About This Book
The rst part of Savor (chapters 1 through 4) provides a Buddhist perspective on weight control and well-being. We begin the book by o ering you a new way of looking at your weight problem—through the lens of the Four Noble Truths, the most fundamental Buddhist teaching. You rst need to acknowledge that you have a weight problem and re ect 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 e ective path toward a healthier way of living and a healthier weight.
Next, we o er 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 e ort 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 a ects your weight and all other aspects of your daily life. Diet books typically focus only on how foods immediately bene t the body and rarely address the psychosocial, cultural, and environmental factors that a ect 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 in uenced 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 di culty with weight, an important step is to learn to empower yourself to transform this di culty. 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 e ective 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 con dence to recognize the nature and cause of your su ering 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 scienti c primer on healthy eating and drinking, to help you decide what to eat and drink, and to o er 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- rst-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 o er 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 a ect everything and everyone else, and what everything and everyone else does will have an e ect 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 nite 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 nd 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.
