The District Chronicles

Issue date: 2/7/10 Section: Divine Intervention

Mindful eating uses Buddhist principles to stop bad habits.

(RNS) With his round cheeks and ample belly, the Buddha may rank somewhere close to sumo wrestlers on most Americans' list of go-to sources for healthy eating tips.

But the ever-present image of a fat and happy Buddha owes more to China's ideal of prosperity and ability to mass-produce figurines than to historical accuracy. In places like Japan and India, the Buddha is depicted as trim and lithe, said the Rev. Jan Chozen Bays, a Zen priest and pediatrician. He added that Buddha's teachings may be key to overcoming Americans' increasingly troubled eating habits.

Bays, who goes by the Dharma name, Chozen ("clear meditation"), is a student and teacher of "mindful eating," a practice that borrows liberally from Buddhist psychology and meditation techniques.

For calorie-counting Americans, mindful eating preaches an alert, moment-by-moment focus on emotions, food, and fullness. Buddhism teaches that "right mindfulness" is a step on the path to nirvana. Even more so, mindful eating could be a step toward a smaller waistline.

Bay said hunger is only one of several reasons people eat. Frustration, sadness, irritation, boredom, anxiety, anger and insecurity are all additional spurs to snacking.

Mindfulness can help foster an awareness of when and why these emotions arise, according to Bay, thereby sapping them of their power to control our lives.

"There's no guarantee that mindful eating will help you lose weight," said Bays, who's led mindful eating retreats in Oregon for seven years and is author of the 2009 book, "Mindful Eating." "But it will help you enter a balanced, helpful relationship with food again," he continued

Beside the Buddha, mindful eating also draws lessons and inspiration from Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Program, which introduced the masses - and the medical establishment - to a secularized form of meditation in 1979. Since then, studies have shown the positive effects of mindfulness meditation on everything from substance abuse to psoriasis, and hundreds of hospitals have established mindfulness clinics.

Dr. Jean Kristeller, a psychologist and director of the Center for the Study of Health, Religion, and Spirituality at Indiana State University, has studied meditation for 30 years. As co-founder of the Center for Mindful Eating, Kristeller has also received two grants from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of mindful eating. While the studies' results have not yet been published, Kristeller said she has seen firsthand that mindful eating works.

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