{"id":129,"date":"2014-09-25T09:13:55","date_gmt":"2014-09-25T13:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/?p=129"},"modified":"2014-09-25T09:13:55","modified_gmt":"2014-09-25T13:13:55","slug":"fat-karma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/2014\/09\/fat-karma\/","title":{"rendered":"Fat Karma"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Not<\/a>
Not once has my inability to eat cupcakes prevented me from photographing them.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

You\u2019re never as prepared for an all-you-can-eat buffet as a person in pajamas. I found myself with my teenage sons at just such a buffet last night. I\u2019m not a huge fan of those places \u2014 as someone with celiac, they seem like minefields. To teenage boys, they seem like paradise: row after row of food and no limit to how much they can ingest. By the time my older son came back to the table with a plate piled-high with desserts, I had to physically look away lest I become ill at the sight of him eating even more. As I glanced around, I saw the pajama-clad. Some people, it turns out, plan ahead for their overeating, and show up\u00a0in comfortable clothing that isn\u2019t tight around the waist.<\/p>\n

My mind wandered to two of my friends, who both underwent bariatric surgery last week. A married couple, the man has weighed over 400 lbs his entire adult life and his wife has weighed over 500 lbs as long as I\u2019ve known her. It\u2019s been a long time since I was skinny myself, but I\u2019ve never suffered their kind of obesity: I\u2019ve never walked into a room and looked around for a chair I could trust or needed a motorized scooter if the day included too much walking or needed a seatbelt extender. I know what it\u2019s like to be thin, and I know what it\u2019s like to be fat, but I don\u2019t know the suffering of being significantly impaired from weight or the anguish they\u2019ve felt knowing their weight was why they couldn\u2019t have children. They finally decided enough was enough and saved up their money and got gastric sleeve surgery, which removes a significant portion of the stomach (it doesn\u2019t involve the stomach wearing<\/em> a \u201csleeve\u201d; it involves the stomach becoming the shape of a sleeve).<\/p>\n

Now that they\u2019re home, the wife has been posting a lot of pictures of food. Foods she misses, foods she wants to try as soon as she\u2019s allowed solids, foods she\u2019s stocked up on for recovery. She even started posting updates of what her cat is eating. Right now, her mind is completely occupied with food, which alarms me a bit.<\/p>\n

It got me thinking. What makes people so large?<\/p>\n

Overeating is an\u00a0obvious answer. It\u2019s not the only culprit. Some people suspect an imbalance in gut flora or a virus or something gone awry with the way food is being produced. Some people have thyroid issues or don\u2019t know how to cook, or literally don\u2019t know enough about nutrition to know healthy foods from unhealthy ones (and this can be a generational cycle that perpetuates). Nowadays fat is a class issue, as organic vegetables are far more expensive than white flour sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup and sold in endless forms throughout the supermarket and gas stations and fast food places. The factors are complex,\u00a0but we can all agree that there\u2019s an epidemic of obesity, which is ironic since the worst food-related danger used to be starvation.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I was turning over in my head. Starvation. Obesity. Starvation. Obesity. I know that on this planet people have always died from starvation and still do. I fully believe in reincarnation. One of the predominant beliefs is that the thoughts on our mind at the time of death determine our next lives. This is where it gets into territory that can\u2019t be definitively answered (least of all by me), but I\u2019ve been wondering: could overeating be caused by starvation in a past life?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My friends know they need to lose weight to improve their health, avoid early death, and hopefully be able to have children someday. They are motivated. They saved the money and went through the surgery. Despite their knowledge and motivation, the wife can\u2019t stop thinking about food and envisioning all the things she wants to eat as soon as she\u2019s able. Could it be that this fixation arises from literally starving to death in a past life and having the last thoughts be a strong desire for access to endless food? If that\u2019s the case, this time around, she does have this kind of access. We have so much food our ancestors would be astonished at how easy it is to eat as much as we want as often as we want. No amount of food seems to be enough to quell the fear of going hungry.<\/p>\n

Some topics I plan to discuss in future posts include: types of karma, how seeds of karma take root, how they flourish (or fail to), how they produce new seeds of the same kind, how we either continue planting the same seeds (always expecting miraculously different crops!) or how we break the cycle.<\/p>\n

One thing I know for sure: even if reincarnation is untrue, even if obesity is unrelated to starving in a previous life, our eating habits have everything to do with karma<\/strong>. All habits are part of an ongoing cycle of actions and food habits are among the most deeply rooted. You can bet the people who show up at the buffet in pajamas aren\u2019t overeating\u00a0for the first time. Even a surgery that removes 80% of the stomach doesn\u2019t uproot the mind\u2019s obsession with and craving for food. Millions of us, to varying degrees,\u00a0are creating and realizing the fruits of fat karma.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our eating habits have everything to do with karma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2044,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[4,5],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-karma","tag-hindu","tag-hinduism"],"yoast_head":"\nFat Karma<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Our eating habits have everything to do with karma.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/2014\/09\/fat-karma\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fat Karma\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Our eating habits have everything to do with karma.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/2014\/09\/fat-karma\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Gathering Nectar\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-09-25T13:13:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/wp.production.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/files\/2014\/09\/cupcakes.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Deepika Birks\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Deepika Birks\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/2014\/09\/fat-karma\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/2014\/09\/fat-karma\/\",\"name\":\"Fat Karma\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2014-09-25T13:13:55+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-09-25T13:13:55+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/#\/schema\/person\/88575c70bc4fd09ba26f763268b468c2\"},\"description\":\"Our eating habits have everything to do with karma.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/2014\/09\/fat-karma\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/2014\/09\/fat-karma\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/2014\/09\/fat-karma\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Fat Karma\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/\",\"name\":\"Gathering Nectar\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/#\/schema\/person\/88575c70bc4fd09ba26f763268b468c2\",\"name\":\"Deepika Birks\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gatheringnectar\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/4eab31f620eb911c04e057c051c1839e?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/4eab31f620eb911c04e057c051c1839e?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Deepika Birks\"},\"description\":\"Deepika Birks is an American Hindu with a background in comparative religion and theology. 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