I wanted mindfulness to fix my disordered eating.

Rachel Shubert
5 min readApr 2, 2019

It hasn’t, and it probably never will.

Photo by Jyotirmoy Gupta on Unsplash

Siddhartha Gautama was 29 years old when he set out in search of the answer to human suffering. The story goes that after roughly six years of experimentation, he achieved enlightenment — the permanent end to all his suffering. He became the Buddha, the Awakened One.

I was approaching the age of 29 when I “found” mindfulness and meditation. I had suffered from diagnosed binge eating disorder and resultant obesity — as well as depression — for almost a decade at that point. My search for solutions stretched back nearly as long, but mindfulness seemed to hold more promise than anything else I had encountered. I became an enthusiastic practitioner in short order.

I’m more than six years into my own experiment and have given up on mindfulness (or mindful eating, or the Dharma) being The Answer for me. Even in this one specific realm of life, this one area of suffering.

I thought my goals were modest and achievable: not enlightenment, but mere ‘lightenment. I had hoped to release a terrible psychological and behavioral burden through my practice. I expected if that happened, I’d carry less physical burden in due time.

But at almost 37, I weigh the same as I did at 29. I’ve been the same weight since the age of 26, actually: about 100–125 pounds more than I want to weigh. Meditation has brought wonderful things into my life, but my excessive eating and tired body remain a source of angst.

Of course, my dedication to practice doesn’t compare to Siddhartha Gautama’s, or even to the (predominantly retired) people I know from sitting groups and meditation retreats. It could be that I just need to practice more, put in more years, be more ardent about the Path. I think that’s certainly possible.

Or it could be that mindfulness and compassion practice isn’t the answer to everything.

It could be that even with mindfulness and meditation, with therapy (CBT and ACT and psychodynamic, to be more precise), with medication, with 12 step programs, with private coaches, with online programs, with reading and trying to implement the plans in countless books — an eating disorder can remain. It can remain even when you stack several of these…

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Rachel Shubert

Writing about the personal and the political. Therapist and meditation teacher with a poli sci background. Single parent in the rural Midwest.