There was this one time I did ice cream meditation for a few weeks, in order to learn about why I eat so much of it. What I did was to just apply mindfulness when eating it. Just be aware of every spoonful, how my body and mind reacts to it, before, during, after. I realised it’s not so much about the taste of the ice cream that made me consume so much, though I generally do enjoy sweet diary products.

Back home, eating a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s is not about wholesome enjoyment but to cover up some stress or suffering. Usually it’s work stress. I eat ice cream to ‘pamper’ a body that’s too beat up by my demanding work ethic and externalised pressure. Somehow, perhaps from early childhood experiences, ice cream got associated with emotional comfort. And in a bid to seek out comfort from stress, I turned to ice cream. Lots of it. Though it might momentarily soothe the emotions, that huge amount of ice cream doesn’t help the body one bit. All that sugar just brings energy spikes and crashes, weight gain, digestive issues and thus poorer overall health, and ironically, more stress. It was a really poor and unwholesome form of coping. 

Consuming to escape, I create more (bodily) suffering on top of the previous (stress) suffering. 

I’m still working on it. The ice cream was after all just the tip of a bigger, deeper iceberg. It’s just a symptom. The deeper root causes are unbalanced narratives of career as personal identity, unskillful perspectives of work, bad work habits, poor emotional regulation, and even poorer methods of coping. 

But it’s interesting now to observe, to use ice cream cravings as some sort of early alert alarm, that I’m going through some emotional difficulties, and I probably need to take care of that instead of just blazing forward. 

Ice cream means I scream. From a downstream, coping mechanism to an upstream, early warning mechanism.