Author's note: This is the
sixteenth installment of a column that explores a new
diet based on mental and spiritual rather than physical
paradigms. It is arranged in "bite-sized
chunks" that come to you each Friday and that build
on each other. It is sometimes called the "eat-half"
diet and is built around some surprisingly simple concepts
that require discipline and commitment (and practice)
to implement. The physical diet principles which
were presented during the first 12 weeks of the column,
will cause healthy weight loss in anyone who applies
them, and also become a "type" by which to
understand the mental and spiritual "bridling principles"
which can transform our lives. We have established that
natural appetites and passions are a gift from God,
and our objective should be to use, control, and appreciate
them. Each week now, we will apply a physical
principle from the "food diet" to a mental
concept relating to the quest for self control and the
mastery of all appetites. Compare the mental concepts
of today's column with the physical concepts or "type"
discussed back in Column 3 from the Bridell Archives.
Each week now, try to put these mental principles into
practice (while continuing to practice the physical
diet principles and continuing to lose or control your
weight). If you missed any of the earlier columns,
catch up by clicking here
to go to the Bridell archives. And remember that
Dr Bridell appreciates feedback and comments as well
as questions which you can send to him by clicking here
"Half
as much, twice as slow"
If you have been following
Dr Bridells Diet every week, you know that I believe
the laws that govern our food intake can be extended
to other areas of our lives. In many instances, our
spiritual lives can be mirrored in our physical situations.
Laws that govern the physical can also govern the spiritual.
The promise of the physical diet (remember from
column 3) was (and is) that as you cut the quantity
intake of food by half, your body will start desiring
and demanding better quality in what you do put in your
mouth. If you seek out quality nutrients, junk and
fast food will look less appetizing, and vegetables
and fruit will look better and better.
The same principle works
with your mind. As you cut some of the trash and
non-nourishing stuff out of your life (simplify,
as discussed last week), your soul will gradually begin
to appreciate and even crave more quality in
your activities, your entertainment, your interests,
and your relationships.
In the physical diet, the key to eating half as much
is to eat twice as slow. Slow down the way you
eat smaller bites, more chewing, savoring each morsel,
and your body rewards you by enjoying it more, craving
quality, and getting fitter and stronger. In life
we need to do the same thing. As you slow down
and simplify the way you live and the way you think,
your brain rewards you by producing better ideas and
purer thought, noticing more beauty, and becoming more
perceptive and more aware.
Today's Too-Fast World
Think about the world we live in today. The pace
of life has become so fast. We rush from one thing
to the next without taking time to notice or even to
think. Some of us remember slower times, when evenings
were long and there was time to sit and talk and even
have dinner together, when kids had time to just play
and create, when weekends were a time to relax and recharge,
and when summer had some lazy, hazy days.
Today, the average meal
at McDonald's takes 11 minutes to consume, our evenings
are busier than our days, our kids are as over scheduled
as we are, and we have developed what Guy Claxton, a
British psychologist, calls "an inner pschology
of speed, of saving time and maximizing efficiency,
which is getting stronger by the day." Everything
seems to be geared to getting more done in less time.
Carl Honore, in his book In Praise of Slowness,
puts it in perspective when he honors speed but also
worries about it:
Speed has helped to remake
our world in ways that are wonderful and liberating.
Who wants to live without the Internet or jet travel?
The problem is that our love of speed, our obsession
with doing more and more in less and less time, has
gone too far; it has turned into an addiction, a kind
of idolatry.
Even when speed starts
to backfire, we invoke the go-faster gospel. Falling
behind at work? Get a quicker Internet connection.
No time for that novel you got at Christmas? Learn
to speed read. Diet not working? Try liposuction.
Too busy to cook? Buy a microwave.
And yet some things cannot,
should not, be sped up. They take time, they need
slowness. When you accelerate things that should
not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down,
there is a price to pay."
One London based life-coach
puts it this way: "Burnout used to be something
you mainly found in people over forty. Now I'm seeing
men and women in their thirties, and even in their twenties,
who are completely burned out." Perhaps we
would do well to remember what Gandhi said: "There
is more to life than increasing its speed."
Even our kids, who used
to have both time and spontaneity, are now over-programmed.
A recent cartoon said it all: two little girls are standing
at the school bus stop, each clutching a personal planner.
One says to the other "OK, I'll move ballet back
an hour, reschedule gymnastics, and cancel piano. You
shift your violin lesson to Thursday and skip soccer
practice. That gives us from 3:15 to 3:45 on Wednesday
the 16th to play."
Another cartoon, this one
in the New Yorker, shows two primary school boys
walking down a street, books under their arms, baseball
caps on their heads. With a world weariness beyond
their years, one mutters to the other: "So many
toys so little unstructured time."
The culture of hurry gets
even more intense for college students. The stress
of trying to do everything and do it all fast got so
intense at Harvard that the Dean of the Undergraduate
school, Harry Lewis, wrote an open letter that now goes
out to every first-year Harvard student. The title
of the letter is "Slow Down."
During the course of seven
pages, Lewis makes the case for getting more out of
university and life by doing less. He urges
students to think twice about racing through their degrees
and to avoid piling on too many extracurricular activities.
Do fewer things and take the time to make the most of
them, he says, and remember that doing nothing at times,
and being slow is an essential part of good thinking.
"Empty time is not
a vacuum to be filled," writes the Dean. "It
is the thing that enables the other things on your mind
to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in
the 4X4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other
fifteen pieces around."
Slowing Down
The lessons of the New Testament story of Mary and Martha
may never have been more relevant than it is now.
We find ourselves like Jesus described Martha "cumbered
about" and "careful and concerned about many
things," trying to do everything for everyone,
and missing what really matters; finding ourselves unable
to, like Mary "choose the best part."
What we need to do is to consciously slow down.
And slowing down physically can help us slow down mentally.
Make yourself walk a little slower and notice a little
more, drive a little slower and be more aware of what
is around you. You will only lose a few seconds,
and you will start to win the battle against haste and
hurry. The old saying "haste makes waste"
is true. Hurrying all the time wastes our peace
and wrests the quality from our lives. How many
times a day do we say "hurry" to our kids
(or to ourselves)?
Find the things that slow your mind down. For
some it is gardening. For one man I know, it is archery
the solitude of shooting arrows at a target. For many,
classical music is a soother and a slower of their souls.
We said earlier that everything seems to be geared
to getting more done in less time. Well, think
for a minute about all of your various appetites as
interlocking gears, some bigger, some smaller, that
turn together. Appetites for food, for success,
for recognition, for wealth, for sex, for control, for
status all are gears turning.
What is the "drive
gear, the one that powers all the others? Perhaps
it is the appetite for hurry, for haste, for speed.
We want everything faster. We overload our lives
and think the way to get everything done is to do hurry
more. That sense of pace feeds each of our appetites
and lets all of them pull harder on us.
If we can slow down some of those interlocking gears,
it begins to slow them all down, and to resist the drive
gear of hurry and haste. Our hunger for food,
the appetite that serves as such a good metaphor for
all the others, is a good place to start. By sipping
and savoring small bites and eating half, we change
the unhealthy rush of quick-quantity refueling to a
pleasurable tasting of quality. And the very process
of slowing down that gear begins to slow down the others.
We taste, and while we are tasting, we start seeing
more and hearing more, and thinking more.
Then, if you can slow down eating, you start to feel
that you can slow down other things. Let that
kiss for your loved one take a little longer.
Look into a person's eyes and hold the hand a half second
longer when you greet someone. Sit down and take a look
around you for a moment before you start a piece of
work.
Slow Thinking
Fast thinking, the kind of thinking we do under pressure
(when the clock is ticking), often produces tunnel vision
and reduces our awareness of the things around us.
Slow thinking is intuitive and creative. When
we slow down and give ideas time to simmer at their
own pace, it yields rich and subtle insights. It leads
to lateral thinking and serendipity.
The scriptures tell us
to "be still and know...." Plato believed
that the highest form of leisure was to be still and
receptive to the world. Franz Kafka put it this
way: "You don't need to leave your room. Remain
sitting at your table and listen. Don't even listen,
simply wait. Don't even wait; be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.
It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your
feet."
As the mind slows down, one begins to discover something
that is hard to explain logically, but wonderful to
feel. It is "the speed of going slow."
It is the seeming incongruity that as you slow down
and become more peaceful and aware, you actually get
where you are going or finish what you need to more
easily and somehow more quickly. The lights turn
green for you, the people you need answer their phone,
and life takes on a more pleasant rhythm. Rudyard Kipling
wrote of keeping your head while all about you are losing
theirs. Today, we need to learn to keep our cool
while all around us are losing theirs, and to stay slow
inside even as we work to meet a deadline or to get
the children to school on time.
The speed of going slow is not something one learns
overnight, or something that works all the time.
But it is something one can learn and something one
can practice. Eat slowly, walk slowly, think slowly,
try for more awareness and perspective, taste more,
see more, feel more, and look for more quality and less
quantity in your activities, your relationships, and
your goals as well as in your food.
Remember that Dr. Bridell appreciates feedback and comments
as well as questions, all of which you can send directly
to him/her by clicking here, At this juncture,
as we move from the physical to the mental, the good
Doctor would be especially appreciative of your feedback
on how the eat half diet and it's principles are working
for you so far. (If you have been "implementing",
tell her/him how much weight you have lost and if you
feel better, along with any comments or questions you
have on the mental application of some of the physical
diet principles.)
