DR BRIDELL’S logical and rational & poetic and beautiful & completely guaranteed DIET
#16 Living Life at Half Speed
By the Mysterious Dr Bridell

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 Bridell’s 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.)