Article: Love, Lust or Appetite?
by Gilles Marin, Senior Tao Instructor
Director of the Chi Nei Tsang Clinic USA
LOVE OR LUST; APPETITE OR CRAVING by Gilles Marin
Diet, appetite, cravings and Chi Nei Tsang
Excerpt from Healing From Within with Chi Nei Tsang by Gilles Marin
Appetite is known in all traditions to be the sign of good health and appreciation of life. Unfortunately, a lot of people are afraid of their appetite because they mistake a desire for certain foods for craving. Also, in a civilization of plenty and temptations where diets rule, appetite has become in many a household synonym of sin. The desire for food, a desire rising up from the deep, has also been associated with the desire of the flesh, the desire for sex and the sin of lust. In my opinion, there is a need in our minds to differentiate between appetite and cravings, which have the same relation to each other as love and lust. Our inability to differentiate between them leads us to the unfortunate mistake of taking one for the other.
Love = Appetite = Good health
Lust = Cravings = Poison
Love involves, among a lot of other things, a healthy desire for sex in a fulfilling and satisfying relationship with bonding at the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels. Yielding to love results in immediate improvement of health. Then, sex becomes healing. It is in fact the most potent and efficient health enhancer in the world. Cultivating our potential for love involves the ability to satisfy ourselves as well as others and radiates the healing energy developed within us toward others.
Appetite means good health. It means that our body lets us know what we need, in what proportions and when. Appetite changes according to seasons, weather, geographical location, mood, physical and mental activity, food availability and even gender, blood type, body type, ethnicity, and so on. It is the result of an extremely sensitive and sophisticated inner network of communication that can be cultivated to a high degree of refinement. Appetite tells us what kind of food we need to nourish ourselves, and when we get it, we feel satisfied. Yielding to our appetite is also our gateway to love. How we eat is generally a reflection of our sexuality.
A craving is a sure sign of imbalance in our health and points precisely to our poisons. When our health is out of balance, our whole life has a tendency to lean in that imbalanced direction. A craving points to what we shouldn't have, because if we have it, we can't stop desiring more of it. We are never satisfied, and we are able to stop only when we get sick. We never get satisfaction from yielding to cravings, and that is one way of distinguishing craving from appetite. Cravings can, and often do, lead to intoxication and addiction. Addiction is an attempt of the body to prevent oneself from going through the suffering of detoxifying.
This does not necessarily mean that the objects of our cravings are all toxic for everyone and that everyone should stay clear of them. What is poison for someone can be the right food for someone else according to the situation and the person. In any case, yielding to food cravings leads to metabolic imbalance due to not getting the kind of energy we need. In addition, a huge loss of energy will be experienced from the overload of work left to the internal organs as a result of poor processing, overload, detoxifying and the flooding of stress hormones resulting from dissatisfaction. Paradoxically, when we indulge in our cravings we might feel that we do it for compensation or reward, but yielding to cravings and eating too much is in fact a form of self-abuse that sends the inner message that we don't deserve to live. Yielding to cravings also is a gateway to lust and the resulting ill health.
Lust is sexual craving. It is born out of the inability to satisfy our sexuality. We try over and over again, often with different partners, with the sad result that every unsuccessful attempt builds a potential of failure that inevitably will end up in depression. A lack of knowing better in matters of sexual satisfaction, an overload of pent-up energy, and being manic-depressive, are usually the different factors that lead to lust. Yielding to sexual cravings leads rapidly to a huge loss of vital energy and is very destructive to oneself and others. Unfortunately, in our much-distressed industrialized world we easily lose faith in ourselves and look for guidance and approval through systems of aesthetics geared toward mass consumption of products heavily advertised. The quality of these products is such that they wouldn't stand a chance without the hypnotic power of commercials. I personally associate pornography, the over-exposure of sexually explicit material designed to induce craving for sex, with over-exposure to food products designed to induce food cravings. Both originate from greed and seeking short-term rewards, and both only provoke disgust in the healthy person.
THE INNER GUIDANCE OF THE APPETITE
Healthy people are in touch with their appetites and are able to satisfy them. Once we have a healthy appetite we can eat anything we want, any time we want it and there is nothing wrong with committing a little excess from time to time. As the Taoist saying goes: "For health and happiness everything in life is to be enjoyed. To keep enjoying it, take everything in moderation, including moderation!" Dr. Chang, on of my most influential teachers, used to say that it is healthier to get very drunk once a month than to drink a glass of wine or beer every day, since our body does not have time in twenty-four hours to detoxify completely from alcohol.
Drinking only once a month, even if we get drunk, will allow the body enough time to detoxify completely. When our appetite is well tuned it will allow us to enjoy these special occasions of indulgence. These occasions will be enjoyed all the more as they will arise only occasionally. But first we have to be healthy; then our appetite will guide us surely and will make sure that we never commit too much excess in moderation! It is always difficult to know what is right and what is wrong for us when we are not in the habit of listening to our own appetite or when we live a lifestyle which leaves little room for shopping for the food we need and cooking it.
We then find ourselves trying unsuccessfully to satisfy our appetite with whatever we can find and end up eating too little of what we really need and too much of the wrong things and getting poisoned. Since most of these products and foods are consumed in an imbalanced way, they end up becoming toxic to our system, even though sometimes very little in the ingredients is poisonous. Any food has some nutritional value, but any food becomes toxic if consumed improperly. Even pure water, when drunk excessively, can harm you. When we force ourselves to ignore the dictates of our own appetite, it's going to be stressful, and the stress will prevent proper digestion of these foods no matter how healthy and organic they might be. If taken in excess they will create stagnation, corrupt, and turn into poison like anything else.
I don't personally think that there is anything wrong with eating some processed food, or even junk food once in a while. Food is food. As long as we keep healthy by eating fresh, whole and possibly organic foods regularly, then we can indulge once in a while in something that could be toxic if we had it every day. When given a chance, a healthy digestive system is able to choose what it needs and efficiently eliminate everything else. A healthy body will always need a wide variety of foods to choose from to remain healthy. It might then choose very little, but very precisely and wisely, this is what a good appetite is all about. When we don't know what to eat any longer it is often because we have been trying different diets for a long time, trying to make sense of completely contradictory advice and guidance. Our thoughts are very much detached from our feelings.
As a matter of fact we use our thinking to control our feelings. So, the more we think, the less we feel. The more we try to make sense of all these dietary advises, the less we are able to hear our own appetite. All this effort to make sense of diets doesn't do anything but estrange ourselves from our real needs by trying to follow the needs of someone else. The net result is a battered and invalidated appetite.
HORMONAL RESPONSE THAT AFFECTS APPETITE
Information in our body is the domain of both Nervous and Endocrine Systems. There is a multi-level of interconnectedness within ourselves that works through nerve impulses and chemical communication with hormones that allows our body to work in complete consistency with itself from gross anatomy all the way to the molecular level. Our metabolic rate is dependent on the production of these hormones. Every endocrine gland produces hormones in what is called an axis. An axis is a set of two hormones produced by the same gland that neutralize and complete each other the same way that our Autonomic Nervous System is divided into sympathetic or stress response and parasympathetic or recovery response.
Our stronger hormonal response in terms of energy production comes out of our pancreas. Our pancreas is in charge of providing fuel in the form of blood sugar to all our cells. It produces an axis of hormones called insulin and glucagon. It sends insulin in our blood stream to allow sugar molecules to break down to a small enough size to leak through blood vessel and feed our body. When this happens the blood sugar level drops to a level that triggers our Nervous System to tell our pancreas to deliver glucagon, the other hormone that inhibits the effect of insulin and makes the blood sugar raise back to a higher level by opening the sugar reserves in our liver and body fat.
As for the Autonomic Nervous System responses of sympathetic and parasympathetic, the hormonal responses are either acidic and associated with the stress response or alkaline and associated with the recovery response. Insulin, being acidic, is associated with the stress response and sympathetic activities such as being busy and active. Glucagon being more alkaline, is associated with the parasympathetic response and parasympathetic activities such as resting, recovering and enjoying oneself.
The pancreatic response is known to be highly dependent on our genes, and therefore can have a wide variation according to the person involved. To me, heredity, being information encoded in our genes, also encompasses systems of habits, tradition, education and a whole behavioral and emotional package of attitudes we get as a standard birthday gift from belonging to an ethnicity, socio-economic background, politico-ecologic group, a gender, social class etc… In short our pancreatic output is a reflection of how comfortable we were made to feel about ourselves and our situation in life.
If we were made to feel good about ourselves with a strong sense of identity, self-esteem and support, we feel strong and can relax into a more parasympathetic response than if we were made to feel guilty just for being born or need to constantly prove that we deserve to live and to be loved by being hyper-productive. In the first case pancreatic function will be well adjusted no matter what we eat and how we eat it. In the second case stress response will trend to predominate with a tendency toward hypoglycemia or diabetes.
