Dieting

 

 

Bring your awareness to taste. When you are eating, forget everything else; just become your tongue, just your taste buds. Exist there in your totality. Taste your food as deeply as possible, and you will be in for a great surprise – not one but many surprises.

 

First you will become aware that you cannot eat more than is needed. You need not diet – only foolish people diet. And you can diet for a few days, and then you jump upon the food with a vengeance, and you gain more weight than you have lost! If you are intelligent, bring your awareness to your taste. Why do you eat more? The simple reason is that you don’t taste, and your hunger for taste remains, so you go on stuffing more. If you really taste, soon you will be satisfied, contented. Soon the body will say, “Stop!” And if you are alert you will be able to listen when the body says stop.

 

Right now you are not there at all. You are eating, but you are not there, present. You may be in your office or you may have gone somewhere else, doing a thousand and one things. One thing is certain: that you are not at the table where you are sitting, you are always somewhere else. You are never where you are; you can't be found where you are. If you are really there, totally absorbed in eating, you will be surprised. The first thing will be that for the first time, food becomes something divine.

The Upanishads say: ANNAM BRAHMA -- food is God. Such a beautiful statement: Food is God. These people must have tasted. Without tasting you cannot see God in food. These people can't be against food, they can't be for fasting, they can't teach you to starve your body. The people who have said: Annam Brahma -- food is God -- cannot be in favor of starving. Starvation cannot be anything spiritual.

Eat, but eat meditatively, silently. When you are eating you are talking. Don't talk, because if you are talking you will miss the joy of absorbing God into yourself. You will miss the joy of eating, and when you miss the joy of eating, your hunger for taste goes on asking for more, so you go on stuffing. And that seems to be nonending. People are stuffing the whole day and still it seems they are not satisfied. Eating twice may be enough or at the most thrice, but people are eating the whole day -- particularly Americans! If they are not eating they won't know what else to do. Just doing something with the mouth keeps them occupied. If they are not eating they are talking, if they are not talking they are smoking, if they are not smoking they are chewing gum -- as if the mouth has to remain continuously occupied.

 

-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 10, #9"

 

 

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If you eat with awareness, then you cannot eat more than is needed by the body. People go on coming to me and they say, “Put us on a diet. My weight is constantly increasing, the body is constantly hoarding. Put us on a diet.”

 

I tell them, “Don’t think of diet, think of consciousness. By dieting nothing will happen. You cannot do it. You will do it one day and the next day it will go. You cannot continue it. Rather, eat with awareness.”

 

The quality changes. If you eat with awareness, you will chew more. With unconscious, mechanical habits, you simply go on pushing things into your stomach. You are not chewing at all, you are just stuffing. Then there is no pleasure, and because there is no pleasure you need more food in order to get the pleasure. There is no taste, so you need more food.

 

Just be alert and see what happens. If you are alert, you will chew more, you will feel the taste more, you will feel the pleasure of eating, and much more time will be taken. If you take half an hour to eat your meal, then by taking the same quantity of a meal with full awareness you will need one and a half hours – thrice the time. In half an hour you will have eaten only one-third of the quantity, and you will feel more fulfilled; you will have enjoyed the meal more. And when the body enjoys, it tells you when to stop. When the body has not enjoyed at all, it never says when to stop, so you go on. Then the body becomes dull. You never hear what the body is saying.

 

You are eating without being there; that creates the problem. Be there, and every process will be slowed down. The body will itself say, “No more!” And when the body says it, that is the right moment. If you are aware, you cannot trespass the body’s order. You will stop. So allow your body to say something. The body is saying things every moment, but you are not there to hear it. Be alert and you will hear it.

 

And when I say, "feel it," I know it is difficult. How can you feel awareness without being aware? I am not saying that you can feel Buddha's enlightenment right now, but one has to start somewhere. You may not get the whole ocean, but a drop -- just a drop -- will give you the taste, and the taste is the same. If even for a single moment you become aware, you have tasted buddhahood. It is momentary, a glimpse of it, but now you know more. And this will never happen to you through thinking; it will happen only through feeling.

The emphasis is on feeling because the emphasis is on a "lived" experience. Thinking is false, you can go on thinking about love and creating theories. You can even get a doctorate on the thesis of love, on what love is, and without ever being in love. You may not know what love is; you may have never felt it. You can grow in knowledge without in any way growing in being. And these are two different dimensions. You can go on growing in knowledge. Your head will go on growing bigger and bigger, but you will remain the same tiny self.

 

-Osho, "Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 2, #8"