| THE PHILOSOPHY OF FAT |
Stevan Orescan
Fat is a mode of consciousness that pervades throughout the whole world, a religion with the
refrigerator as the temple of transmutation and food as the Blessed Sacrament. Fat is not just a
personal matter having to do with health or beauty but is a way of approaching life that affects our
relationships, the environment, ecology, education, war, finance, drug and alcohol addiction and a
host of other problems that the world suffers from.
From a Buddhist Point of view fat is the result of clinging, of selfish desire for that which is
unattainable, the elusive more that can never be satisfied. It is one of the four blemishes of
character that must be eliminated before transformation is possible. Greed, sensuality, ill will and
delusion are all related to the problem of fat. Watch closely as a fat person eats and one can see all
of these characteristics in how the food is approached, taken in, masticated, swallowed and finished
with. All of these actions are usually done in a state of mindlessness; not paying attention to what
they are doing.
A fat man went to see an old monk living in the forest. Please venerable sir, won’t you help
me. I am terribly fat and in poor health because of it. I eat constantly and think only of food.
All day, in the middle of the night, junk food, sugar, starch, Big Macs, candy, Häagen-Dazs
ice cream, all garbage that I know is not good for me but I just can’t help myself. I have
great difficulty breathing, I have heart palpitations, diabetes, bad breath, I don’t sleep well,
my lower back and joints are painful, I sweat profusely, and my feet are always swollen. I’m
ashamed to put on a bathing suit and can’t stand to look at myself in the mirror. Girls aren’t
attracted to me, I look ugly, I feel ugly and I am so depressed I just want to die. Please
venerable sir, you are my last hope, if you can’t help me to stop eating I know that I will
surely die soon.
You are going to die anyway, the old monk replied, what difference does it make if you live
a few weeks or a few months longer more or less? Keep eating all you want, as many Big
Macs as your palpitating heart desires, but only with one difference. Make your eating a
meditation. If the Japanese can make tea drinking into a meditation you can make eating
Big Macs and all the rest into a meditation. Eat with mindfulness. When standing in line for
your food under the golden arches observe how it is being cooked and who is serving you.
Does he or she have a healthy looking body? Healthy skin and complexion? Take the food
from their hands. Clean or dirty? Just observe without judging. Unwrap the Big Mac. Hear
the paper crinkle. Observe your excitement, your anticipation of the pleasure you are about
to experience. Does your mouth water? Take in the smell. Pinch the pasty, processed white
bun that’s devoid of all nutrition, mush it between your fingers, observe the grease from the
dead cow meat, take a bite, don’t gobble, chew slowly, forty times before you swallow,
watch in your mind’s eye the greasy meat, the soft white bread as it makes it’s passage down
your throat into your stomach, watch as the grease hardens into a plaque like substance and
adheres to the lining of your arteries, watch as the fat accumulates around your heart
muscles making your breathing difficult, as you chew think of the animal that has been
slaughtered, lifted up by his hind feet and bashed in the skull sending the contents of his
brain rushing up his spinal cord and into all his blood vessels and infiltrating the flesh quite
possibly with mad cow disease or think of the shit eating pig with trichinosis worms wiggling
their way into your bloodstream and up into the delicate tissue of your brain as you eat your
morning bacon or ham and eggs. Did the cooking kill all those microscopic creepy little
worms? Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. Keep all of these pictures in your mind’s eye as
you chew and swallow, watching as your body swells up to unseemly, explosive proportions,
have a greasy French fry that’s been deep fried in cheap, saturated oil, a sip of your white,
sugar laced coke, eat, eat, yummy, yummy, you are going to die anyway, eat drink and be
merry if that’s what you want. But if that’s not what you want, and if you are a human being
with reasonable intelligence and sensitivity and if you always eat with mindfulness, being
observant and fully consciousness of what you are putting into your body, soon you will see
and understand from the deepest core of your being that your eating habits are stupid and
self destructive and they will just drop away on their own. Trust me. I too was a fatty in my
early life. Mindfulness…. it is the secret of life.
My friend Edwin, a 350 pound genius and my cyber guru says that my diet takes will power that
most people don’t have.
He is also afraid that if he loses 100 pounds some of that weight will come off of his brain and he
won’t be a genius anymore. I assure him that only the fat will come off leaving his brain lighter and
less contaminated, undefiled, almost virginal, thus allowing the neurons to fire faster and cleaner
resulting in more smarts, not less.
“Most people prefer the Beverly Hills diet or other glamorous ones that the movie stars and Oprah
use.”
“What I am explaining to you is not a diet but a way of life, to be fully alive to the moment, to be
conscious of what and who you are and to be aware of your behavior all the time. No will power
whatsoever is needed,” I reply, “only the practice of mindfulness, and besides those diets don’t
seem to work very well for Oprah, she bounces back and forth like a basketball.”
“You’re always railing against obese people, what do you have against us?”
“I don’t have anything against fat people as such, but I have little sympathy for greed, excess,
waste, gluttony, sloth insensitivity, selfishness and a few other things that contribute to the world’s
imbalance. The Bhagavata, one of India’s ancient scriptures, says that if man takes more than
enough food needed to sustain his life he is a criminal and should be treated as such. A glutton
steals from his less fortunate brother, people of excess like King Farouk, Marlon Brando, Ariel
Sharon; vulgar people breed vulgar appetites…
“If you were the fuehrer you’d have all obese people in concentration camps called Phatcau
instead of Dachau and melt our excess poundage down to make candles and soap.”
“If I were the fuehrer I would indeed create Camp Phatcau and round up all you fatties and put
everyone on a 1000 calorie vegetarian diet, make you work in the vegetable garden two hours a
day, meditate and do yoga four hours a day and attend nutrition and history classes that taught you
about balanced eating and world hunger along with movies that showed you the starving Ethiopians
and people from Biafra. Your right forearm would be tattooed with your ideal weight and you
wouldn’t be released until you achieved it and then the phat police would come around and check
on you every so often and if you deviated by 5 pounds then back you would go. And people like
your mother and other unconscious adults that are responsible for stuffing their children with
unhealthy food would be treated with a little harsher kind of behavior modification, like eating 40
Big Macs at a time, wearing their clothes backwards and walking around the compound chanting, I
am a shit bird, I am a shit bird, like they made us do in the Marine Corps when we goofed up or
fell behind on the obstacle course. And we would have therapy sessions as well since all fatties
are unhappy neurotics.”
“Can’t we have anything to take our mind off of food, won’t there even be a little something to
nibble on?” Edwin asked.
“Absolutely not, no nibbling, knoshing, snacking, no candy or coke machines, nothing…. Well,
maybe a carrot or a celery stalk.”
“How about sex?”
“Sex? Yes, you can have all the sex you want, but only regular sex, no Hannibal Lecter stuff; a little
smelling, tasting, biting, licking and sucking will be okay but no blood. These are natural urges;
touching, sensuality, loving closeness and when we deny them we sublimate these needs by eating
too much, or drinking or drugging or smoking too much, so by all means, at Camp Phatcau we will
not deny the needs of the body since comfort and healing result when we touch and are touched in
return. It’s when we disconnect the body from these basic needs that sickness and neurosis results.
If those basic needs are satisfied you will not want to overeat.
“We’ll all be so hungry it will be awfully hard not to take a bite out of our partner.”
“No it won’t because after a while you’ll feel full of love and light, that your cup will runneth over
and you’ll feel thin and beautiful and once that happens the world will be wonderful and you’ll never
want to go back to your old ways again. You won’t have to compensate for your emotional
deprivation by overeating because once the self awakening happens there is no going back to that
voracious hunger that was an unconscious attempt to fill your emptiness.
Obesity is the result of consuming more calories than the body burns. You will gain weight if you
eat more calories than you need in lettuce and tomatoes and you will lose weight if you eat less
calories than you need in chocolate cream pie.
Genetic and glandular factors enter into the equation rarely. Most people simply eat too much and
especially in the United States where people are unhappy, anxiety ridden and neurotic as a result of
having too much. Doesn’t that seem strange? One would think it would be just the opposite.
In India, where I live most of the time, there are fat people but not anywhere as prevalent as in the
west. People there use their bodies more; they walk, they bicycle, they squat to sit, they squat to
shit, they do yoga, they do more physical work out of necessity, the muscles are used, the heart and
lungs are put through their paces daily. Many people, even in the cities, do not have refrigerators,
they go to the market every morning to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, very little
refined food, and as a predominately vegetarian country animal products are minimally consumed
thus reducing heart disease and colon and rectal cancer and all the other ailments that result from an
animal based diet. Unfortunately, now with India’s burgeoning middle class, much of that is
changing as more packaged and processed foods show up on the busy young exec’s table.
According to Hindu philosophy, all worldly things possess common characteristics that are capable
of producing pleasure, pain, and indifference. These common characteristics are called gunas and
are respectively; Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. The entire world of objects contains these three
qualities including food.
Sattva literally means real or existent and is responsible for the manifestations of consciousness. It
is white, light and bright, illuminating. Luminosity, pleasure, happiness, contentment and bliss are all
due to it. It is a quality in mother’s milk, fruit, vegetables and whole grains.
Rajas, which literally means foulness, is the principle of motion, It produces pain. Restless activity,
feverish effort and wild stimulation are its result. It is mobile and stimulating and its color is red. It is
contained in red meat and other flesh foods as well as eggs, cheese, sugar and spices
Tamas, which literally means darkness, is the principle of inertia. It produces apathy and
indifference. Ignorance sloth, confusion, bewilderment, passivity and negativity are its results. It is
heavy and enveloping and as such is opposed to Sattva. It is also opposed to Rajas as it arrests
activity. It’s color is dark or black. It is the quality in alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and certain fermented
and root foods, the flesh of dogs, cats, rats, sea slugs, bottom feeders and pigs.
These three gunas are never separate. They conflict but cooperate with each other and are always
intermingled. However, the nature of a thing, or a food, is determined by the preponderance of
these characteristics. They are either good, bad or indifferent, intelligent, active or slothful, pure,
impure or neutral.
The nature of the three gunas is beautifully expressed in an ancient Hindu poem. The poet says
that the eyes of the beloved are red, white and dark, and are full of nectar, intoxication and poison;
with the results that once they pierce the heart of the lover he experiences the joy of life, the agony
of restlessness and the inertia of death. The recollection of the beloved gives him joy and makes life
worth living; separation
causes acute pain and makes him restless; intensity of love makes him forget everything and he
become inactive, unconscious and almost dead. Sattva is white and like nectar gives joy; rajas is
red and is like intoxication and gives pain; tamas is dark and is like poison and produces
unconsciousness.
As with love, so with food. For the fat person opening the refrigerator door is like opening the
portals of paradise, to that temple of transformation where all problems will momentarily be solved,
when one will feel warm, loved and complete as only a full stomach, or love, can make one feel
complete. Each time you open that door is a moment of truth. Each time your fat fingers grab that
cookie and you start to lift it to your waiting and watering mouth that is a moment of truth. All we
need is love as the song says; all we need is mindfulness as our good sense tells us. Together they
can change our life. Be mindful and love yourself….and don’t touch that cookie.
refrigerator as the temple of transmutation and food as the Blessed Sacrament. Fat is not just a
personal matter having to do with health or beauty but is a way of approaching life that affects our
relationships, the environment, ecology, education, war, finance, drug and alcohol addiction and a
host of other problems that the world suffers from.
From a Buddhist Point of view fat is the result of clinging, of selfish desire for that which is
unattainable, the elusive more that can never be satisfied. It is one of the four blemishes of
character that must be eliminated before transformation is possible. Greed, sensuality, ill will and
delusion are all related to the problem of fat. Watch closely as a fat person eats and one can see all
of these characteristics in how the food is approached, taken in, masticated, swallowed and finished
with. All of these actions are usually done in a state of mindlessness; not paying attention to what
they are doing.
A fat man went to see an old monk living in the forest. Please venerable sir, won’t you help
me. I am terribly fat and in poor health because of it. I eat constantly and think only of food.
All day, in the middle of the night, junk food, sugar, starch, Big Macs, candy, Häagen-Dazs
ice cream, all garbage that I know is not good for me but I just can’t help myself. I have
great difficulty breathing, I have heart palpitations, diabetes, bad breath, I don’t sleep well,
my lower back and joints are painful, I sweat profusely, and my feet are always swollen. I’m
ashamed to put on a bathing suit and can’t stand to look at myself in the mirror. Girls aren’t
attracted to me, I look ugly, I feel ugly and I am so depressed I just want to die. Please
venerable sir, you are my last hope, if you can’t help me to stop eating I know that I will
surely die soon.
You are going to die anyway, the old monk replied, what difference does it make if you live
a few weeks or a few months longer more or less? Keep eating all you want, as many Big
Macs as your palpitating heart desires, but only with one difference. Make your eating a
meditation. If the Japanese can make tea drinking into a meditation you can make eating
Big Macs and all the rest into a meditation. Eat with mindfulness. When standing in line for
your food under the golden arches observe how it is being cooked and who is serving you.
Does he or she have a healthy looking body? Healthy skin and complexion? Take the food
from their hands. Clean or dirty? Just observe without judging. Unwrap the Big Mac. Hear
the paper crinkle. Observe your excitement, your anticipation of the pleasure you are about
to experience. Does your mouth water? Take in the smell. Pinch the pasty, processed white
bun that’s devoid of all nutrition, mush it between your fingers, observe the grease from the
dead cow meat, take a bite, don’t gobble, chew slowly, forty times before you swallow,
watch in your mind’s eye the greasy meat, the soft white bread as it makes it’s passage down
your throat into your stomach, watch as the grease hardens into a plaque like substance and
adheres to the lining of your arteries, watch as the fat accumulates around your heart
muscles making your breathing difficult, as you chew think of the animal that has been
slaughtered, lifted up by his hind feet and bashed in the skull sending the contents of his
brain rushing up his spinal cord and into all his blood vessels and infiltrating the flesh quite
possibly with mad cow disease or think of the shit eating pig with trichinosis worms wiggling
their way into your bloodstream and up into the delicate tissue of your brain as you eat your
morning bacon or ham and eggs. Did the cooking kill all those microscopic creepy little
worms? Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. Keep all of these pictures in your mind’s eye as
you chew and swallow, watching as your body swells up to unseemly, explosive proportions,
have a greasy French fry that’s been deep fried in cheap, saturated oil, a sip of your white,
sugar laced coke, eat, eat, yummy, yummy, you are going to die anyway, eat drink and be
merry if that’s what you want. But if that’s not what you want, and if you are a human being
with reasonable intelligence and sensitivity and if you always eat with mindfulness, being
observant and fully consciousness of what you are putting into your body, soon you will see
and understand from the deepest core of your being that your eating habits are stupid and
self destructive and they will just drop away on their own. Trust me. I too was a fatty in my
early life. Mindfulness…. it is the secret of life.
My friend Edwin, a 350 pound genius and my cyber guru says that my diet takes will power that
most people don’t have.
He is also afraid that if he loses 100 pounds some of that weight will come off of his brain and he
won’t be a genius anymore. I assure him that only the fat will come off leaving his brain lighter and
less contaminated, undefiled, almost virginal, thus allowing the neurons to fire faster and cleaner
resulting in more smarts, not less.
“Most people prefer the Beverly Hills diet or other glamorous ones that the movie stars and Oprah
use.”
“What I am explaining to you is not a diet but a way of life, to be fully alive to the moment, to be
conscious of what and who you are and to be aware of your behavior all the time. No will power
whatsoever is needed,” I reply, “only the practice of mindfulness, and besides those diets don’t
seem to work very well for Oprah, she bounces back and forth like a basketball.”
“You’re always railing against obese people, what do you have against us?”
“I don’t have anything against fat people as such, but I have little sympathy for greed, excess,
waste, gluttony, sloth insensitivity, selfishness and a few other things that contribute to the world’s
imbalance. The Bhagavata, one of India’s ancient scriptures, says that if man takes more than
enough food needed to sustain his life he is a criminal and should be treated as such. A glutton
steals from his less fortunate brother, people of excess like King Farouk, Marlon Brando, Ariel
Sharon; vulgar people breed vulgar appetites…
“If you were the fuehrer you’d have all obese people in concentration camps called Phatcau
instead of Dachau and melt our excess poundage down to make candles and soap.”
“If I were the fuehrer I would indeed create Camp Phatcau and round up all you fatties and put
everyone on a 1000 calorie vegetarian diet, make you work in the vegetable garden two hours a
day, meditate and do yoga four hours a day and attend nutrition and history classes that taught you
about balanced eating and world hunger along with movies that showed you the starving Ethiopians
and people from Biafra. Your right forearm would be tattooed with your ideal weight and you
wouldn’t be released until you achieved it and then the phat police would come around and check
on you every so often and if you deviated by 5 pounds then back you would go. And people like
your mother and other unconscious adults that are responsible for stuffing their children with
unhealthy food would be treated with a little harsher kind of behavior modification, like eating 40
Big Macs at a time, wearing their clothes backwards and walking around the compound chanting, I
am a shit bird, I am a shit bird, like they made us do in the Marine Corps when we goofed up or
fell behind on the obstacle course. And we would have therapy sessions as well since all fatties
are unhappy neurotics.”
“Can’t we have anything to take our mind off of food, won’t there even be a little something to
nibble on?” Edwin asked.
“Absolutely not, no nibbling, knoshing, snacking, no candy or coke machines, nothing…. Well,
maybe a carrot or a celery stalk.”
“How about sex?”
“Sex? Yes, you can have all the sex you want, but only regular sex, no Hannibal Lecter stuff; a little
smelling, tasting, biting, licking and sucking will be okay but no blood. These are natural urges;
touching, sensuality, loving closeness and when we deny them we sublimate these needs by eating
too much, or drinking or drugging or smoking too much, so by all means, at Camp Phatcau we will
not deny the needs of the body since comfort and healing result when we touch and are touched in
return. It’s when we disconnect the body from these basic needs that sickness and neurosis results.
If those basic needs are satisfied you will not want to overeat.
“We’ll all be so hungry it will be awfully hard not to take a bite out of our partner.”
“No it won’t because after a while you’ll feel full of love and light, that your cup will runneth over
and you’ll feel thin and beautiful and once that happens the world will be wonderful and you’ll never
want to go back to your old ways again. You won’t have to compensate for your emotional
deprivation by overeating because once the self awakening happens there is no going back to that
voracious hunger that was an unconscious attempt to fill your emptiness.
Obesity is the result of consuming more calories than the body burns. You will gain weight if you
eat more calories than you need in lettuce and tomatoes and you will lose weight if you eat less
calories than you need in chocolate cream pie.
Genetic and glandular factors enter into the equation rarely. Most people simply eat too much and
especially in the United States where people are unhappy, anxiety ridden and neurotic as a result of
having too much. Doesn’t that seem strange? One would think it would be just the opposite.
In India, where I live most of the time, there are fat people but not anywhere as prevalent as in the
west. People there use their bodies more; they walk, they bicycle, they squat to sit, they squat to
shit, they do yoga, they do more physical work out of necessity, the muscles are used, the heart and
lungs are put through their paces daily. Many people, even in the cities, do not have refrigerators,
they go to the market every morning to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, very little
refined food, and as a predominately vegetarian country animal products are minimally consumed
thus reducing heart disease and colon and rectal cancer and all the other ailments that result from an
animal based diet. Unfortunately, now with India’s burgeoning middle class, much of that is
changing as more packaged and processed foods show up on the busy young exec’s table.
According to Hindu philosophy, all worldly things possess common characteristics that are capable
of producing pleasure, pain, and indifference. These common characteristics are called gunas and
are respectively; Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. The entire world of objects contains these three
qualities including food.
Sattva literally means real or existent and is responsible for the manifestations of consciousness. It
is white, light and bright, illuminating. Luminosity, pleasure, happiness, contentment and bliss are all
due to it. It is a quality in mother’s milk, fruit, vegetables and whole grains.
Rajas, which literally means foulness, is the principle of motion, It produces pain. Restless activity,
feverish effort and wild stimulation are its result. It is mobile and stimulating and its color is red. It is
contained in red meat and other flesh foods as well as eggs, cheese, sugar and spices
Tamas, which literally means darkness, is the principle of inertia. It produces apathy and
indifference. Ignorance sloth, confusion, bewilderment, passivity and negativity are its results. It is
heavy and enveloping and as such is opposed to Sattva. It is also opposed to Rajas as it arrests
activity. It’s color is dark or black. It is the quality in alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and certain fermented
and root foods, the flesh of dogs, cats, rats, sea slugs, bottom feeders and pigs.
These three gunas are never separate. They conflict but cooperate with each other and are always
intermingled. However, the nature of a thing, or a food, is determined by the preponderance of
these characteristics. They are either good, bad or indifferent, intelligent, active or slothful, pure,
impure or neutral.
The nature of the three gunas is beautifully expressed in an ancient Hindu poem. The poet says
that the eyes of the beloved are red, white and dark, and are full of nectar, intoxication and poison;
with the results that once they pierce the heart of the lover he experiences the joy of life, the agony
of restlessness and the inertia of death. The recollection of the beloved gives him joy and makes life
worth living; separation
causes acute pain and makes him restless; intensity of love makes him forget everything and he
become inactive, unconscious and almost dead. Sattva is white and like nectar gives joy; rajas is
red and is like intoxication and gives pain; tamas is dark and is like poison and produces
unconsciousness.
As with love, so with food. For the fat person opening the refrigerator door is like opening the
portals of paradise, to that temple of transformation where all problems will momentarily be solved,
when one will feel warm, loved and complete as only a full stomach, or love, can make one feel
complete. Each time you open that door is a moment of truth. Each time your fat fingers grab that
cookie and you start to lift it to your waiting and watering mouth that is a moment of truth. All we
need is love as the song says; all we need is mindfulness as our good sense tells us. Together they
can change our life. Be mindful and love yourself….and don’t touch that cookie.
 | |  |
