Once you become an accomplished driver, your subconscious assumes most of the predictable actions needed to safely steer a car. The acts of acceleration and deceleration, gentle and predictable turning, blinkers and braking all become mindless behavior after you’ve learned to drive. For some of us (never me, of course) this frees up our more conscious driving moments for texting or mobile phone conversation.

We let much of our everyday routines slip unaware into the unconscious cycles of the mental processor. Psycho-neurologists reckon this a primordial coping mechanism because our conscious brain can not possibly process all the stimulus flooding in from the physical world. Too many variables to consider all at once, so we write a sub-routine for our brain’s CPU. The subconscious assumes control of the routine.

Inevitably, eating becomes another habitual category controlled by the unconscious mind. At some point in our youth, because we were either left unsupervised to satisfy our own ancient cravings for fat, salt and sugar or were led like cattle to the feed troff by parents who succumbed to the processed food revolution, we pushed thinking about what to eat down into the basement of our subconscious.

Eating without thinking about eating is now as common as a rolling stop for most of us. I can tell you from experience. I was one, and to some extent, still am, an unconscious eater. To stop the programmed eating, to change the sub-routine of mindless calories, we need a junk food blue screen of death to jolt our conscious from its merry little trip down junk food lane.

For many, this shock comes from a regularly scheduled blood test, blood pressure reading, or worse… detection of cancer or a heart attack. One in eight women will face breast cancer. We are facing an unprecedented epidemic of life-style related disease. Over 1,500,000 new cases of cancer are expected in 2010, according to the American Cancer Society.

In the next decade, we will discover a disproportional percentage of our medical maladies stem from mindless eating. My hope is that we will take time to stop and think about everything we eat, and then, ask ourselves, “Is it worthy of the temple?”

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