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Buddhist Meditation to Breathe Through Food Anxiety
How to eat well during times of distress
I was feeling anxious and disgusted with myself — I stepped on the scale and found that I had gained 20 kilograms. How did I let this happen?
Startled, I opened my eyes and realized it was a dream. I went up to go to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror — I am a grown person with a clear understanding that we should be prioritizing the way we feel and act in our bodies rather than numbers, and yet it seems I still intrinsically struggle with this fear of gaining weight. Why?
I have been overweight and underweight, and the journey to maintaining balance has been an emotionally complicated and difficult journey. Even as a huge advocate of movement, healthy foods, preparing vegetables in ways you love, and enjoying everything else in moderation, I still sometimes struggle with food anxiety.
Food anxiety is complicated because it addresses the superficial pressure of being “beautiful” in the eyes of society with the very real fear of the health consequences that come with being overweight. We all face it at one point or another, but we feel it even more so during times of distress, intense anxiety, and extreme change and instability. It is during these times that we find ourselves overeating, undereating, wondering what these changes are doing to our body yet simultaneously doing our best to ignore it to cope with other stresses at hand.
But this is unsustainable, and it ultimately hurts our emotional health. Instead of ignoring these tendencies and letting these stresses build up in my mind, I use Zen Buddhist meditation to breathe through food anxiety.
What is Zazen?
Zazen is a type of Zen Buddhist meditation where the focus is clearing your mind of thoughts, anxieties, and ideas, and trying to attain clarity on what existence in the world means to you. By giving your anxieties room to appear and then disappear, the practice allows us to feel calm in chaos and peace in conflict.
