In the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” JZ Knight, as Ramtha, is shown on camera saying, “You have addictions because you have nothing better. No one has taught you how to dream.”

Since learning to live on light I have come to realize for myself that the biggest challenge has been the feeling that I need food to take care of my emotional states. I began to differentiate the emotions and the cravings. When I was down, I wanted chocolate, or caffeine. When I was happy I wanted to celebrate with rich sauces and alcohol. When I was lonely I wanted popcorn with my movie. When I was grieving I wanted tuna casserole with potato chips on the top.

Since I had spent four years of my career as a drug and alcohol counselor, I decided to use the addictions model to help me deal with these cravings. The model I use is an additive model. I recommend that we don’t take things out of our lives that we consider “bad” for us, but that we add more and more healthy things to our lives. Eventually the healthy things and activities will take up so much of us that there will no longer be room for the things that don’t serve us. For example, I used to enjoy marijuana until I started meditating regularly. When I started to enjoy the effect of the meditation so much, I realized I was no longer interested in smoking pot, as it just got in the way of this other more satisfying experience. In this additive model for changing habits and behavior, there is less of a sense of deprivation and more of a sense of empowerment and choosing to move in a new direction.

I never realized until I actually stopped eating food, how much space is taken up on so many levels with our normal preoccupation with what, when and how to eat. About ten months post-process, I went for a weekend getaway with four women friends. Because of the dynamic of me being in the group and not eating, we were all acutely aware of the time and energy spent discussing where we would eat, what we would eat, what time we would eat and how much we wanted to pay to eat. Gaining consensus three times a day with that many people became quite an ordeal. At one point, one of the women turned to me and said, “Wow, Teri, how much easier your life must be now!”

And decisions about eating seem to get more complicated as we go along. With the continuous stream of new theories, new diets and new health focuses, the current thinking on the subject seems to be always changing and rearranging as far as what is the best way to feed our bodies. I have seen people in the grocery store reading the ingredients on packages looking stunned and incapacitated. One friend who was worrying about her husband’s list of physical difficulties ranging from gout to high cholesterol looked at me in frustration and said, “I just can’t feed him anything anymore!” While I looked silently back at her with empathy, she seemed to remember my lifestyle and added, “Oh, never mind!”

Why is it that when we are sick our bodies stop wanting food? I don’t believe it is our physical bodies that crave food, but that it is our mental and emotional bodies that are in need. Once we know that our bodies can be healthier by eating less and less, it is then a matter of healing our addiction to the desired affect of eating the food.

If we crave food for stimulation, we can add stimulating activities to our lives, such as classes, travel or art (skydiving, if you are so inclined). If we crave food for comfort, we can add comforting activities to our lives, such as massages, beautiful music or talking with supportive friends. If we crave food to alleviate boredom then we need to challenge ourselves to explore. If we crave food to numb out, then our attention is being called to find healing for the emotions that we resist and repress.

As we are learning in quantum physics, when we observe something, we change it. When we observe these patterns of addiction to the effects of certain foods with a non-judgmental, curious approach we are empowering ourselves to choose whatever reality most serves us at this point in our evolution.

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