Middle Way YOGA

I have to confess, friends, that whenever I tell myself I need to go on a diet I automatically gain two pounds. I immediately start craving something to eat, and it’s not a craving that can be satisfied with broccoli or salad: Only carbs will do. People are often surprised when I say I have to constantly watch my weight, but this is especially true as I get older. I am forever yoyo-ing ten pounds on the scale either way and every single time it catches me by surprise. I then vow to restrict my eating habits by cutting out all the things I want to eat without reserve (cookies, ice cream, buttered toast, homemade scones with homemade lemon curd, chocolate...) until I’m down ten pounds again, but I never get any further than that; it’s just one endless cycle of gain and lose, gain and lose, and frankly I’m tired of it.

There was a time when I didn’t worry about what I put into my mouth (a very brief time, albeit) and food was not so important to me. I was young and active and living in Spain, and food in that culture holds a very different position in Spanish society than food in our culture. There are not many overweight people in Spain. This was 20 years ago, but culturally not much has changed here in the last 20 years, so I’m going to assume the same is true for Spain. What role does food play in Spain, and what role does it play here in the United States, land of giant buy-in-bulk supermarkets, super-sized fast-food and cheaply-priced convenience and junk foods? The clue is in the question: The way food is bought and prepared in Spain is as different as the languages we speak.

Supermarkets were a newfangled thing when I was living there, and most of the people bought their daily groceries in the market square from the local butcher, greengrocer, fishmonger or cheesemaker, all of whom are within walking distance to your domicile. A trip to the mammoth supermarket is an exciting family excursion you have to get in the car for because the market was built on the outskirts of town where there is open space. Many European cities were developed around a narrow main street a few hundred years ago, expanding outward into even narrower side streets with apartment buildings stacked up on either side. The further away one gets from the original city center, the more modern city planning becomes. Still, everything in Europe is smaller than in the US; the cars, the streets, the apartments, the people. There are no suburbs with sprawling housing tracts and backyards that contain swimming pools. There are no Lincoln Continental Towncars, SUVs or four-wheel drive extended-cab trucks; they’d never fit on those tiny streets! Even the size of your wardrobe is smaller because there’s no Walmart where you can buy six-dollar shirts and eleven dollar pants.

But I’ve gotten off track here. The point is that most people shop within their neighborhoods at their local grocers or go to the market square on the weekend where they buy fresh, locally produced food from their favorite vendor. They take it home and prepare the main meal for the middle of the day when the whole family eats together. If there’s dessert it’s usually some kind of fruit. If you’re at a restaurant it could be flan. When your kids come home for the midday meal you send them out to buy the bread from the bakery downstairs; milk comes in boxes that you don’t need to refrigerate until they’re open (I think mostly used for cafe con leche); most people drink wine with meals; at 10 o’clock a.m. people visit the bar for an espresso and a snack, usually a tapa of some sort or a small sandwich. At six p.m., after you’ve had your main meal and all the stores are open after the mid-day siesta, you visit the bar again where you meet up with friends, have some more tapas, and drink a little wine; dinner is at nine or ten, not as big as the midday meal, and afterwards you might go to the bar again for a drink if it’s the weekend; if it is you go out at eleven p.m. and stay up all night, then at 5 a.m., before heading home, you have hot chocolate and churros from a vendor in the street. It sounds like a lot of eating and drinking, doesn’t it? But it’s all ritualized. There are very specific times for eating and drinking, and what you are eating is usually freshly prepared, not from a box or frozen, and you are almost always sitting down when you eat, not standing over the kitchen sink, or digging into that package of cookies while you are driving or consuming a whole bag of chips or M&Ms while watching TV (in Spain there was never anything good on those three government-subsidized channels anyway).

When I came home from Spain after three years of living on a Mediterranean diet of mostly fish, vegetables, tapas, espresso and wine, I found much of the sweet convenient food like cookies, cake and ice cream, too rich for my taste. I simply couldn’t stomach them anymore. One Keebler fudge-striped cookie was more than enough to satisfy my sweet tooth; two and I might have to throw up. Of course, it isn’t like that now. When in Rome, do as the Romans, etc., and I gradually re-adopted my former way of eating here in the good ole’ U.S. of A. The abundance of goods here is simply amazing and sometimes it’s just too hard —and too cheap— to pass up.

Finally, if I haven’t made it clear yet, junk food was just not as readily available in Spain as it is here. There were not aisles and aisles of it in the markets. If you wanted a snack, there was an appropriate time to eat it and there was a bar just down the street where you could go and get it, and it was never anything like cake or cookies. It was ham and cheese croquettes, stuffed mussels, homemade sausage and bread, olives, vinegar-cured little fish called bocarones and other such delicacies, and you could wash it all down with a very short glass of wine that only cost 20 pesetas (about 20 cents). Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a clean, well-lighted bar that served food like that, where you could take your family, just down the street from your house?

 We are living the American dream, folks. We have so much material wealth, such a high-standard of living (even the poorest of us have cars and TVs), and are used to having everything supplied in abundance. Yet in this economic downturn we are discovering that there is much we can do without, there is much that is unnecessary. In my family, my husband finally conceded that we couldn’t afford to pay for TV service anymore. I have been asking him to turn the TV off for years, and now he has been forced to do it and guess what? We are spending more time together as a family. We are finding other ways to de-stress that don’t involve zombie-like behaviour in front of the wide screen; we read, we do crossword puzzles together, we play board games, we bake cookies, we do partner yoga, we meditate. I am closer to my family now than I have been in years.

How does all this connect to our eating habits? I think we have evolved into a culture of convenience and remote communication. It’s easier to flop down on the sofa and turn on the TV than talk to your spouse or kid because you’re tired from work. It’s easier to grab a bite of some pre-made processed food that is readily available than to prepare a meal and sit down at the table with the family. But it could be easier to do this in any culture, couldn’t it? Perhaps not. Did you know that in Europe people get a month’s vacation every year? Those people know how to slow down and take their time. They realize that every worker needs a good dose of time off in order to continue doing a good job. In Spain they have preserved the tradition of the midday meal with the family and the six p.m. paseo to the bars (which, by the way, are not like American bars if you haven’t guessed yet) to meet up with friends, plus all the shops are closed on Sundays. Can you imagine if the government decreed that everything here be closed one day a week? I won’t go into it. I eventually got used to it in Spain and missed it once I came back to the States. The only thing equal to it here is the quiet in the streets on a Superbowl Sunday.

It’s beginning to sound like in order to lose weight nothing short of a cultural revolution will do, one where we agree to ignore the cookie aisle in the market and opt for the farmer’s market instead; one where eating establishments serve delicious tidbits of food in small portions appropriately priced instead of sixty ounce sodas and buckets of fries; one where meeting friends in public is all part of the daily ritual of living; one where we all work and shop closer to home; one where we have learned to ignore the advertisements that scream for us to buy buy buy so we can look beautiful, have the latest technology, be more virile, drive the coolest car — and on and on. In short, one where we have learned to silence the outside voices so we can begin to listen to our hearts instead.

Namaste.