What Does World Peace have to do With Weight Loss?

by Mariana Bozesan

It was sometime during the spring of 2003 that my friend and teacher Dr. Deepak Chopra first mentioned the Alliance for the New Humanity to me. Made up of brilliant, distinguished leaders from all over the world, the Alliance had formed quite spontaneously out of a growing concern for worldwide increases in violence and war, as well as mounting threats to the environment, and a lopsided global distribution of wealth. My own life’s work is focused on many of the same issues, and after discussing it over the course of several months with my husband Tom, we decided to act as founding sponsors of the Alliance.

In December of that year, the Alliance held its first full meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico where panelists such as former Vice President Al Gore and Nobel Laureates, Betty Williams and Oscar Arias, discussed how to go about making the world a more peaceful, equitable place. As these luminaries shared their hard won wisdom on creating lasting change on a large scale, I realized that they were revealing not only valuable insights into their own struggles for peace, but into the true nature of change and transformation itself—many of which could be applied not only at the international level, but on an individual level as well.

1. Compassion. Though the over 400 meeting participants came from a dazzling array of backgrounds, traditions and professions, one of their main shared beliefs is that compassion is a key component of world peace. Compassion is defined by an ability to empathize with the suffering of others accompanied by a desire to alleviate it, and this concept can be extended to the area of personal transformation by noticing how we regard our own struggles. When we attempt to make a health related change, are we doing it out of a sense of our imperfections, or a desire to create vitality? When we falter in our efforts, do we condemn ourselves, or do we treat ourselves as we would want to be treated by another person? Compassion teaches us that’s it’s just as unacceptable for us to treat ourselves harshly as it is for us to treat one another harshly¹.


2. Connection. Gautama Buddha said that "in separateness lies the world’s great misery," and it’s clear that whether on a national level or a personal one, isolation leads to extremism. In order to put a stop to extreme eating and other destructive behaviors, we need to connect ourselves to other positive people, places and activities. Breaking up the patterns of behavior that keep us isolated means that we’re much less likely to engage in unhealthy habits. This is something that modern social scientists figured out only fairly recently, but Buddha knew it back in 565 B.C.


3. Long-term thinking. Using non-violent methods like boycotts and hunger strikes, it took migrant worker Cesar Chavez ten long years to succeed in making the very first steps toward improving workers’ wages. "Non-violence is hard work," he said. "It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win." When attempting to bring about significant changes such as world peace, it’s crucial to think beyond next week, next month and even next year. So when we embark upon a healthy weight loss plan, we can’t do it in a hurried or urgent way. Real, lasting change only comes with long-term commitment and the patience required to see things through.


4. A sense of purpose. What is our mission in life? Are we full of enthusiasm? Do we lead lives of meaning? If we have a sense of purpose, then weight loss can happen more naturally because we’re driven and will do anything to support our higher pursuits. When we love our life’s work, it gets easier to make good choices about what to put into our bodies, because we crave the energy to accomplish our goals².


5. Healing. Both world peace and weight loss require deep healing and moving away from values that contaminate our best efforts for vital, healthy lives. The Alliance points out that when a disaster takes place, individuals will sometimes abandon their more self-serving goals in order to compete with one another over giving assistance and resources to those who most need it. We saw this after the September 11^th attacks, when lines at blood donation centers wrapped around the block and millions of dollars were raised to help surviving family members. What if we applied this principle on a daily basis? If we focused less on what we can get and more on what we can give, would this have an effect on our weight? Moving away from mindless consumption holds the promise not only of healing our bodies and helping us lose excess weight, but of healing the world itself.