A fossil fuel diet

In the first five days of my no-burp diet I have lost somewhere between 2 and 4 pounds. It’s really hard to tell with these electronic scales that give you one reading after another. But the direction is definitely downward and, for me, swift. I’ve never been able to lose more than about a half pound a week. I don’t expect this rate to continue but, nevertheless, it is remarkable and a bit puzzling.

I am not hungry. I do not permit myself to be hungry. When I am hungry I eat a little and then stop. I stop not by willpower but by paying attention to the feeling in my tummy. Feeling just a little full? Whoa! The next bite threatens heartburn! I am learning to hate feeling too full. I am learning to embrace the feeling of enough for now.

The learning has been swift—almost instantaneous, in fact. As soon as I identified the feeling I hated and the feeling I enjoyed, I made the switch. It’s the perfect example of the Heath brothers’ image of the relationship between the Elephant and the Rider. The Rider is reason and knowledge, how we understand the problem, what we know we should do, how we strategize to address it. The Elephant is emotion—that big beast that does the actual moving toward the goal or away from it. The beast that needs skillful direction by the Rider but can’t simply be told what to do. The beast too big to control only by logic. Somehow my Rider got my Elephant turned and moving in the right direction.

Another way of saying this is the energy has shifted. Perhaps the shift of energy may be responsible for the instantaneous and dramatic weight loss. It may also have to do with not waiting for the daily weigh-in for feedback but following the energy flow hour by hour, even minute by minute. This kind of shift affects your mentality and mentality affects metabolism. Stress, as we know, affects metabolism, often promoting weight gain and sometimes unhealthy weight loss. It does this not only by influencing appetite but also by affecting hormone balance, especially cortisol. I have a feeling science is only beginning to uncover the relationships among what we are thinking, how we are feeling, and how our physiology behaves.

Where else can we make such instantaneous switches? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our society could develop a sudden revulsion for fossil fuel? This is already happening for many of us. We are learning to hate the excess trip, the belches of dirty diesel from the aging truck, the overheated and overchilled apartment buildings, our enslavement to the automobile, and above all the gouged pits and crushed bedrock that result from trying to squeeze out more, more, and still more. We are curbing our individual appetites for fossil fuel. We are embracing the beauty of the bike and the sun and the wind. With a little help from national infrastructure, we could easily go on a no-fossil-fuel diet.

But we do need help on this. There is only so much we as individuals can do. Until our leaders, too, feel the revulsion in their guts, our policies will keep force feeding us what, all too recently, we thought we wanted. It’s time to say, Enough oil! No more gas! I can’t take another bite! (B-u-u-u-r-p).