On A Diet
Today we are talking about
being on a diet, not in the typical way.
I was doing some reading this weekend,
and I stumbled across a poem,
and the title of the poem,
written in the early
1970s, is On a diet,
and I really enjoyed it.
I thought I would share it with you.
Let's dive right into it
here is the poem by William Matthews.
I'm just going to give you my very best
dramatic reading of it,
and then dive in
and do some thinking about it.
On a diet.
The Ruth of soups and balm of sources.
I renounce equally what Warshaw saw in
ink I find in the buttery frizzle
in the saute pan, and I leave it behind,
and the sweet peat smoked
tang of bananas and cream
and clots and chocolate.
I give away the satisfaction of food
and take desire for food.
I'll be traveling
light to the heaven of revisions.
Why be
adipose in dense
cetera in a waste it cetera.
Something like the body of the poet's
work.
With its pale shadows, begins
to pare and replace the poet's body.
And isn't it time?
On a diet by William Matthews?
I spent some good time chewing on this.
What do you think?
Have you heard it before?
What comes to your mind?
I spend a lot of time thinking myself.
And then when I had thought
all the thoughts I could muster,
I looked up a few commentaries,
little few people chatting about it
because a few things I was like,
what are they trying to do?
So I got some extra insights
and I will share those with you.
But I really enjoyed it
and I'll walk you through this and see
what kind of thinking
can we add to our experience.
Here we are.
We are in the middle of summer.
Oh man, how is this summer going for you?
At least while we're recording it?
Maybe you're coming back
and watching in some other season.
He brings some summer vibes to
wherever you're at, and that'll be great.
I'll be fully honest.
I did not know what on earth
the word Ruth meant in this setting.
What does that mean?
It means like compassion,
kindness.
So think of the compassion of Supes.
I just thought already when I read the
first words, I was like, oh, I'm gonna.
I'm gonna find some interesting
thinking in this.
Okay? Comfort food.
Think already we're sitting in the space.
We're looking at comfort food.
I would say, honestly, a soup.
Probably my favorite comfort food.
Both physically, actually to have it.
And then in a fasting space,
it says we're getting toward that broth
sort of space broth.
I say faster is friend, this is going
to help you through a fasting space.
If you have the mind to do it.
You say, I really want to do it.
But like the the hunger
a little much, okay, a broth
comforting,
soothing and the balm of sauces.
So like look, we're getting into like
healing space or do you think of a balm?
You know, something that
is covering over protecting.
All right.
So think of the compare and contrast,
the first lines,
the compassion,
the root of soups and the balm of sauces.
Okay.
Good things I renounce equally.
And how does that hit for you?
When I read it I was like, oh man.
Then on the second line, see, first line,
I was liking second line.
I'm like, oh man.
And then I'm thinking
fasting space already.
Is this what we're doing?
We're not eating. Okay.
But then this is a powerful, powerful way
to say it.
It's challenging me usually, you know,
I'm trying to be like, really gentle.
How do we ease our way into something?
This guy is like, I renounce them.
Whoa.
I say, maybe,
at least for a period of time.
Hopefully not forever.
Oh, man.
And then we start diving deep.
What Rorschach saw in ink.
You know, these tests,
the little ink blots.
Like, what do people see is like the idea.
It's just like a blob or something, right?
But then then they have them tested.
It's more of a measure
of the subconscious. Right?
You're going to project on things
that are in the mind.
All right.
He's finding this in the buttery
frizzle of the saute pan.
Have you ever done anything like that?
It's kind of like looking at clouds,
right?
People like to look at clouds and say,
oh, I see the elephant or whatever.
It's like, if we're really hungry,
if we're dialed in the,
you know, we're watching the pan.
It's like, whoa, it's
starting to bring in the idea.
We can be projecting a lot of stuff onto
food, you know what I mean?
Oh, yes.
So already we are
diving deep into the emotions of it,
aren't we?
Rorschach tests
and, you know, subconscious projection.
So to me, I'm just loving this.
It says I'm leaving it behind.
We're leaving behind two things
to see what we're doing in this.
Already in three lines.
We've brought in so much emotion
in the healing and helping
and nurturing parts of food.
We're moving on,
but then we're confronting these emotions
that we're seeing in this thing
and we're leaving those.
I think this is a beautiful progression
so far.
And then we're back in.
It's like, okay, we had like the food
and then we're leaving it.
But now do you see the ideas are back.
It's like, oh, the longing for it.
This was quite a I've never heard
bananas described in such detail.
The sweet peat smoked tang of bananas,
I don't know.
I think I'm trying to think
if we're mixing all this
into some sort of tasty dessert,
fried bananas
with cream and chocolate or something,
something really decadent is happening.
That's got to be what it is.
I give away the satisfactions of food
and take desire for food.
What a sentence.
And then the colon.
And then juxtaposing.
I'll be traveling light.
I don't know what your experience
is to walk through it.
You know he's.
Do you feel the tension
that they're creating in this?
And it's like it's like replicating
attention, don't
you experience this isn't
what the the experience is like.
I just love this in a few words.
This I don't know this person
William Matthews, they're obviously
have incredible wit with words
because just in a few sentences,
they are taking us through the emotions
and the experience.
They say on a diet,
I say bring it in the fasting space,
feel the dance,
the tension, the experience.
I like this tension.
Give away the satisfaction for food
and take desire for food.
So that's an intense trade, right?
Is that the trade we have to make?
Is that the difficulty.
But but look takes the difficulty
and pairs it to the benefit I love this.
I'll be traveling light, right?
If you're physically traveling
don't you want to travel light?
This is resonating a lot with me.
After carrying multiple backpacks
for people on my hiking trip
in North Carolina,
I was like, I packed these things and
I should have packed them a little later.
But you want to be prepared.
But it's like,
now my back's a little sore.
Traveling light is the way to go.
This is bringing in the ideas
that we want.
The whole idea right? Fasting space.
What are we trying to do?
Try to take this ancient tool
that is fasting, that is been practiced
by human beings for millennia,
bring it into our life, wrestle
with the experience
that the author is describing,
finding the balance
between recognizing the benefits
and the comforts of food
and the benefits of traveling light,
and then the benefits
of not just satisfaction,
but the balance also to it, the desire
leaning in on the other side.
That's the part of it
that is leading into something lighter.
It's getting into the mindset,
I say, of the fasting space,
have you experienced this?
You eat a big meal.
Maybe you make a decadent dessert.
Like he's saying
fried bananas with cream and chocolate.
Okay.
Take that.
The space.
Total satisfaction, you say?
I'd be very satisfied right now.
Take the other space.
Fasting space. Have a coffee.
Where are you going? To dial in
and do your best work.
Your deepest thinking.
You're like biggest picture things to me.
Like the space,
satisfaction, decadent dessert.
That's total resting time.
I'm going to just be like out and then
fasting space the balance traveling light.
So huge value in both, I say.
But we want to be dialing
in most thoughtfully on the latter part.
Most of the time, I say.
So we leave the special thing
for the special experience.
Right now.
Look, two paragraphs
or two stanzas in this and we flip here.
Here is the transition in this work
to the heaven of revisions.
And now the the poem goes
all meta on us,
where it's like he's describing.
He's taking everything about that
first stanza,
about food and diets, about the struggle
and the emotion.
And he flips it in to like a literary work
of like writing a poem,
which I think is incredible.
And then and then also he takes that into
like basically implying like that
this is what our life is,
that our life is poetry,
that our life is like a mirror of this.
Here's
how he does it. The heaven of revisions.
Now this this spot
I just read literally in the first time
because I didn't know any better
why I'd be adipose.
I was like,
all right, so here, adipose cell,
it's like the fat cell,
the medical word for it.
I was like,
well this is interesting to find adipose
also more broadly meaning excess.
So he's
actually coming in in a literary sense.
This is actually a line from Shakespeare
I didn't see I don't know, some
someone who is an expert in Shakespeare
said,
apparently it's funny, the commentaries
I was reading on it, people say,
this poem is so funny
because he's quoting Shakespeare.
I don't know it well enough.
Sonnet 129 never read it. Should have.
Okay, this is like he's twisting
a little bit of Shakespeare.
The idea of Shakespeare that he's
bringing in
is basically getting control
of our emotions.
Very fitting,
but from an editing perspective.
Adipose an expense.
Is it a waste, the editor
trying to take the excess in our writing,
in a poem, all the extra words
bring it down to the bare essentials.
Do you see the mirror in the diet?
Trying to lose weight?
Trying to write something,
to edit, to bring it down.
Something like the body of the poet's
work.
He's merging the ideas back together.
The body of the poet,
the body of the poet's work.
Like what we're seeing as these
words are coming
together, is this idea of a diet
which we can call our fasting space.
If we don't like the word our fasting
lifestyle, just our choices, right?
Like how we are being our way
of being flowing
through the world
and the way that we are doing. Right.
That sort of process
also mirrored in the writing
of something beautiful
in the creation of any type of artwork.
And this is the type of thing
that I absolutely love, because I'm trying
to describe our health experience
as our ultimate artistic expression.
And here we have a poem that is just
showing us this is what it is,
the body of the poet's work.
We say, the body of our work
that we're trying to sculpt and change.
Right, by making fasting a part of us.
Love that session.
Body of the poet's work.
Okay, he's a poet.
He's going through this experience.
He's presumably trying to lose weight.
He's also writing something
and then trying to build out
a collection of work,
not just one thing, but across a lifetime.
And then we are
going really deep at the end
with its pale shadows.
Commentaries that I was reading saying,
this is in
plain words on a page
that that there's our actual life
and then the work, and then the writing
is like a pale shadow of the life, is
what he was saying, that the work is like
coming out, but not quite.
But they say these pale shadows
begin to pair
and replace the poet's body.
This is described I needed help,
I'll be honest, I'd be helped.
But I like this interpretation.
At least this is the aging process, right?
This is what we go
through as we are getting older.
The work, the pale shadows,
the things that we have created.
What's one commentator said? The legacy.
What is the legacy?
And I thought of the session
we did the other week, love is the legacy.
What is the legacy we're creating?
We're saying we're trying
to move toward health in this space.
But what is health if love isn't
part of it and like the foundation of it?
And so that's what I bring into this work,
replacing even
the physical body with the legacy,
the love that we have shown
to people, the kindness that we have shown
both to ourselves and to other people.
And then it just ends.
And isn't it time?
What a way to end it.
Isn't it time?
I don't know what it is
to be in a space
who say, from a certain point of view,
if you have lived a full life, you know,
and you are like 99 years old
and you say, I have like run a race,
you know.
It's like I'm
very mindful of, like,
I want to get to that place.
You don't want to be taken out early
by some awful thing.
So much of what we are trying to do,
we can't control.
We have no idea.
We're all sitting here in this experience
and who knows all of the factors
and toxic exposures that we have that are
causing disease and all these things.
You say we're sitting in a health space
so that as many of us as possible,
we're just trying
to tilt the odds in our favor
so we can give ourselves the best shot
at thinking a thought like this,
where we get to the end
and could ask a question
like this, isn't it time?
Like, you know
what an incredibly actually privileged
thing
to experience, actually.
Isn't it
time as we are flowing
through the experience of life,
where we say from this vantage point,
we can see
replacing even the body with ideas,
with emotion and concepts
very, very deep in powerful thought.
And so to me, flowing through this,
I spent a lot of time thinking about it
this weekend. Do you like it?
What do you think?
I just I loved the concepts in it.
The struggle between eating
and not eating.
Finding the balance.
The balance between satisfaction
and finding lightness.
And this is something that I want us
to do.
Body, mind and spirit.
A place of lightness.
Fasting.
An incredible metaphor for this.
because everything flows
through all of these spaces,
you know, lightness in the body,
moving into lightness
in the spirit of lightness
in our thinking,
if you are feeling heavy in a space, may
be come back to this and think through it.
And then I especially love this idea
of editing the body, mirroring between
the process of editing a literary work
and then editing our body.
Never thought of that analogy or concept
before
fasting, as editing the body,
I think, is a
really interesting and beautiful concept.
I like it say, you know,
I don't think this sentence belongs here.
You know, it's like, let's edit it out.
Easier said than done
in the actual physical body.
I say fasting space, fasting,
the type of thing.
It's like an editing tool.
One of the tools in the toolkit,
along with making
the very best dietary choices
that we can and moving the body
in the healthiest ways,
framing all of these experiences together
into powerful, holistic,
comprehensive place.
And using these tools like a lockpick.
You know, all those little pins
trying to get them in?
Pick the lock.
That's what we're trying to do.
love the talk we did the other day
from my clinical study.
We look at like a really,
really tightly controlled
process of people
six months, very, very analytical
about the type of thing that people
can experience when you really dial in,
maybe an idea from that study
to bring it in here.
Like, can you compare yourself
to one of the clinical trial participants
who's, like, totally dialed
in, could couldn't experience like that?
Open your mind to the type of experience
that we can you can create for yourself
with your medical team, with the thinking
and ideas that we are generating.
Leaning into one of these things.
If you feel called to it for a season,
leaning back on
some of it's all flexible concepts,
just like the little lark
picks back and forth, you can move them
until we get to the right place.
Unlock the cell.
But that's the idea from that study
that we are experiencing hormonal effects
that are very strong,
and we are trying to fight against them
instead of flow through them.
This is a big thing
that we need to lean towards.
So if you're feeling stuck in a space
like that, come back to a talk like that.
Get into the mindset insulin.
How do we control that
master access to that fat cell?
And then emotionally, maybe this poem is
the type of thing
that is working on the emotional side.
Author
helping us get into the space,
feel the tension.
That's what you're going to do.
You're going to pick a lock.
You got to be very subtle.
You got to feel in there,
especially if you can't see it.
Can we feel those little pins in there
that we're trying to get in
just to hit hit the right one
many times.
It's the emotional space
that is the linchpin for the entire thing.
We can understand concepts in the body
and we can understand data
and all these things.
And if that if we were robot,
then that would be what we need.
But we are this emotional,
spiritual being.
And many times it's that pin
that is buried the deepest down.
That's the one way at the back
that we gotta hit to pick the lock.
And so
spend some time sit with this poem.
If you are having reflection
sometimes something like this.
Here a poem you work through some thoughts
like that.
You hear a concept like, oh, editing
the body
is that editing the physical body
or editing the emotional body?
Same thing.
Probably
because we are a mind and body together
as one mind, body spirit.
Although I don't know, for for me it's
hard to have the words to say,
what does that really mean?
But I do believe it.
Sometimes you get a little nugget
like that.
That's what it's been like for me over
the last couple of days over the weekend,
as I was like letting the poem roll around
and then I have more thoughts about it.
And then I kind of think more about it is
what a good piece of art will do, right?
I say a good way to think of ourselves,
at least for me.
This is a goal I have.
We're trying to say we're trying
to create our expression of health.
It's like our being.
It's like it is ourselves.
It's like, how are we in the world?
I think about a poem
that is a great artistic expression.
Help people to think about it.
Well, this is what I would like say, man,
I listen to a little fasting space.
I'm still thinking about it.
You know, this would be this session
as an artistic expression,
which is what I am trying to make,
something that gets us
thinking deeply about life and health
in a way that matters, you know,
that helps us to find strength
on the journey.
Right?
Because I see how I am describing
our whole path forward.
It's a journey.
Journey takes time.
Journey isn't a simple fix.
Nothing sugarcoated, just real. Right?
We have the real tools of health,
the core
ways of being healthy
and pushing back
against an unhealthy culture.
then our task.
How do we gain skill with them, shape them
and use them to move forward?
The strongest way possible helps
when we can do it together.
Very happy to have you all here
with me on the journey,
and I wish you the very best in this day,
in the very best in this week.
Lots of good thinking coming up
invites you to come back, tune in
and we'll keep walking on this journey
together.
Have a great day! Everybody talk soon.
