The spiritual dimension of losing weight

[Majed]

I think that losing weight is a deeply spiritual journey, as it requires relinquishing material desires for food, towards a higher goal, like being fit, looking better as well as having better health. 

[bazera]

Why do you think that being fit, looking better and having better health are spiritual things?

[Ramanujan]

Leo is about theoretical side of self improvment. practical side of self improvment is different

Edited 21 hours ago by Ramanujan

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Any sort of pursuit that puts us face-to-face with confronting our attachments can be a process of working on conditioning.

The more you clarify and remove the obscurity of conditioning - the closer to truth we become. Sometimes we need to expose the conditioning for awareness to do the work, so we no longer operate on an unconscious level with our consumption patterns. Sometimes much more than awareness is needed to break reflexive habits.

For many, food can be a coping mechanism. It can have a self soothing function. It also has a place in ritual. Coming together. Celebration. Deeply cultural. But it is also entangled with survival as a need.

How spiritual it is depends on what sort of relationship we are working on with food. 

If it is in any way negative - I would argue, it is worth inspection.

Edited 21 hours ago by Natasha Tori Maru

[bazera]

1 hour ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

How spiritual it is depends on what sort of relationship we are working on with food. 

I think also it depends on intentions behind changing your relationship with food. If, for example you want to cut junk food because you want to lose weight to become more attractive and get more sex, I woudn't call that spiritual. Even if you do it for health reasons. They are good for survival though. 

But as you mentioned, that whole process can become a catalyst for self-reflection if one is cognizant enough to observe the whole process in meta sort of way to see how attachment works (to food in this case), what phases do one goes through when letting go of attachment and addiction (to food), etc. It can be a whole journey of discovery and structural growth, but it's an additional layer of work on top of actually doing work to lose weight and most people don't go that far.

Most life experience can be used for those purposes for that matter. 

Edited 19 hours ago by bazera

[Lyubov]

Yes I do agree that for some people this is the case. I would say I’ve used food before to “feel better.” So a good bit of just saying no and sitting with that is practicing emotional mastery. 

[oOo]

Yeah there's a lot of truth to that, because spirituality is first and foremost about connection to our own being and builds from there.

The solution is in the absence of a healthy connection to our body.

Let's flip the switch and go from body to mind, overweight body to an overweight mind.

What is the very thing that someone struggling to accept not only the importance of critical thinking but the sheer joy in enhancing their own critical thinking? 

Their connection to it.

What kind of connection though?

Simple, the feeling itself. 

"What feeling though, because I feel hungry right now I want a Mc Donald's burger?"

Or for the mind, "What feeling though, because I am using my mind I want to right now go on TikTok?"

But are you connected with how other parts of your body feel about having a burger, and more so than the burger itself? Then its about increasing the connection with those parts.

Or for the mind, are you connected with how other parts of your mind feels about TikTok, and more so than going on TikTok itself? 

The mind is actually a far more tangible example, because the brain experiences phenomenological experiences like the "Tetris Effect"  which means mental activity transposes over anything we spend our time doing. If we spend our days doing X and continually get mental reinforcement for that, we will undoubtedly start to re-tune the brains interpretation of the world through that reality tunnel. Or if we take it more literally, is activity presently more in my prefrontal cortex, or my amygdala and what kind of activity is it? An individual needs to learn how to control the machine by simply learning how to activate one area compared to another, and the best place to start to navigate either the area of the brain or mind and the human body, is connecting with mindfulness. 

Mindfulness leads to increased sensitivity, increased sensitivity leads to a more refined perception and a more refined perception leads to a more informed capacity for working out the differences between impulses that serve us versus those impulses that don't, those that make us fat in the body or fat in the mind. And when you've got that down pat, now you have an increased sense of agency. From here, the rest is history; rinse and repeat the feedback loop and you're rock solid!

Treat yourself kindly @Majed. 

Best.

Edited 1 hour ago by oOo

[Olaf]

@Majed this is why I believe in many spiritual traditions they use fasting. I have done fasting many times and it is very spiritual. Fasting and doing a retreat will 10x your spiritual growth. When I was in a very spiritual phase I would do so much fasting. But if you go too far it is also not effective as the pain of hunger will ruin your meditation. I did one time a 7 day water fast plus retreat. It was too much, I was almost falling down and pass out and the pain of hunger was too much to actually focus on the meditation.

In a bigger metaphor you could say the same about the hunger for money, if you have so much hunger for money, nothing else matters and you can't focus on anything else. Mainly when people start making money, will they focus on other areas of life, like relationships or health or other ways to grow and improve. I think Osho said that he wouldn't teach spirituality to the poor, because what is the point of teaching someone who can't think about anything else besides food. The buddha also stopped fasting, because he realised he went too extreme and the middle path is the way. I find it so interesting how the buddha has such wisdom beyond what many people understand, it goes way way deeper then anyone can imagine.