Motion picture a life in which your every waking moment is spent searching for food. Your belly is distended and your limbs are emaciated like a starving child'due south. Your hunger is ceaseless and painful, but your throat is no wider than the eye of a needle. When y'all find nutrient, you can't eat information technology. Not even a bite. The hunger persists, and your search continues. Such is the fate of pretas in Buddhist tradition—the hungry ghosts.

These poor souls were reborn this way because in by lives they were driven past desire, greed, acrimony, and ignorance. While you might find yourself checking a few of these boxes on any given 24-hour interval, in Buddhism you take to take such vices to the extreme to finish up with such a tortured existence—like committing murder in a jealous rage. So no need to panic.

It's a tradition in many Asian cultures to leave offerings of food for the hungry ghosts. But this doesn't really help. It turns out these ghosts aren't actually searching for food. Or they are, simply their search is misguided. Hunger for the ghosts has aught to do with food, and everything to do with what they did in their previous fourth dimension on globe. At that place'southward plenty of nutrient for them, simply they tin't eat it. Similar every religious parable, there'southward an important lesson hither: it's not food they really need.

Back here in the homo realm, we even so look to food to do much more than attend our bodies and satisfy our hunger. Nosotros turn to food in times of great joy and nifty sadness. When something wonderful happens, we celebrate with a dinner out. We beverage champagne, nosotros eat block, we splurge on nice meals. Food becomes part of the rejoicing. And the opposite is true, too. There's a long tradition of providing food to those who are grieving. We band together to provide meals to friends in crunch—yous may, at some bespeak in your life, have signed upwardly on a spreadsheet or email thread to bring meals to someone mourning, someone recovering, someone struggling. In times of sadness, nosotros instinctively desire to provide comfort in a tangible way. And very often, we practice that with nutrient.

Food is there for all of it—the good times and the bad. And to some extent, it makes sense. It's fun to become out and celebrate a heighten, an ceremony, or a graduation. And it feels right that when people are truly suffering, the terminal matter they should worry about is putting together a meal. In these moments of tragedy or triumph, food is a worthy and welcome ally.

The problem comes when we use food to comfort and advantage ourselves when the stakes are much, much lower. Finally I got the kids to sleep, at present I can eat those cookies I've been eyeing. That large meeting today was a mess, time for a big glass of vino. These mundane highs and lows are challenging. But they are non worthy of cracking sadness or slap-up commemoration. Or, really, food.

Related: Read a collection of Tricycle Teachings on Nutrient

And nosotros know it, also. Imagine going out for dinner to celebrate fixing the washing machine. Or delivering a meal to a friend who had a bad sunburn. It sounds ridiculous. Simply we withal give ourselves mini-rewards for pocket-sized successes, and mini-comforts for pocket-size irritations—and they often involve food. We won't buy ourselves a celebratory block, but nosotros might well take a piece if there'due south some in the refrigerator. Or nosotros might find ourselves a pocketbook of chips or a cold beer. Each of these could hands be several hundred calories. And worse withal, it's mostly at the end of a long day that we find ourselves wanting this reward or condolement—the worst possible time for our bodies. Do that regularly, and it adds up fast.

There's a reason we do this, of course. Food is a natural reward. Think of Ivan Pavlov and his studies of classical conditioning in dogs—he trained them with food. The comfort foods nosotros ordinarily turn to—the ones full of starch and sugar—are scientifically proven to better our mood. E'er hear someone refer to a peculiarly enticing snack as being "like fissure"? Eating tasty food seems to actuate the aforementioned parts of the brain as addictive drugs and even cause the release of natural opiates. Studies have shown that carbohydrates in particular increase serotonin release, the chemical in the body that boosts mood. The more serotonin, the better you feel. Fatty foods are the same. Brain scans of participants in a 2011 written report, who were fed either a solution of fatty acids or a saline solution via a feeding tube, showed that those who got the fat acids had less activeness in the areas of the brain that controlled sadness, fifty-fifty after listening to "sad classical music." (Yes, people really volunteered for this report—with sad music and a feeding tube.)

Then what's wrong with that? Better than actual fissure at least, right? If food really does help with our mood, isn't that a expert affair?

Yes and no. But generally no. Remember those hungry ghosts? They get a chip of relief when they gustation the nutrient on their tongues. So practise y'all, studies tell us—and you're luckier than the hungry ghosts because at least you can consume your chocolate. But that relief is temporary. The bad day still lingers, smothered by the brownie, pretzel, or muffin. And merely similar the hungry ghosts, you aren't really looking for food. What the ghosts truly want is relief from the void created by desire, greed, anger, and ignorance—notwithstanding they keep trying to fill up that empty feeling with food, even though information technology never works. Sound familiar?

Not only are these self-soothing snacks not all that soothing, just when we use food to comfort and provide relief from stress, we're using it at a time when we tin can least afford the calories. A recent Ohio State University study of 58 healthy middle-aged women revealed that experiencing one or more than stressful events the day before eating a single high-fat repast really slowed their metabolism. And not just a little—plenty to "add up to virtually 11 pounds across a year" according to the authors. Stress seems to cause the body to freak out and cling to the calories, thinking it might demand them later. This may be a biological holdover from times of famine, or when we weren't all that sure when we'd spear our next woolly mammoth. Whatever we're stressed about today—whether an sick loved 1, a struggling human relationship, a financial burden, or a lousy job—probably won't cause united states of america to starve tomorrow. But our bodies haven't evolved to know the deviation.

And it gets worse. Overeating for any reason often leads to these same negative emotional states that so trigger more overeating. A study of both normal-weight and overweight women in Germany found that they felt sadness, shame, and anxiety later on eating loftier-calorie foods—with the overweight women reporting the most intense emotional responses. And so we overeat when we're pitiful or stressed, then become more than deplorable and stressed when we overeat. In betwixt, we gain weight, which is also associated with low and makes everything worse. It's some other barbarous cycle of "overeating, weight proceeds, and depressed mood."

Related: I Tried the Buddhist Monk Diet—And Information technology Worked

Luckily, there are many ways to bargain with stress. The healthiest approach is to take steps to address the actual cause. That may mean facing the reality of a bad human relationship, or seeking out a new job, or saying no to commitments that have you stretched too thin. Social diversion—basically hanging out with friends or family—also works well. In fact, of all the ways to distract yourself, this seems to be the most effective.

What psychologists telephone call "emotion-oriented coping" is the virtually dangerous. This is when yous blame yourself, daydream, fantasize, and otherwise ruminate on your miserable life. Maybe lying in bed listening to sad music. Don't do that. This often leads to emotional eating—perhaps considering it just doesn't work on its own. Awful-izing rarely makes us feel improve.

On the other paw, meditation and mindfulness—a few minutes of pure silence and peace—have been shown to help significantly. Similarly, studies of yoga for relieving stress and feet are very promising, and have even shown that yoga tin can reduce preoccupations with food for those with serious eating disorders. Physical practise has long been known to improve our moods, and also seems to help us fight anxiety. Exposure to nature helps many people. You may have to try several things before you find something that works for you lot. But don't permit yourself use nutrient as your cure.

Y'all will sideslip up, of course, now and again. These are difficult habits to break. But recall advisedly about just how often you are engaging in these behaviors, and see them for what they are—a temporary fix that can crusade a lasting trouble. And remember the lesson of the hungry ghosts. The unsettled self can never be sated with food.

♦

From Buddha's Nutrition: The Ancient Art of Losing Weight Without Losing Your Listen, by Tara Cottrell and Dan Zigmond, © 2016. Reprinted with permission of Running Printing, an imprint of Perseus Books, a partitioning of PBG Publishing, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group.

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