any kind of alteration needed, instead of just all these pretend moments that you have to endure until you can find the time to engineer a real, perfect, present moment...wow.

That would be a dream.

All packed at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center…so I can go home and unpack and then pack again. We’ll start unpacking all this next week.

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And please feel free to share this post with anyone you may know who is, with the best of intentions, hurting themselves with food or their thinking about it. It might be a long journey, but it starts with a single bite.