“As Buddhists, we all take a vow to help alleviate suffering. The final section is largely about how to incorporate mindfulness and Buddhist teachings into eating habits and daily life. It’s about helping others and encouraging them to be mindful. That failure is part of why we start overproducing fat and gaining weight.”įor Zigmond, dieting isn’t about getting a beach body. “When we overwork our metabolism, it starts to fail. “If you’re overweight it can help you lose weight, and if you’re not it can help you maintain a healthy body weight. “That period of fasting provides some protection against obesity,” says Zigmond. But if you let them eat as much as they want within a nine-hour period each day, they won’t gain weight. Experiments on mice show that if you let them do the same, they’ll get obese. Half of Americans eat throughout their waking hours. Science agrees with Zigmond and the Buddha. The other extreme is the severe fasting that he had tried and found so unwholesome.” “One extreme is the round-the-clock eating that most of us do today. It’s consistent with the Buddha’s general theme of finding the middle way between extremes,” explains Zigmond. It’s not fasting, and it’s not living in complete abundance. “You can see this diet approach as a middle way. Those practices contrasted sharply against the Buddha’s early palace life, wherein he lived in abundance, food included. Prior to his enlightenment, the Buddha himself experimented with asceticism - the practice of trying to conquer the body by starving oneself. In ancient India, fasting was a popular spiritual practice. “These days I think we would think of him as a biohacker - someone who was experimenting on himself to try and understand the human condition.”Īn eating schedule may seem like a peculiar preoccupation for an enlightened teacher, and indeed, to understand the Buddha’s diet, context is key. “Buddha himself cared a lot about data,” he says. Zigmond says the book’s dual purposes arose naturally out of the interplay between modern science and the Buddha’s teachings. Photo by Michael Newhall.ĭepending on who is reading it, Buddha’s Diet could be seen as a book of Buddhist teachings or a book on dieting. “We tried to bring all of these elements together - the science, the data, the Buddhist teachings - and some real practical advice about eating and changing our relationship to food,” says Zigmond.ĭan Zigmond in priests’ robes. Out of the work came Buddha’s Diet - co-authored with Tara Cotrell - and the diet for which it is named. Zigmond left Hampton Creek and spent nine months reviewing scientific papers, researching sutras, and writing. That was really the moment all these three things came together.” “Here I was, a data scientist at a food company, reading about a diet that was reminiscent of Buddhist teachings. While he worked there, Zigmond discovered new research about intermittent fasting. Recently, he worked at Hampton Creek, a company known for producing vegan version of mayonnaise. In college, he got interested in Buddhism and started meditating. He taught himself to code when he was young. Until recently, Zen, data, and food were three completely separate interests for Zigmond. Zigmond himself eats between roughly 9am and 6pm each day - a habit he picked up when living at a temple in Thailand. He suggests eating during only nine hours in a day outside of those hours, you can drink water, tea, and coffee. Zigmond has updated the Buddha’s rules on eating for modern (and not necessarily Buddhist) lifestyles in his new book, Buddha’s Diet ( reviewed in the January 2017 issue of Lion’s Roar). You too, monks, avoid eating in the evening, and you will have good health. Because I avoid eating in the evening, I am in good health, light, energetic, and live comfortably. And, in his eight rules for lay followers, he asked that they “not eat at night or at an improper time.” To his monastic followers, he explained, “Buddha’s diet involves eating in certain hours during the day and then not eating at all after those hours.” “The essence of the diet can be explained in a single sentence,” says Zigmond. In truth, Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, was quite trim - and for one simple reason: he dieted.ĭan Zigmond, a Zen priest and the data scientist who runs Facebook’s newsfeed, thinks we could learn a lot from the Buddha’s diet. Statues of Hotei, the Buddha in meditation, and the Buddha as an ascetic before his enlightenment.
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