Everywhere I go people tell me about starting this diet or that, from Weight Watchers to Adkins.  Some folks succeed and are happy as clams, a seafood which may or may not be on their diets.  Others struggle on and on.

My doctor put me on a diet a couple of years ago, for my high cholesterol.  I followed it faithfully for about a month and lost ten pounds.  After that, it’s been creeping back up so that now I weigh at least what I did then, and a little more.  My nemesis is movie popcorn.  I also blame it on nearing fifty.

The diet craze has become so prolific, so competitive, that the Mayo Clinic compared at least four of them in its last Women’s HealthSource newsletter.  Each is discussed regarding the nutrients they include or are lacking.  In the end, the Mayo Clinic reminds us that diets have been around for many years, but that the solution to one’s weight loss isn’t the diet, but the commitment to making life-style changes.

I can think of one life-style change most people need to make:  to slow down, and quit the drive-through.  Fast-food restaurants have been accused of making virtually all American citizens over-weight.  Witness the movie Super Size Me!  I didn’t see the movie; I didn’t think it could compete with Michael Moore.  But I also thought the premise was a little silly.  Who would eat all their meals at a McDonald’s and accept every increase in size offered?  It would be like opening your refrigerator and having to eat all the ice cream in the container because it was “offered” to you, or all the left-overs in one sitting.  Yuk!  We do have some responsibility for the choices we make!

It is faster to eat the occasional Burger King, and that chain has even responded to vegetarians whose lives have sped up.  Now we can get fresh salads, too, although I haven’t been able to bring myself to believe that they’re actually good.  And fresh. In any case, eating out, anywhere, is probably a reason we gain so much weight.  It’s too easy; we don’t have to go grocery shopping as much, or spend time over a hot stove, or wash dishes afterwards; all in all, just making dinner and washing up is one to two hours out of our busy lives.  Fast food takes fifteen minutes.  On the other hand, our meals at home tend to be lighter and simpler.  Don’t they?  Is that worth spending the time?  A good question to which I have no answer.

We need to slow down, take more time to eat right, not more, but better, whichever diet one chooses.  Just eating a balance of foods, and less, and exercising seem to be what the advice of all these diets and doctors boils down to.  It’s also practical for those who don’t need or want to lose weight, and for those trying to prevent or recover from serious illness.  I would guess that Julia Child thought highly of balance in our daily meals as well as the enjoyment of them in our daily lives.

Kahlil Gibran, in The Prophet, says to let eating “be an act of worship,” and your table an altar. (p. 23)   He also wrote that “your daily life is your temple and your religion.” (p. 78)  That is so at odds with the image of fast food on one’s plate.  Or one’s paper wrapper.  At least the popular diets today are encouraging people to pay attention to what they are eating and to care what we do put into our bodies.  For our bodies are a temple as well.

Food is no stranger to religion.  They are thoroughly interwoven throughout history.  One familiar reference is from Genesis, Chapter 1 (v. 29-30):  “And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.”  In the very beginning of our greatest religions, food is the gift of God.  Throughout time we have developed religious rites where food is central, such as the Passover Seder dinner and Communion, Sukkoth and Ramadan, Thanksgiving, church potlucks…even the coffee hour.  Food and religion are both the source of life.

Physical health involves eating in balance, and paying attention to and caring about that balance.  Exercise is just as important as the right food in maintaining balance.  What we put into our bodies and how we move our bodies are what keep us healthy.  In Bill Moyers’ book, Healing and The Mind, he goes to China and interviews Dr. David Eisenberg about Chinese Medicine.  Eisenberg says, “There is an ancient idea that if you don’t move the body every day, it becomes stagnant.  It’s said that the body is like a hinge on a door:  if it is not swung open, it rusts.” (p. 279)

The Chinese, among many other religious and spiritual traditions, have evolved spiritual practices that are based in movement.  T’ai chi is one I practiced in college, along with Aikido, a form of passive martial arts.  T’ai chi is the slow movement of the body that requires attention to body and chi, the energy of every person.  T’ai chi is twenty-three centuries old, and Eisenberg describes the exercise as “trying to ‘move like the clouds, eternally transforming without the appearance of change.’”  He goes on to say that “the exercise is supposed to be like nature, and the person exercising tries to connect with nature through movement.  In Chinese medicine there’s the idea that the body has to move, and that movement is as important as eating or sleeping or drinking.” (p. 277)

Health, to the Chinese, means that the body reflects the balances in nature.  It is important for every person to go outside to feel the seasons and thus to feel their energy.  Eisenberg says that “when they feel their energy, they become balanced, but if they don’t feel their energy, then they fall out of balance, and they get sick.” (p. 281)

I have discovered that for myself, and it’s nice to have it confirmed.  When I go outside every morning, it is like another awakening.  My first one is the one I have before I get out of bed.  The second is when I go outside and feel the fresh breeze, see the clear air, listen to the wild creatures welcoming the morning.

If I’m lucky, I’ll see our coyote mom and pup run by through our front yard.  We have hawks in the tree across the street, and the young ones have learned to screech, which they do every morning when I go to get the paper at the top of my driveway.  Each morning as I get that paper and turn around to go back to the house, I look at Mt. Lemmon to see what the sky has to offer, how the pinks and oranges reflect on the clouds, and what amazing shapes those clouds are forming that day.  Or, maybe it’s a clear fall day.  Or a crisp winter, still clear.  Or spring with it’s endless clear skies.  Then around to summer with a thirst for the monsoons, which come again, at last.

I need that connection, that daily reminder that I am a part of nature, that I am nature.  This is my balance, part of my spiritual practice.  It is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls the practice of mindfulness.  In our hymnal, he says, “Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds.  Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.” (505)

The spiritual practice of meditation helps us to center our energy and come into balance.  While I was reading Healing and The Mind, I came across a description of a meditation I was taught in college, the origin of which I had never been able to discover.  I had even asked the sensei at the Green Gulch Zen Center north of San Francisco while on retreat there a long time ago, and he said it sounded Tibetan.  The type in the book is Chinese, and maybe related to Tibet.  Anyway, it’s called chi gong. 

A year ago one of our members told me about a group that meets here in Tucson to practice chi gong on Sunday mornings.  I didn’t know what it was then (and I couldn’t have gone anyway, of course).  Chi gong is meditation with movements that enable one to feel where the energy is in one’s body.  Then one practices moving that energy up or down or through a limb.  My meditation didn’t involve movement, but it did involve feeling and gathering the energy and sending it around my body from the “third eye” to ear to shoulder to elbow, on down to my toes and back up to my head.  After practicing twice a day for over a year, I could feel the ball of energy move through me.  I learned to feel when my awareness or consciousness was sort of lop-sided in my body, and bring my energy back into balance.  I could send my energy, my awareness, outward into whatever was around me, and feel my connection, my oneness, with all nature.

But…busyness changed my habits and my spiritual practice.  Work, school, motherhood, goals, doing everything and too much -- my practice went from dedicated meditation (along with aikido and t’ai chi) to nothing to liturgical dance to daily walking in the neighborhood as the practice of mindfulness.  My spiritual practice moved away from a particular movement and attention to an integrated mindfulness in my daily life.  I don’t go sit to connect with nature and my life; I stop and pay attention wherever I am, whenever I remember.  There are times I really wish I could force myself to pause long enough to meditate again.  On the other hand, I do have time to pause and take a walk each day.  We choose the spiritual practices that call to us, making time for what truly feeds us and brings us into balance with nature, our nature.

These practices lead us into physical and spiritual health.  When we work on one, we work on the other.  When we neglect or harm one, we neglect or harm the other.  Mind and body are not separate and our daily lives are our religion.  To pay attention to our physical health is a spiritual practice in that we make of our bodies a temple and all that we do an act of worship, of thankfulness, of mindfulness that we are a part of the All.

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson