Diet as a window on practice and life

"What have you been eating?" Chiba Sensei would thunder, on afternoons when I was particularly sluggish on the mat for noon class as the Fairmount Avenue dojo in San Diego. Depending on his mood, I would confess to a cheeseburger at McDonald's or a fat, roach-parts-sprinkled burrito from the taco stand down the block from my house.

Yes, I had grown up like many American's on McDonald's and other processed food, but I had also spent years as a vegetarian and health-food devotee before moving to San Diego. Yet something about the kenshusei program had me pulling into drive-thrus like never before. Even as I trained harder than I had ever trained in my life, I packed on the pounds.

When I visited my former teacher in Seattle after a year in the program, he said: "What are they feeding you up there, chanko-nabe?" Chanko-nabe is the calorie-laden stew they feed Sumo wrestlers to bulk them up for competition. The comment stung, but my graduation to a Size 5 gi attested to the truth of his observation.

I attribute some of the weight gain to stress eating, but as the years passed I also see that the bulk gave me some added protection and helped me to hold my own against stronger practitioners. Editor's note: Biran and Biran Online will be featuring essays on diet and Aikido practice for the next few issues. Please send contributions through your chief instructor or directly to the Biran editor. Let's make this an ongoing dialog! Years later, in Japan, I tried Sumo at an all-martial-arts camp. Wearing a fundoshi over my gi pants, I barreled into one opponent and won my match, while managing to jam my thumb so badly it hurt for months. Size was power!

But in another way I also see my weight gain as a retreat from full practice, a way to avoid pushing my ukemi to the next level. If my partners couldn't move me, I couldn't be blamed for not taking a connected fall or reacting to a quick change of direction. In a competitive environment like the kenshusei program, my size put me on the sidelines somewhat and freed me from expectations. Also, after a brutal day of training, how could I resist the Vietnamese fried rice right up the road from the dojo?

Of course, weight put on in your 20s doesn't easily come off in your 30s or 40s, especially if you come from German peasant stock. Even so, since San Diego I have maintained a healthy, mostly vegetarian diet. But diet has not been a central concern, especially in recent years of establishing a dojo.

However, I have had several fascinating insights into the influence of diet on practice in recent years, especially when joining students in the 10-day brown rice fast that we embarked upon occasionally in San Diego.

The infamous "Brown Rice Diet" consists of mainly brown rice, miso soup, nori seaweed and sweet potato, with pickled plum and daikon as condiments. Ten days, and that's all you've got to eat, in sufficient but scanty portions. The diet is a brutal test at the best of times, with the entire kenshusei program reduced to cravings and irritability in unison. But at least in San Diego, we were all eating together, training together and often living together. The power of peer pressure is all that could keep us from gagging on cold brown rice at times.

Going on the brown rice diet in a small group - while working at a full-time job and socializing with non-Aikidoka -- is virtually impossible. First, you've got to wean yourself from caffeine. Then you've got to stay away from the muffins your co-worker brought from a meeting. That afternoon snack or candy bar? Ha, have some more brown rice. Friends going out for pizza and beer? How about some nice soggy seaweed and some barley tea. Hey, it kind of looks like beer if you squint a little...

What the diet boils down to is self-discipline, and that's in short supply in our culture and in our characters. To follow the diet, even for 10 days, goes against everything our society stands for: Variety, convenience, tastiness, sweetness, social times around a steaming pizza or frosty milkshake.

Aikido asks us to step aside from daily life and look to another set of values to refine and clarify our encounters with the world. I'm still figuring out what exactly those values are and how I can incorporate them into my own daily life. To fully embrace Aikido as a lifestyle, I do know I must confront my relationship with food and chose a new path.

Preferably a path that's nowhere near a McDonald's.

Liese Klein is Chief Instructor at Fire Horse Aikido in New Haven, CT.