Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life
By Thich Nhat Hanh and Lilian Cheung
4/5
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About this ebook
Common sense tells us that to lose weight, we must eat less and exercise more. But somehow we get stalled. We start on a weight-loss program with good intentions but cannot stay on track. Neither the countless fad diets, nor the annual spending of $50 billion on weight loss helps us feel better or lose weight.
Too many of us are in a cycle of shame and guilt. We spend countless hours worrying about what we ate or if we exercised enough, blaming ourselves for actions that we can't undo. We are stuck in the past and unable to live in the present—that moment in which we do have the power to make changes in our lives.
With Savor, world-renowned Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and Harvard nutritionist Dr. Lilian Cheung show us how to end our struggles with weight once and for all.
Offering practical tools, including personalized goal setting, a detailed nutrition guide, and a mindful living plan, the authors help us to uncover the roots of our habits and then guide us as we transform our actions. Savor teaches us how to easily adopt the practice of mindfulness and integrate it into eating, exercise, and all facets of our daily life, so that being conscious and present becomes a core part of our being.
It is the awareness of the present moment, the realization of why we do what we do, that enables us to stop feeling bad and start changing our behavior. Savor not only helps us achieve the healthy weight and well-being we seek, but it also brings to the surface the rich abundance of life available to us in every moment.
Editor's Note
More than nutrition…
This nutrition guide links eating, exercise & mindfulness to produce a holistic handbook on how to not only lose weight, but also live a fulfilling life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Thich Nhat Hanh was a world-renowned Buddhist Zen master, poet, author, scholar, and activist for social change, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was the author of many bestselling books, including the classics Peace Is Every Step and The Art of Living. Through his books and retreats at the monasteries he has founded in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia, he became a pre-eminent figure in contemporary Buddhism, offering teachings that are both deeply rooted in ancient wisdom and accessible to all. Sister Chan Khong is Thich Nhat Hanh’s most senior monastic disciple and lifelong collaborator. A leading force in his engaged Buddhism programs and humanitarian projects, her books include Learning True Love and Beginning Anew. Sister True Dedication is a former journalist and monastic Dharma Teacher ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh.
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Reviews for Savor
65 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5From my blog...Ever pondered why one eats when stressed? Tried dieting only to fall back into the same old routine weeks or months later? If so, Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life by Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr. Lilian Cheung may be the book to read. The authors, while using an astonishing amount of documented research, point out some rather key functions of why so many fail on their diets, over-eat, or eat while stressed out. The authors suggest that rather than being obsessed with counting every calorie or trying to calculate whether or not enough calories were burned in one's last workout to allow a slice of cake, one should rather step back and take a look inward. One must consciously make oneself aware not only of how one eats and what one chooses to eat, but more importantly, one must understand one's innermost needs, desires, and actions. Savor is not only well written and well researched, the authors offer up sound advise, suggestions, substitutions, definitions, and illustrations to get their point across. Savor is a much-needed slice-of-reality book in today's society where just reading the appendices alone would benefit many readers, this one included. I cannot praise Savor enough.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I very much liked the first 25% or so of this book. After that it was repetitive and I lost interest. I skimmed through some of it and saw advice about handling specific problems with eating and moving which looked good, but my interest was in what mindful eating is and the aspects of it. I got that in the first part of the book and did not want to wade through the rehash.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great for anyone trying to mindfully live with intention. Extremely helpful for those trying to lose weight or even healthy individuals trying to promote health & well-being around them in the world.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As a 25 year vegetarian, I came to this book looking for mindfulness advice not weight loss. I agree with the book that a vegetarian diet will lead to weight loss if as I did eating more then the recommended amount of meat is what caused me to put on weight. I became a vegetarian because when I saw how small a portion of meat was recommended, I knew that I'd never be satisfied.
The advice on mindfulness is well presented . If you are not a Buddhist and do not want to read Buddhist suggestions on how to live a happier healthier life I'd suggest picking a different book. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book has helped change my relationship to food and eating to make it even healthier than it already was. For anyone who has challenges in this area and wants an introspective and 'zen' approach, read this!
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eat less. Move more. Be mindful.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alles was in diesem Buch steht, findet meine Zustimmung. Trotzdem habe ich viele Wochen gebraucht, um das Buch durchzulesen. Wer es schafft, alle Ziele des Buches zu erreichen, ist sicher ein Heiliger. Aber gut, Ziele zu habe, finde ich gut und es ist auch nicht so wichtig, jedes Ziel zu erreichen. Wichtiger ist, Ziele zu verfolgen. In dem Sinne bietet das Buch einen Ansporn, sein Verhältnis zum Essen, zu Bewegung und zum Achtsamsein neu auszurichten. Den fehlenden Stern hätte ich vergeben, wenn mich das Buch gefesselt hätte.
Book preview
Savor - Thich Nhat Hanh
SAVOR
Mindful Eating, Mindful Life
Thich Nhat Hanh
and
Lilian Cheung D.Sc., R.D.
pngCONTENTS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
PART 1
A Buddhist Perspective on Weight Control
CHAPTER 1 Ending Your Struggle with Weight
CHAPTER 2 Are You Really Appreciating the Apple?
An Apple Meditation
CHAPTER 3 You Are More Than What You Eat
CHAPTER 4 Stop and Look: The Present Moment
PART 2
Mindful Action Plans
CHAPTER 5 Mindful Eating
CHAPTER 6 Mindful Moving
CHAPTER 7 Mindful Living Plan
PART 3
Individual and Collective Effort
CHAPTER 8 A Mindful World
NOTES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
APPENDIX A Integrating Mindfulness into Your Daily Life
APPENDIX B Discourse on the Four Kinds of Nutriments
APPENDIX C Total Relaxation
APPENDIX D Screen-Time Alternatives
APPENDIX E Community-Based Strategies to Prevent and Control Obesity
APPENDIX F Resources
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
Most books about nutrition and diet stress the calorie content of foods, saturated fats, trans fats, carbohydrates, portion size, and the balance between energy intake and energy expended. This book is different. This book is not only about what to eat. This book also teaches how to eat.
If you are someone who is concerned about your weight, perhaps you have tried dieting in the past. Maybe you have gone from cutting calories, to excluding fats, to avoiding carbs,
to taking a chance on the grapefruit diet or some other fad. Perhaps you have even lost weight—only to gain it right back within a few months. You know something is wrong and you feel not in control of your own body. You are convinced that something has to change, but where do you begin?
The answer, provided in this book, is not to begin with what you put on your plate. Rather, you begin with what is already inside you, with your awareness and experience of every moment you live—what the authors call mindfulness. While the concept of mindfulness derives from Buddhist teaching, anyone can become more mindful in nourishing our bodies. Many distractions in daily life reinforce the mindless ingestion of food, and mindless eating is a strong driver of weight gain and obesity. With awareness and practice, it is possible to become more mindful in our eating—and in our lives. This book tells you how to do it.
Authored by an eminent spiritual leader and a renowned nutritionist, this work infuses science into wisdom and wisdom into science. It is a practical guide to eating mindfully and points the way to attain a healthier weight and a more satisfying life.
Harvey V. Fineberg, M.D., Ph.D.
President
Institute of Medicine
The National Academies
Washington, D.C.
INTRODUCTION
IF YOU HAVE PICKED up Savor because you want more peace and happiness in everyday life, then you are in the right place. If you have picked up Savor because you or someone you love is struggling with weight and in need of practical solutions, then this book is for you also.
Learning to eat and live mindfully is the key to experiencing health and peace. This vision brought us, a Zen Buddhist Master and a nutritionist, together to take a fresh look at mindfulness and the problem of obesity that is spreading across the globe. It is clear that standard approaches are not working to stem the tide of weight gain and the burden it creates for people and communities. More than a billion people worldwide are overweight—so many, in fact, that scientists call it an obesity epidemic. And while this is certainly an apt description of the outcome of eating too much and not moving enough, it does not fully describe what is going on. It is also a worldwide crisis largely brought on by social trends that distract and prevent us from doing the things that keep us in balance, healthy, and connected with our inner selves and our place in the world. Savor is a guide to help us all reconnect with these different aspects of our lives that together can improve our weight, our well-being, and the well-being of our world.
Common sense tells us that to lose weight, we must eat less and exercise more. That is easier said than done, however. Many of us know that we need to eat less, and we need to be more active. But somehow we get stuck. We start on a weight-loss program with only good intentions, but when we cannot stay on track, we feel disappointed and discouraged. We become pessimistic, more and more unhappy with our weight. We spend hours worrying about our future, blaming ourselves for what we’ve eaten or how inactive we’ve been in the past, and completely missing the present moment—the moment in which we actually have the power to make real change in our lives.
To end our struggle, we must learn to not let regret, worry, or fear dominate our life in the present moment. Each minute we spend worrying about the future and regretting the past is a minute we miss in our appointment with life—a missed opportunity to engage life and to see that each moment gives us the chance to change for the better, to experience peace and joy. The practice of being fully present in each moment is called mindfulness. It is an ancient Buddhist approach to living that helps us to be in the here and now—and to end our struggle with weight.
To be mindful is to be completely aware of what is happening in the present, to be fully aware of all that is going on within ourselves and all that is happening around us, from moment to moment, without judgment or preconceived notions. Although mindfulness has been taught in Eastern meditation trainings, it is not some mystical or esoteric practice that is hard to learn. People in all walks of life have followed this set of age-old practices on their path to health, well-being, peace, and happiness for over twenty-five hundred years.
When we walk and our mind is aware of each step that we plant firmly on the ground, we are already practicing mindfulness. When we eat and our mind is aware of each bite, savoring the taste and the nourishment it gives us, we are already practicing mindfulness. To be mindful of something, we need to learn to be fully present for an instant and look deeply into that something. We must first stop our wandering mind in order to begin to engage it in what is there in the present moment. When we are mindful of what we are doing, we learn to keep our appointment with life. This awareness of the present moment gives us the opportunity and the tools to touch peace and joy, to see the true nature of who we are and how we are related to everything else, and to end our struggle with weight.
In Savor we share with you how to live mindfully, and in particular how living mindfully can help you take care of your weight problem in a peaceful and sustainable way. Throughout the book, we show you how to easily adopt the practice of mindfulness and integrate it into eating, physical activity, and all other facets of your daily life so that mindful-ness gradually becomes a core part of your being.
Dealing with our overweight—or with any of our life’s difficulties, for that matter—is not a battle to be fought. Instead, we must learn how to make friends with our hardships and challenges. They are there to help us; they are natural opportunities for deeper understanding and transformation, bringing us more joy and peace as we learn to work with them. With mindfulness practice, we gain insight into the roots of our difficulties.
You will learn to observe and be more aware of your motivations for and obstacles to staying healthy. Why do you eat what you eat? How do you eat, and how do you feel after you eat? What attitudes do you have toward physical activity? What are the barriers—physical, psychological, cultural, and environmental—that prevent you from eating well and staying active? As you become more aware of your body and of the feelings, thoughts, and realities that prevent you from taking health-enhancing actions, you will realize what you need to do individually and what types of community and social support you need in order to change your behavior. With these insights, you will be better equipped to break through your barriers to a healthy lifestyle and weight control. You can start to make changes step-by-step, establishing healthier habits and instilling more and more peace within yourself.
With the hectic pace of modern living, we recognize that it is very challenging for people to add more tasks to their to do
list. As you will see, mindfulness practice does not need to be another add-on.
Its beauty lies in the fact that it can be fully and easily integrated into every act of our daily living, reminding us to live the present moment fully.
With mindfulness, we can choose how to live our lives now. We can seize any moment and begin anew. It is as simple as taking a few in-breaths and out-breaths here and there throughout the day—while answering e-mails, waiting in line, or sitting in traffic. It is absolutely within anyone’s reach. Take small steps every day, and be persistent. Small steps will add up over time. With the constant practice of mindfulness, you will feel more alive and in the flow of life. You will find more stillness amid the chaos. You will have a better understanding of yourself and all that is around you. The fog that veils your well-being will gradually dissipate, allowing you to touch the joy and peace that have always been inside you. The Buddha did not foresee many of the modern-day problems that we face, including the obesity epidemic, but his teachings are timeless. They are foundations for understanding and processes for gaining insight. As people have found over many generations, solidity, freedom, calm, and joy are the fruits of mindful living.
By combining the sage Buddhist philosophy with the science of nutrition, we can contribute to a better understanding of our bodies and minds. We invite you to embark on this mindfulness journey, just as others have over many generations, to help you end your struggle with weight and improve your health, the health of those around you, and the well-being of the world in which we live.
About This Book
The first part of Savor (chapters 1 through 4) provides a Buddhist perspective on weight control and well-being. We begin the book by offering you a new way of looking at your weight problem—through the lens of the Four Noble Truths, the most fundamental Buddhist teaching. You first need to acknowledge that you have a weight problem and reflect on whether or not you are ready to make changes and are committed to making them. If you are, you need to know what has led to your being overweight. Through a series of questions for self-inquiry, you will gain a better understanding of the reasons that you are overweight. You will realize that you do have the power to stop the unhealthy, mindless routines that led you to become overweight, if you so choose. And you will realize that mindfulness practice is an effective path toward a healthier way of living and a healthier weight.
Next, we offer you a taste of mindfulness—a meditation on eating an apple. With mindfulness, the simple act of eating an apple becomes a profound experience. It opens up our awareness that the apple is a manifestation of our world and that it cannot come into being in isolation. The apple is dependent on everything else for its existence, reminding us that we, too, are constantly supported by the effort of many beings so that we can enjoy the apple.
We then invite you to look at your personal makeup. We explore how everything you see, taste, smell, hear, touch, and think affects your weight and all other aspects of your daily life. Diet books typically focus only on how foods immediately benefit the body and rarely address the psychosocial, cultural, and environmental factors that affect our habits of eating and physical activity. It is clear that we are not only what we eat; we are what we consume through all our senses. What we eat and how we eat are influenced by our ancestors, parents, and culture, the food businesses, the media, and societal forces. To maintain a healthy weight and lifestyle, we must look carefully at the interrelationships of our body, our mind, and society at large.
As you begin to understand your difficulty with weight, an important step is to learn to empower yourself to transform this difficulty. The Buddha’s Discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness elaborates on exercises that can lead to transformation and healing. We take you through the salient points of the four foundations of mindfulness practice for effective transformation, showing how to instill joy and peace in yourself as well as overcome your destructive habits. We describe a process and practice that will enhance your awareness of your body, feelings, mind, and all perceptions, and how they are intimately related to changing your eating and physical activity habits. You will learn basic breathing techniques to calm your body, feelings, and mind, and you will learn how to see yourself in relation to everything that is around you. With continuous practice, you will build up the confidence to recognize the nature and cause of your suffering and then transform it at its base, to uproot long-held negative beliefs, habits, and feelings.
The second part of Savor (chapters 5 through 7) brings mindfulness practice to your daily life. All of us eat and drink numerous times a day. These are wonderful opportunities for us to practice mindfulness. Paying attention to what we eat and drink as well as to how we eat and drink brings us nourishment, sustaining not only our own body and mind but also the well-being of our world for future generations. We provide you with a scientific primer on healthy eating and drinking, to help you decide what to eat and drink, and to offer concrete ways for you to eat and drink more mindfully. Through a series of questions, you begin to establish your own mindful-eating goals and personalized mindful-eating plan so that you can savor your foods and drinks while maintaining health and well-being.
We move our bodies every day, though our twenty-first-century lifestyle has rendered us much more sedentary. Moving mindfully not only helps us burn more calories and maintain our health but also is a valuable opportunity to practice mindfulness in action. In chapter 6, we offer mindful ways to help you maintain the level of physical activity that you need to improve your weight and health. Included are reflections to help you create your personalized mindful-moving plan.
Mindful eating and moving are both held in a larger net of general everyday, moment-to-moment mindfulness. To enhance your rhythm of mindful living, we propose simple tools to increase your practice of mindfulness throughout your waking hours. By creating a strategic mindfulness living plan, you can turn even the most mundane chore into an opportunity to practice mindfulness and nourish yourself.
As you steadily progress in your journey toward a healthy weight, you will realize that your ability to make wholesome choices and follow a healthier lifestyle depends not only on you, but also on all that is around you. We are all connected and interdependent. What one does will affect everything and everyone else, and what everything and everyone else does will have an effect on each individual. Mindful living and weight control are not just an individual matter. We must also take collective action to make our environment less toxic and more supportive of healthy eating and active living. In the third part of the book (chapter 8), we explore ways we can help improve the environment and the community—for ourselves, our family, our friends, and future generations. By cultivating mindfulness energy, we will gain insight and understanding leading to greater compassion for all beings. It is this compassion that motivates us to take individual and collective action, creating profound change in our communities and societies to improve our well-being and the well-being of our world.
We have a finite amount of energy to spend every day before becoming exhausted. Mindfulness helps you use your energy wisely, spending it on situations, people, and causes that bring you the most joy, meaning, and peace. Mindfulness is the guiding light that already exists inside every one of us. Discover it. We beckon you to use it and let it illuminate your life in every moment. Living like this, you will find yourself savoring your life deeply. Not only will this help you achieve the healthy weight and well-being that you seek; it will bring to the surface life’s rich abundance that is so often invisible to us.
PART 1
A Buddhist Perspective on Weight Control
CHAPTER 1
Ending Your Struggle with Weight
I have been struggling with my weight all my life. I know I have to lose weight. I do not like the way I look. I do not like the way I feel. I have gone on diets, tried diligently to exercise, lost the weight, and had it all come back in no time. I’ve lost count of how many times I have gone through this yo-yo cycle of loss and gain. I am totally frustrated, ashamed of myself, anxious and overwhelmed about my weight. I am tired of carrying this extra weight around. I do not feel good. Every day is a struggle for me. Every night is a nightmare. I have diabetes now, and I am really worried. I fear that I will not be around to see my children grow up. I am here because I do not want to give up. There must be a way out of this suffering.
—Participant in a mindfulness retreat
THIS WOMAN IS NOT alone. Everywhere you turn—from television, magazines, and Web sites to newspapers and radio—you see, read, or hear stories about the U.S. population’s frustrating struggle to lose weight. Two out of three adults in the United States are overweight, and one out of three is obese,¹ more than double the rate of obesity in the late 1970s. In scientific terms, we are in the middle of an obesity pandemic, a state of extreme weight gain that is overtaking not only the United States but also much of the globe. This steep rise in obesity over the past thirty years has no parallel in our history, and if we do not change our current trends, the numbers will continue to rise.
And this is largely because our society has become toxic in a way that experts call obesigenic.
We are surrounded by societal forces that drive us to eat more and move less. And the natural result is weight gain, obesity, and the myriad health and emotional problems that go along with them. Yes, it’s ultimately a personal decision to eat more than one needs and to not exercise enough, but it’s also nearly impossible to escape the pressures around us that lead to unhealthy behaviors. Bombarded day in and day out by unhealthy outside influences, we easily become dissociated from what our bodies truly need and truly want.
Just think of the food court at the local shopping mall. It’s a feast of choices that can overwhelm the senses. You see and smell foods that are savory as well as those that are sweet—steak sizzling in teriyaki sauce, oven-fresh pizza, hot cinnamon buns drizzled with snow-white icing, rich coffee confections infused with sugar syrup and topped with cream. The abundance of aromas, colors, and sounds awaken your palate and your urge to eat. In and of itself this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—who doesn’t love the look and smell of delicious food?—but it often spurs us to eat automatically whether we’re actually hungry or not. Before we know it, we’ve eaten a supersized meal that has two-thirds of the calories we need in one day—and we weren’t even hungry to begin with. When this happens day after day, week after week, what began as one enjoyable moment of eating becomes a weight problem that can affect us the rest of our lives. And this is just one of many examples of the impact our surroundings and social networks can have on our weight and health.
In our food supply, there are plenty of foods and drinks that are highly seasoned with salt, sugar, and fat. According to Dr. David Kessler, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the food and restaurant industries deliberately produce high-salt, high-sugar, and high-fat foods just so that people cannot resist them and want more. In his book The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, citing research done in behavioral neuroscience, nutrition, and psychology, he reports that foods high in fat, salt, and sugar alter the brain’s chemistry, stimulating the release of dopamine, which in turn is associated with the feeling of pleasure.² This is one of the reasons that we crave more of foods and drinks high in fat, sugar, and salt—because they are satisfying.
Advertising is another. It’s the market economy’s way to shape social norms that propel consumption and profits. And when it comes to the food industry, what they want is for consumers to truly consume—to eat as much food and to drink as many drinks as they can stomach, and then have some more. It is telling that in the United States, the food industry spends more on advertising than any other industry except the auto industry.³ Every day we’re exposed to dozens of ads for food and beverages, each one cueing us to eat and drink. And there is no place that is off-limits for eating and drinking: we eat and drink in our cars and at our desks, as we sit in meetings and as we stroll through the shopping malls. It is no wonder that we often find ourselves eating and drinking beyond what we need to satisfy our true physiological hunger. We have created a culture of constant snacking, drinking, and eating.
Now, think of our social norms around physical activity. From the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s up to our current information technology revolution, we have become increasingly sedentary as we rely more and more on machines, gadgets, and automobiles to do our work and get around. We have drastically diminished the amount of energy we burn every day through bodily movements and the use of our muscles. And with the average home in the United States having more television sets than people,⁴ we have become couch potatoes living under the spell of the television.
Together, all these societal forces push us toward eating more calories each day than we expend, and without our being aware of it. Over time these extra calories build up, and before we even realize it we’ve put on a good deal of weight. And it doesn’t take too much for this to happen. Over the course of one year, one hundred extra calories each day—the equivalent of eating one small cookie or of driving a mile instead of walking it—could end up packing ten pounds of extra fat on our bodies.
Given the huge burden these social influences place on us, how can we get back in touch with our bodies and relieve ourselves of the burden and suffering that arise from being overweight? How can each of us reach a healthier weight?
The answer almost certainly doesn’t rest with the current weight-loss industry in the United States. Weight-loss programs, diet books, and diet foods, herbs, and pills represent an estimated $59-billion industry in the United States.⁵ Thousands of fad-diet books and weight-loss plans come and go. Yet these nearly always fail people over time. You can lose weight on any diet, but there is no scientific evidence that rigid dieting will help you achieve weight loss in the long run. On the contrary, the U.S. population is growing fatter and fatter, and growing increasingly frustrated and discouraged by its failure to lose weight.
Millions are spent on research and development by pharmaceutical companies to find an obesity fix. But there is still no magic pill or formula that can help us lose weight and maintain our lost weight without side effects. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is cautious in the approval of these fat-fighting drugs. Yet those few drugs on the market that can help people shed a few pounds have unwanted side effects.⁶
The difficult truth is that the basic law of thermodynamics still holds: When we eat more calories than we expend, we gain weight. When we burn more energy through physical activity or exercise than we take in from food and drinks, we lose weight. Though this sounds basic and simple, the fact that so many of us are overweight points to the complexity of the situation. For anyone who has tried many times to lose weight, the thought of trying again may feel like an overwhelming and daunting task. Is it truly possible to change one’s habits of eating and moving, especially in the face of a society that pushes us so hard in the wrong direction? How can one begin to make these changes?
The Buddha teaches that change requires insight, and insight cannot begin until we stop and focus our attention on what is happening right in front of us. This stopping, or shamatha, allows us to rest the body and the mind. When we have calmed ourselves, we can then go on to look deeply into our current situation. We need to step off our frantic life treadmills, to stop unconsciously doing the same things over and over again that have allowed our weight to creep up. We need to stop, rest, and reflect on a constructive way forward that will end the habits that have led to our current weight issues. We need to be fully aware of what is going on in our daily living. Only then can we begin to change.