Savor summary

In order to overcome your unhealthy eating habits, you need to transform your life. To do this, it is best to be part of a supportive community who’ll help you make this transformation. It is also important to try for small successes rather than to try taking quantum leaps.

Buddhist teachings help you to make this transformation in four basic steps:

Most of us go through our daily lives being very distracted by thoughts of the past and the future. Such thoughts tend to overwhelm us with worries, concerns and regrets. This means that we struggle to focus our attention on the present moment.

This lack of awareness of the present moment is called mindlessness. When we live mindlessly, it’s a bit like operating on autopilot, and operating on autopilot prevents us from noticing feelings, desires and habits as they develop in us.

We are used to thinking of ourselves individualistically, like separate islands disconnected from others and from our environment. But this belief is an illusion – we are, in fact, all connected.

Consider how eating a simple orange can connect you to the entire world: the orange grows on a tree that someone has planted; the tree grows out of the soil, with the help of water and sunlight; many people are involved in picking, packing and transporting the fruit, and all of them are influenced in turn by numerous other people. In this way, everything and everyone is ultimately connected to the orange.

Buddhism recognizes that “you are more than what you eat.” Rather than just considering how we feed our bodies with food, we must also consider how we feed our minds.

One of the things that feed our minds is sense impressions – for example, the sights, sounds and smells received through our sense organs. Our minds can be fed with certain senses intentionally, as demonstrated in the way the mass media and advertisements create many sense impressions to direct at us, some of which make us happier and more compassionate, and others of which make us anxious, angry or sad.

Unfortunately, the market for weight-loss diets is full of contradictory advice. For example, some diets claim that carbohydrates are bad, while others claim that you can eat as many carbs as you like because it’s actually fats you should worry about! 

In fact, it is best to ignore these extreme diets and instead learn from modern nutritional science, which teaches that, rather than eliminate an important macronutrient from your diet, you should focus on the quality – and not just the quantity – of these nutrients: choose foods with good carbs, good proteins and good fats, not bad ones. 

No matter what “miracle” cures are advertised on the market, the fact remains that you have to balance energy-in and energy-out to maintain a healthy weight, which means you need to exercise to burn off calories; and the harder and longer you work out, the more weight you will lose.

In addition to helping you lose weight, regular exercise can bring many other health benefits. In adults, it lowers the risk of diabetes, heart disease and other conditions. It also boosts mood, reduces stress and extends your life. In fact, the weight-loss pills and programs on the market may claim to be “the perfect cure,” but regular exercise is the closest to a magic potion that you can get!

We all have habits that cause us to do things that we know we shouldn’t do, such as unhealthy night-time snacking. If you want to transform your life, you need to try to conquer those bad habits.

The first thing you should do is change the habits that stop you from being mindful of the present moment. For example, if you realize that you have a habit of watching TV mindlessly for hours, then try to stop yourself as you reach for the remote control, breathe calmly, and ask, “Why am I about to watch television?”

There is a wealth of good advice telling you how to sustainably lose weight; however, it’s not always that easy to put it into practice. The best way to keep yourself on track and really make changes in your life is to keep a written record of your goals and progress.

These records can be separated into an InEating strategy and an InMoving strategy.

The main message of this book is:

The obesity problem in modern society cannot be solved by fad diets. These neglect the important societal problems which cause us to overeat and refrain from exercise. Only by tackling these problems can we hope to live a healthier lifestyle. The Buddhist approach provides us with a solution: it allows us to truly reflect on all the problems that cause us to become unhealthy, and helps us deal with them by living only in the present moment. Combined with modern nutritional science, it provides the best way to living a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.

A healthy diet tip: Whole grains are the perfect food for having a healthy lifestyle.

If you want to eat a healthy diet, whole grains are a great place to start. Whole grains are particularly good for your health, possibly because of their specific combination of nutrients, which protects you against heart disease, diabetes and cancer.