Will Power? Higher Power?

People ask me: how do you eat so little? How do you control yourself? You must have tremendous willpower.

The trick is: I have no willpower whatever. You don't have to either, because eating right isn't about willpower.

I think the biggest break for me, the biggest insight, the one that allowed me to eat better--more sensibly, more healthfully and within reasonable limits--was a very simple recognition.

At the beginning of this whole processed--while doing a modified fast for several days--I realized something transcendentally simple.

We are hungry. Human beings are hungry.

We are hungry all the time.

Hunger is absolutely normal.

If we weren't hungry, we wouldn't have gotten out of the caves to forage for food.

Our ancestors who didn't care too much about food all died off before having children.

The ones who survived and propagated were the hungry ones.

Hunger must be perceived, at some level, as a kind of danger signal. And that's the way it feels. I must eat something, I must get something to eat, I must do it now. If I don't, I'll just die.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are very hearty, most human beings.

We can go for long periods without eating, or eating little. I'm talking about days.

But in contemporary life, we rarely go more than a few hours. I'm talking about those of us lucky enough to have enough to eat--which is not all Americans.

Once I recognized that hunger was okay, that it was normal, the emergency light went off.

Lately I've been remembering something people who are in 12-step groups sometimes say. They sometimes say, "Of course, I did that I'm an x"--fill in the x here as alcoholic, co-dependent, addict, etc.

That always weirded me out. As if being that category become a whole state of mind, a kind of person. They had categorized themselves and found comfort in being a category.

Now I see it a bit differently.

Now I see it as a recognition that there are features of themselves, of their brain chemistry and the way their body gets translated into ideas, that have unhappy consequences if followed literally.

If you are hard-wired a certain way, you often think, "I need a drink (or a fix) to maintain my equilibrium." Maybe not those exact words, but that general idea.

And in a sense, you're probably right. Many addicts seem to have a certain brain chemstry, perhaps hereditary, perhaps learned, which almost requires them to use some specific substance to achieve a kind of temporary balance.

The "of course" of the 12-step follower is just a recognition that this particular need and idea, this way of feeling a problem and trying to solve it is really not going to go away. It's a permanent feature of their psychic-somatic landscape.

So, for perhaps quite different reasons, it is with hunger.

Your body will tell you that you are hungry. Many times a day. Quite often. Even after having eaten quite a reasonable amount.

But you don't have to obey.

You can't ignore it. You will have to recognize that it's there. But you can know from your experiences that the signal need not be followed.

It's like saying: "Thanks for telling me about that. I sometimes forget. But I choose not to do anything about that right now. I choose to continue in this state, even though it's a bit uncomfortable. It will help me more to adjust my state of being a bit later and in a bit healthier a way."

As I understand them (inspired in part by Gregory Bateson's ideas), 12-step programs represent a way of overcoming addictions by no longer thinking of them in terms of will.

The problem isn't that your will as weak, that you don't have the will power, that you can't battle some greater force. The problem is thinking of it as a battle of the wills, as something that diminishes you if you lose.

If, instead, you 'accept that you are powerless' and 'turn to a higher power,' it's no longer a battle.

'Accepting that you are powerless' here simply means accepting the hunger itself, accepting it as a normal part of life, as a feature of your biochemistry and mind that will not simply go away. Of course you are powerless over food cravings. Who wouldn't be?

But 'turning to a higher power' here simply means turning to a rational means of eating, eating what is good for you in amounts that are healthy.

Oddly, I began to eat healthfully when I realized that I would never simply want to.

That was my first step, anyway. Maybe it will be yours, too.

--E. R. O'Neill