How I Lost 60 Pounds Without even Trying - Fridays

3. I never ate a second helping.
At the first meal I ate with my in-laws after getting off the plane, I helped myself to another heaping portion. It tasted good and there was some left in the dish, so, why not? But there is something about having a very neat and self-righteous elderly father-in-law raise an eyebrow as you scoop into the vanilla pudding for a second time, that makes you never want to do it again. Ever. It was perhaps the first time that anyone so tidy and sure of himself ever reacted so naturally and critically to my overeating. As if there were limits and I should know what they were, and why didn't I? The meal was abundant, I had eaten plenty. There was dessert, and I had my share of that, too. My father-in-law wasn't interested in making sure I could exercise my unfettered liberty. His subtle judgment held a mirror up to my behavior, and I became aware of myself...overeating.

4. I ate out in restaurants a great deal less.
Restaurants in Europe can be expensive -- not necessarily the meals, but all the extras, like drinks. And, the service is structured so that you will be spending more than an hour for the experience. Either sitting there waiting to be brought the menu, waiting for your food which can take up to half an hour, actually eating it, or waiting for your server to come back and bring the bill...all told, it adds up to a long-term commitment of time and money. Again, it is undignified and weird there to rush through life's little pleasures. So, we went from eating out perhaps once or twice a week (either sit-down or fast food) in America to eating out once every four months and having take-away or fast food twice a month at the most.

Tune in for more ways to learn how one loses 60 pounds without even trying, just by living the European lifestyle, next friday...

The Sounds of a Meal

Cynthia Anderson-Bauer, encountering the sacred at a community meal in Kerala, India:
"The sounds of a kitchen, of a meal, served for all, that brings people of all walks of life together as equals: that is surely the sound of something holy."

Sacred Chow in Sag Harbor

On Rev. Donna Schaper's book: Sacred Chow: Some Holy Ways to Eat...

“We’re really in the middle of a sea change and how Americans look at food,” says Rev. Schaper, senior minister at Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square in New York City. “It came to me that the religious aspect of food hadn’t been thoroughly explored. The entire heart of our spirituality is the simple meal that is more than it appears … the heart of our faith is the meal.”

Please Mr. Postman

I just discovered the digital-spiritual imagery of Stevee Postman, from Portland, Oregon, creator of the Cosmic Tribe Tarot. Here is a mini-set called Uproot: the Vegi-Shaman six pack. 

Love these collage images of vegetal people, all male faces, dancing carrots...in mystical situations with fairy-vegetable beings glowing lotuses, waves of bliss. Please, please look at the larger images on his site!

"Below and above unite with here and now, activating a garden of enlightened awareness alive with cosmic flavor & excellent fragrance. A visual feast that will nourish and inspirit with the nectar of creativity."

Dreaming what the Plants Say

"Fifteen years ago i had an odd dream. in it, a medicinal plant that I was interested in, an Usnea lichen that is ubiquitous on trees throughout the world, told me that while it was good for healing human lungs it was primarily a medicine for the lungs of the planet, the trees. When I awoke, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me in quite that way that plants have some life and purpose outside their use to human beings."
-- Stephen Harrod Buhner, from
The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth

One Way to Give up Eating Animals

On a somewhat boring day I had to make lunch for myself and my boys. There was some sort of health food-esque frozen Asian-style stir fry in the freezer I decided to serve over rice. It involved frying the breaded chunks of chicken and heating up the sweet and sour sauce. Now, this was not some cheapy meal, it had been marketed as a high quality convenience food, which I now see as an oxymoron, but anyway: it came from a health food supermarket.

I served it up. My mood was not nurturing and languid, it was rushed.

(This battery farm, stuffed with live chickens who never go outside, is meant to be especially humane because unlike most of them, this one is not entirely shut in darkness.)

I took a bite. At first, the tangy sauce made me think it was tasty -- it was an explosion of hot and sour and lemony flavor. The flavor was a familiar one: a loud flavor, a flavor to force someone to salivate, it was a flavor bent on creating a breathless reaction in me -- food porn.

Food porn isn't only the luscious, tantalizing pictures of meals, rather, it is the deliberate manipulation of flavor so that it immediately and without any specific or deeper intent, arouses a person's appetite, completely devoid of connection to authentic desire, hunger, or will. It is separate from the inner calling to eat. It pushes you to react and never truly fulfills -- just like the intent of manufactured porn culture.

This quick intensity of flavor is not hiding something more substantial behind it -- it IS the point of these kind of meals, and it is a particularly common form of industrial food preparation in the United States. Fast-acting, strong, overwhelming flavor meant to trick the person into feeling quickly and easily fed and filled.

But...
I was invested and hungry so I only discovered this pornish manipulation with hindsight. I still kept eating.

The third bite introduced something burnt, something sinister -- it was more of a feeling than a flavor, it was an emotion coming from the meat, which was chicken.

I could feel what was in the chicken, all that had composed its life. It came rushing up: a quick, meaningless, joyless life, and a fast, violent death as a teenager. A female chicken denied even feeling the sun and picking through grass and mating and laying eggs. She was denied everything but sitting in the squawking chaos of hundreds like her, waiting without knowing that she was only allowed to live in order to die, without even any kind of conscious honor in her sacrifice as my food.

I was eating a young animal who had no chance to live according to its ancestral dream. There I was, eating emotions of this animal, seeing the whole picture: there was a confusion, a loss of understanding, a brittle, scattered, immature feeling to this beast, such a taste of futility and waste and exhaustion -- and I was eating this. With every bite I was taking it in.

It wasn't simply that these were amorphous, ephemeral feelings coming from my own brain, my own imaginings, in a society where spirit and body are thought to be separate, if indeed spirit is acknowledged at all.

This very pain and chaos WAS this animal's meat, the emotions and its experience were as part of the flesh as its cells and sinew. I was eating this creature's brief life. This was going into me and becoming a part of me. I was eating convenience, I was eating rushing, I was eating mechanization, I was eating profanity...and it was turning me into a mechanized, rushed, thoughtless, profane being of convenience.

I felt nauseous and started to gag.

People postulate about why they might consider giving up meat, under what conditions. Some say as long as the animal has been able to experience a normal life, it isn't so bad to kill it for food. Or, there's the theory that as long as we feel gratitude and experience the animal's sacrifice as sacred, it's okay to kill it for food. Some think as long as you are involved in the killing, then you have earned the right to eat it's life...Most of all of these more soulful options is missing from the vast majority of meat preparation in the western world.

All I know is, I had been trained to ignore feeling the animals. Some people are better at this than others. I have sometimes eaten meat that I knew was tainted with sorrow and futility and angst and horror...and eaten anyway, because I was conditioned to the flavor and conditioned to ignoring emotion, and was hungry.

But the better I can feel, the more I can spend of my life in a feeling state, then I experience the feelings of the animals, and it becomes unacceptable to eat tortured animals. For a purely selfish reason: I cannot put that torture and pain into my body. I cannot process and put away and deal with and handle that pain, which is a palpable energetic reality. And I find I will not participate in that torture and pain, anymore.

That is how we become vegetarians. We let the feelings come in.