Picture the scene: You’ve made a curry. It’s an absolute blinder, like, you swear a chef straight out of a fancy Bombay restaurant would compliment you on your flagrant and fragrant use of mustard seeds. You don’t even chew on a cardamom pod, not one time. It’s a feast for all the senses. If you could, you’d bathe in the damn stuff.
You eat a modest amount, because, well, you’re a modest eater now, thanks to a strong desire to not be a lard ass. To help solidify your new state of being as a small-eater you attempt to chew 50 times per forkful. There’s lots of water on the table, you drink so much you’re likely to be up and down all night – a hostage to your full bladder. But anyways, the whys and wherefores don’t really matter, the point is you eat modestly.
Now you’re clearing up and there’s half a pan of the world’s finest jalfrezi staring up at you as well as rice, ok jasmine rice. Ooooh mother. So you reach for the tupperware enlisted for such times and start sluicing in the leftovers with a wooden spoon. Rice on the bottom, curry on top. As if on cue the gears of desire start turning. The thumping beat of compulsion begins to pulse inside you.
Dum-dum-dum I want to run this wooden spoon around the sides of the pan and put the subsequent scrapings into my wide, gaping, salivating pie-hole. Dum-dum-dum nobody would know, why would it even matter? Dum-dum-dum it’s not like it would make the squirrel’s bit of difference if I did dum-dum-dum-dum-dum.
And because you only ate modestly in the first place, there’s plenty of room in your belly for more. So, what do you do?
You grab this beautiful opportunity by both testicles and you squeeze. What you DO NOT do is put one single flakey scraping of curry into your wide, gaping, salivating pie-hole. It ALL goes in the tupperware for tomorrow’s lunch. Then you dance around the fucking kitchen, letting smugness and “I am Queen of my mind, brain and behaviour” ooze out of every pore.
That feeling of desire is the stepping stone to success. You have to feel those dum-dum-dums pulsing through your body so you can laugh at their meaninglessness. There is no other way.
So be grateful. Say thank you. Do a little jig, get down on all fours and kiss the ground pretending it’s the sandaled, weathered feet of the Almighty himself. You know what the really cool thing about this practice is? The harder you go into it, the easier it becomes.
You WANT that thumping beat of compulsion to rage. You NEED it. So you must court it when it shows up, stick your tongue down its throat. It can’t do anything to you, it’s literally a feeling, an unavoidable feeling that you have to experience and do nothing with until it goes away and then stops turning up altogether. Because that is how you rewire your brain.
And in that that knowledge lies your total release from this clusterfuck we call food obsession.
So you see it’s not a dilemma you’re faced with here, like a should I, shan’t I have another mouthful type of thing, it’s an opportunity to steer yourself away from the food craziness at all. It’s an opportunity to stop those dum-dum-dums coming on in the first place, and that’s the golden ticket – being able to see food and think oh that’s nice without sweat beads forming on your top lip.
Sadly you can only get to this nirvana via the hot coals, but happily, once you’re standing on the hot coals you realise they’re not even hot.
So lean into those yearnings, enjoy them and feel excited by them because not only are they NOT your enemies?
They’re actually your friends.
Photo by Jakob Rubner on Unsplash