Welcome! This is the ongoing thread for those following a Buddhist path and working on weight loss. Please feel free to post your questions, thoughts, and concerns!
Here is a quotation from Tulku Thondup:
- By eating food with mindfulness, we can cultivate awareness, calmness, peace, and joy.
How can the Buddhist outlook help you in your quest to shed weight?
I still stop in here from time to time to see if anyone has posted!
We need a discussion topic--how about, the relationship between being overweight and wanting to cling to good experiences, such as the satisfaction of eating?
sounds interesting or perhaps, personal insights into we feel happier now compared to when we were heavier this then taking your topic and casting doubt over wether we were happy or wether we had become in need of something to give us happiness
a good example chocolate. in 2003 i gave up chocolate for a bet of £5 i loved my chocolate and ate loads of it. so out of pig headed stubborness i gave up the chocolate. it was hard and there were times that i sat salivating at the prospect of eating chocolate. it was so real i could even taste it in my mouth the texture the flavour everything. just how i remembered it.
come new years eve i sat waiting for big ben to chime and im' looking at this really realy lovely bit of chocolate remembering the taste the texture how good it was and good it made me feel and how happy i was. come tweleve happy new year nice bit of chocolate in my mouth slowly savouring the taste PAH! spat it out. it tasted awful, nothing like the sweet smooth milky chocolate i remembered.
Ha! So, you might say it was the memory of the chocolate that kept your desire going all that time!
One night when I was overstressed and way too tired, I picked up a chocolate bar at the checkout counter. Chocolate isn't my favorite thing--that's the weird thing! It's OK, but it's not something that will usually even tempt me very much.
So I got this bar, it was Hershey's Dark Chocolate. And I started to eat it, and it was like chewing on wax. Bleah!
And so, maybe what you really were desiring was... not the chocolate, but the past experience of the chocolate. Trying to re-create that in the present.
Many posters on 3FC want to lose weight to "get back" to where they used to be. Can they really do that? It may work as a motivation... but in my experience, 155 now isn't the same as 155 was 20 years ago. My body has changed! Still, because I used to be a more normal weight, I do have that idea of how things used to be.
Other posters have never known anything but being oveweight.
As to was I happier then... that's pretty complex. Because weight was not "an issue" for me then, but it is now. Hmmmm...
i went from 322 down to 226-230 and stayed there for 2 years. in that time i felt much happier in general, i'd get up an feel energetic and willing to do something. before i'd get up and feel tired and want to go straight back to sleep. however after a shoulder injury i slipped into poor eating again i think the constant barrage of poor eating your body gets euphoric on the crap they pump into it. the chemical in the chocolate that release dopemine the e numbers and preserveatives in foods. and you quickly get a false sense of happiness from this. its like you see little kids at the supermarket screaming for sweets and chocolate and when they get it they're happy again. like its a daily heroin fix or something
Yeah--it does seem like that! It's almost as though one is eating to avoid the pain of withdrawal than for the pleasure of the food.
It can be helpful just to watch the feelings arise, without doing anything about them--that is, notice the craving without acting on it. See what happens.
I've found that if I don't eat a food that looks tempting, like cake at a party, I don't actually die from it! heh!
i've given up chocolate again for the mean time. i might have the odd square of green and blacks organic super strength dark stuff in the future but none of this mass made animal and vegtable fat milk rubbish.
i've also been Alcohol free for nearly 4 weeks. which for a british student is almost a miracle.
other food i find i get problems with are Wine gums! only the black ones though i get really really awful headaches if i eat them.
Buddhists Support/Discussion #3
Welcome to the thread!
