Macroneurotic

Sometimes I like to go into the co-op and rock a diva attitude, just to counterbalance all the hippie.  But that's mostly because, as an ex-Lola Granola, I'm rebelling against my former rebellion.  Like a Jack Mormon who drinks like a fish, swears like a sailor and wears any goddamn underwear he likes, I have renounced patchouli for Chanel No. 5 and Earth shoes for stilettos because middle age.

And also because I don't want to limit my life or revolve my activities around what I can and cannot eat.  There's a reason why my forebears stopped keeping kosher, especially after they moved to the Caribbean.  It's difficult to be flexible amid a diverse populace when food, the universal currency of friendship and hospitality, becomes imprisoned in a rigid construct.  As a friend put it, "Beware of anyone who has more 'nos' than 'yeses.'"

A colleague who offered trauma healing services in Bosnia in the wake of the 1990s Balkans war told me that, while she did not drink coffee at home in the U.S., she would never refuse a sip or two from the refugees living in tent camps who boiled a pot just for her whenever she arrived.  She said she would not deny anything from those generous, destitute souls unless it would make her deathly ill.  I thought of her sharing that thick, sludgy Eastern Mediterranean coffee, poured into whatever stray vessels could be scrounged from around the camp, and of the women who served her and sat with her and talked like normal friends on an average day because they needed that social engagement as much as they needed air.

Those reassuring, everyday comforts - archetypal in their ability to evoke the natural rhythm of home - are the things many people say they miss the most in times of war, famine and natural disaster.  I realized then that my friend's decision to partake rather than abstain was one of the greatest acts of lovingkindness that she could have offered.  I later thought of her when I would serve and share microwave popcorn with the inner city teens in my after school art program.  It was nuked, full of GMOs and not organic.  It may not have actually even been food.  And it might have been the only thing some of those students ate all day.

I was not always so accommodating with what I ate.  I was, in fact and for far too long, the annoying second cousin once removed to the Nitemare Hippy Girl that Beck so cleverly drones on about on his first major label album.  Back in the day, when I was completely new to the health food scene, I asked a waiter at a Boston organic cafe for some soy milk for my coffee.  I was aghast when he said they didn't have any, so I canceled the coffee, which I refused to drink with even a splash of cow's milk for no other reason than that I had become a self-righteous college-age food fundamentalist.  He told me something I will never forget: "Don't be macroneurotic."

As Buddhist nun, author and teacher Pema Chödrön puts it, “We are all capable of becoming fundamentalists because we get addicted to other people's wrongness.”  I was one of those sudden converts to macroneurosis, and addicted to others' wrongness I was, to the tenth power.  I wish I could say this was due to a lightening bolt spiritual experience involving some deep ethical transformation.  True, I had taken a 101 survey course in Eastern religions freshman year and was uncomfortably struck by Buddha's description of animals as "fellow flesh."  But really it was the fact that I was hopelessly codependent on my first love away from home, and he was a sort-of vegetarian, meaning he didn't eat red meat (the scientific term for this is lacto-ovo-avian-pescatarian a.k.a. poser).  Also, the best dining hall on campus was the vegetarian one, outside of which, at any given meal time, countless tofu-eating badasses would be chain smoking in leather biker jackets and nubuck motorcycle boots just before entering for their seitan stroganoff.  

One of those smoking vegetarians, a street smart Chicago kid, called me out as I was bemoaning over my quinoa the psychological torture of dinner out with my family back home, during which everyone ordered veal - baby cows in bondage! - parmigiana.  Affronted, I refused to speak to him for weeks, until there was nowhere else at "Veggie" to sit other than directly across from him, and I couldn't help but chat him up because I haven't had a silent meal since I had strep in fourth grade.  Not long after, a Zen teacher in the Tibetan tradition, which recognizes that Himalayan people need red meat lest they die of altitude-induced anemic hypothermia, warned us students against the spiritual narcissism of believing we are superior to others just because we meditate, chant and take the Four Great Vows.  She said, "When you're out in the world, partake in whatever others are doing.  Don't put yourself above. If they're having a burger, have a burger with them."  As mentioned earlier, this advice served me well years later when, working with various impoverished populations, I joined them in a bite or two of whatever they were having due to the immense honor it was that they were inviting me to share in what very little they had.

The other crucial ego-deflating piece around my so-called conscious eating was that I had worked too hard on recovering from an eating disorder to make a constant issue out of food.  The entire point of getting help for that primal dysfunction was, for me, to restore a normative relationship with food, to practice what Chödrön describes as "no big deal."  I simply could not join the ranks of compulsively aisle-blocking label-readers at Whole Foods and have the freedom I wished to experience around eating.  Because spiritual practice is the foundation of my recovery, I also had to give up any notion of arrogance around what people eat, which often amounts to an insidious form of classism in which the privileged get to indulge in thinly-veiled snobbery around the fact that we can afford to pay $227 for three bottles of supplements and a bag of micro greens while the People of Walmart save their pennies for the $1 value menu at BK.

I was once one of those value menu people, back when my working mother was going through some financial hardship and the only eating out we did was during $0.99 burger week at a chain fast food joint.  During a windfall, I might actually get two 99-cent burgers and maybe share some fries.  Downing two burgers in one sitting was nothing to me, even at the age of 8.  I have always been a big eater.  From as far back as I remember, I loved to eat, I liked pretty much everything, and I always went for seconds.  There was a saying in our family: "Take all you want, but eat all you take."  When I was 9, the kindly proprietor of an all-you-can-eat buffet in the small Appalachian mountain town where my grandmother lived finally broke down and told her, as politely as possible, that he would start charging the adult rate for my lunches if I kept on eating, and I quote, "like a truck driver."

The thing is, I was never overweight.  I had always been petite in bone structure and pretty much a normal weight for my size.  I must have had the metabolism of a rabid hummingbird to eat as much as I did and remain slender.  Until adolescence, that is.  Then, suddenly I sprouted more than the standard girly curves and could not understand for the life of me what the hell had happened to the sweet buy-now-pay-never deal I had always had.

Food at that point became my sworn enemy.  Well, perhaps more like a frenemy, since I needed it to live.  But once my hormones changed at puberty, I always wanted more to eat than my body could metabolize without gaining weight, and then I'd regret my overindulgence and futilely attempt to pay for it with some crazy deprivation diet, punishing exercise or just plain old starvation.  Bear with me: I grew up in Miami, where every day is bikini season (because whole piece bathing suits are for swim teams and grannies) and the entire purpose of human life is to be impossibly, overwhelmingly, Photoshopped sexy at every waking moment, even when blowing your nose, cleaning the toilet or battling dysentery.  My disordered eating was never life-threatening, but I did at one point weigh 95 pounds on a 5'4" frame and didn't get a period for a couple of years due to an excessively low BMI.  As denial would have it, I was genuinely shocked when the high school blood drive nurses told me I was too thin to donate, and was convinced my doctor was being a drama queen as she worried about the possibility of my developing osteoporosis later in life if I didn't get enough fat back on my body to menstruate.

The first order of business in rebalancing my relationship to food was to cultivate a regular rhythm of three squares and a snack on a daily basis.  This meant for a time that I needed to eliminate what are sometimes called "trigger foods" - the treats and noshes that, once started on, couldn't be stopped until the container was viciously violated, down to the last addictive crumb, when you realize why the fuck didn't I enjoy this more when it was still halfway full and did I even taste anything during this whole entire wolverine binge and how many calories are in a crumb anyway goddammit I need to go work out where's one of those 24-hour gyms when you need one.

It took a solid two years before my eating patterns had stabilized enough - one part behavioral habituation, three parts intensive psychic transformation - to venture into slow gradations of flexibility, like eating reasonably healthy sandwiches and pizza (dude, onions are totally vegetables) instead of a stingy dollop of cottage cheese on a sad wilted leaf of rubbery iceberg lettuce.  It was actually during this time that I lost too much weight, mostly because the diet mentality had brainwashed me into believing that bread and chips constituted the Axis Powers of Butt Fat Unlovability.  So I ate carbs in half portions and became semi-skeletal.  But I had to start somewhere.  I knew I couldn't stay on a diet forever, even if it had been convincingly rebranded as a "food plan," and still be as portable as I wished to be in my life.  I was about to go to college, and the last thing I wanted was to make a spectacle of myself by weighing my chicken patty from the cafeteria line with a postal scale.  My crazed teenage binges and diets drew enough unwanted attention around eating weirdness for a lifetime.

I actually began to experience balance around my relationship with food during my college years, right around the time that the smoking vegetarian told me to lighten up about carnivores and my Zen teacher gave her "nothing special" dharma talk.  While backpacking during a summer internship at a national park in the Rockies, the revelation that food is fuel for the body, that refrigerators and restaurants are like gas stations, not opium dens, dawned on me like sunrise over the Grand Canyon trail I was hiking.  I was living in my body in an entirely new paradigm as I used it to descend canyons, climb mountains, stretch into asana twists and ride my bike for transportation around the city where I lived.  As opposed to my body's primary function being to inertly lay on the beach looking sculptural because Miami.

It was also during that time that I discovered the power of yoga practice, breathing meditations and body-centered psychotherapy to relieve me from the constant imprisonment of craving.  There were several hundred PSI of repressed trauma and unmet needs behind my addictive behaviors that needed to be embraced, expressed and integrated before I got even the beginnings of relief from their grip.  However, once I attuned more deeply to my body in an internally-connected way, eating became simply easier.  The satiation meter on my belly became palpable, perhaps for the first time in conscious memory, and I could sense what my body needed to eat from a physiological, rather than emotionally reactive, standpoint.  That was 25 years ago, and I have been practicing intuitive eating ever since, with few setbacks, mostly involving under-eating during times of acute grief or anxiety.  I now know to keep high-protein soft foods like nut butters in my pantry so I don't lose weight or vital nutrition when I'm too upset to chew, and I've been neither underweight nor overweight for years.

Recently, I have had to make dietary concessions for some unfortunate allergies developed later in life, which has led me to a still-robust but mostly anti-inflammatory diet.  This involves minimal gluten, sugars, fermented foods and acidic fruits.  Not because I want to lose weight or micromanage my food or be the special one when ordering out, but because I like breathing.  Breathing rocks.  But even when my allergies suck ass and I'd prefer decapitation over the pounding migraine cursing my sinuses for days on end, I will not go on a cleanse. In fact, frequent flyers of nutritional cleanses often strike me as the absolute last people who need them.  Unless you're "cleansing" because you're an IV drug user, have been in a major industrial accident in the past three years or have a serious chronic illness, you may be falling into the insidious pattern of orthorexia, a more recently recognized eating disorder characterized by perfectionism around the perceived "purity" of the food one eats. I personally cannot afford to go down that road because I'm pretty sure it will lead me right back into the unforgiving arms of macroneurosis - or worse.  I am confident that routine exhaling, armpit sweat, urination, peristalsis and the occasional bout of food poisoning offer my body sufficient detoxing on a routine basis to keep me going.

More recently, I've made the shift from "no big deal" eating to eating as a sensory gratitude meditation, pausing to deeply appreciate food for its presentation and aroma as much for its taste and texture.  A recent prayer before meals involves bowing my head toward my plate and taking a deep breath through my nose to fully appreciate, by way of my sense of smell, the blessing of food as a present-moment experience.  My husband was astonished when I taught him to place food or drink on different parts of his mouth to experience the spectrum of flavor in each bite or sip, not to be pretentious about bouquets and finishes but simply to slow down and savor.  Harvard-trained clinical psychologist and author Joan Borysenko states that her "all-time favorite meditation is a small, moist piece of chocolate cake eaten with exquisite attention and tremendous gratitude.  Any time that we are fully present in the moment, we are meditating.  We are free from limitations of thought and at one with the river of life."  I have tried Borysenko's meditation with a variety of food (mostly savory to minimize metabolism-spiking sugars) and it truly is a portal to the divine presence of now.  It's also loads more fun than straight up zazen.

You could say that I'm a foodie recovering from eating disorder, which in and of itself is nothing short of a miracle.  Nowadays, food is neither my best friend nor my worst enemy.  It doesn't love me unconditionally or keep me company when I'm sad.  It is not my mother, lover or secret admirer.  Nor is it a mocking torturer or a serpentine siren song.  It is one aspect of my sustenance, one facet of my pleasure, one domain of my worship.  The long and winding road has led me to the door where I started, yet I know the place for the first time.

I suppose my divatude at the juice bar is in some ways a celebration of the free range, fair trade joy I now experience around food and eating, something I never thought would be possible for me.  If you see me there, I'll be rocking that sass about my dirty chai indulgence while you rock yours about your cayenne lemonade fast. And we will toast one another with our overpriced organic concoctions because, either way, peristalsis.