I have not med­i­tated for weeks. I’ve been con­cen­trat­ing, though. I’ve been read­ing Over­com­ing Overeat­ing, which is the first book on overeat­ing I’ve read that really, con­tin­u­ally, nails how I feel about and behave around food.

…you spend your days fight­ing your desire to eat. Some days you give in to your desire, and scream at your­self for your lack of willpower. Other days you resist the desire and feel vir­tu­ous and wor­thy of praise. On any given day, how­ever, much of your men­tal life and energy is absorbed by thoughts about your eat­ing, your weight, and your plans to con­trol both. You’ve prob­a­bly thought about these top­ics con­tin­u­ally for many years. It amy appear to oth­ers that you are lead­ing a hum­drum, aver­age life, but they don’t see beyond the sur­face of your daily activ­i­ties. Despite appear­ances, you know that you are con­stantly pre­oc­cu­pied by painful thoughts about your body and eating…

And, not by coin­ci­dence, it turns out that the key piece of advice in the book comes down to the same thing as Hiakajo’s def­i­n­i­tion of Zen — “When hun­gry, eat; when tired, sleep.”

While the book doesn’t men­tion sleep, but the main thrust of it is aimed at con­vert­ing a per­son to “demand feed­ing”, that is, “when hun­gry, eat.” One thing that’s been help­ful is the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion the book makes between “mouth hunger” and “stom­ach hunger”. The “mouth hunger” is the hunger of the hun­gry ghost, never sat­is­fi­able, always want­ing more. The “stom­ach hunger” is the true phys­i­o­log­i­cal hunger of your own phys­i­cal need for food.

The main thrust of the book’s advice, it seems to me, is basi­cally to be mind­ful of your own desires and needs, to train your­self to under­stand what’s going on in your body and mind by watch­ing your­self as you expe­ri­ence the dif­fer­ent types of hunger. It also con­cen­trates on com­pas­sion; on not beat­ing your­self up when you overeat, but instead for­giv­ing your­self and under­stand­ing yourself.

This feels like exactly what I need. It feels like what I’ve been think­ing, on one level or another, for years, but thought out and exper­i­mented with by experts, and for­mu­lated into a few hun­dred pages of really good, prac­ti­cal advice on overeating.

It may, in short, be the best chance I’ve ever had of under­stand­ing my overeat­ing and mak­ing a real change in my pat­terns of behaviour.

So. Yes, under­stand­ably, I think, I’ve been using a lot of my energy to con­cen­trate on fol­low­ing the book’s advice. Not on read­ing, which I’ve been doing fairly slowly and spo­rad­i­cally, but on actu­ally doing. Lis­ten­ing to myself, for­giv­ing myself, try­ing to under­stand the dif­fer­ence between mouth and stom­ach hunger. Try­ing to eat from stom­ach hunger more often, but at the same time being for­giv­ing and under­stand­ing when I eat from mouth hunger instead.

But. I’ve been feel­ing, still, like I’m fail­ing in the med­i­ta­tion side of things. For months ear­lier this year, I med­i­tated daily in the hope of build­ing a habit that would be hard to break. And here I am, hav­ing quickly bro­ken the habit. On the other hand, maybe I would be sit­ting here writ­ing this this morn­ing if part of that habit for­ma­tion hadn’t trig­gered some anx­i­ety and guilt when I stopped the habit.

So, is today the day to start again? Twenty min­utes a day, is all I’m up to. It’s not much to add into a rou­tine. Maybe I can kill off a TV show and a few RSS feeds and some fid­dling with iPhone games, and med­i­tate instead. 7 * 20 min­utes = 140. Two hours and twenty min­utes a week, in total. It’s not much, in a week.

I’ll set an alarm for this evening, and med­i­tate for fif­teen or twenty min­utes, and see how it feels.