Name: How I Changed My Habits With The Satiation Principle
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T05:00:09.000Z
Duration: 7 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Like most people, I walked around the city with a hole inside of me.

Transition words & phrases

And although it hid from my view, it grew and inflicted me with pain, so I felt its

This worked for a short time, but it always failed in the long run.

Junk food went inside, partially sealed up the hole, then fell out on the other side.

I ate another burger and drank another soda, but I never felt full.

Fat gathered around my stomach, my gut bred bad bacteria, and my own body became a war

zone—depression and self-loathing were the norm.

I was losing the battle, and I needed to change.

So I imposed restrictive rules on myself.

I stopped eating junk food and drinking pop, but I never found a replacement for those

The hole inside of me grew and inflicted more pain, and if I neglected it for any longer,

it would have eaten me from the inside-out.

I preferred to be partially filled and alive, rather than empty, suffering, and eventually,

I went to the gym and ate plain chicken with broccoli.

Instead of leaving the hole wide open, I tried to fill it with something different.

I spent immense energy gathering new pieces, but they were the wrong shape.

They were shaped like squares, and as far as I knew, the hole wasn't.

So again, I reverted back to my old habits.

After deep self-examination, I learned to see its shape.

At the time, I had taken on too many commitments.

Stress entered my life and created the hole.

Like a dragon, stress wreaked havoc on my body.

And instead of confronting it, I ran into the castle of Junk Food and hid.

And as long as I let the dragon roam, I never would have been able to leave the castle.

So I pulled the sword called Balance out of the stone and slayed the dragon.

I lowered my stress by cutting down on the number of hours I worked.

As my stress lowered, I found that my desire for comfort foods vanished.

I used the hours I had gained to cook healthy and delicious alternatives, allowing me to

Balance was the piece I needed to fill the hole.

I wasn't deprived, and I didn't need more.

It felt like drinking a large glass of water after a long run—a perfect harmony between

the affliction, thirst, and the cure, water.

As I grew older, new holes emerged, but my process for dealing with them remained the

I asked myself, “what is its shape?”, “what do I think will fill it?”, and “when

The marriage between my biology and my environment gave a unique shape to every hole.

And because of that, I never found a rulebook.

Without knowing the unique shape of me, how could anyone know what I needed?

The process of change became individual and unique.

Another man ate to relive the comfort his mother had provided.

And another man ate to cope with the stresses of poverty and parenting.

The first man said, “change is easy”: just stop.

The second man said, “Change is hard, but you must heal your mother complex.”

But neither solution helped the third man.

For each man, the hole took on a different shape, and so the process by which they filled

I recently came across a Czech fairy tale called “The Wooden Baby.”

In it, a husband and wife wished for a child, but they were not able to have one.

“You should be grateful,” said their neighbour.

But one day, while out in the forest, the husband discovered a stump that looked like

It begged for food, and so the mother made it a meal.

But after eating the meal, the baby was not sated.

It ate more and more, and eventually, it ate its mother, father, and other members of the

As the neighbour pointed out, the family lacked wealth—not necessarily financial.

Perhaps they lacked material, spiritual, philosophical, psychological, or societal wealth.

But the case remained, the poverty of the parents passed on to the baby.

And so the baby entered the world with a hole, but it never found the thing that could have

It consumed more and more and destroyed the world around it.

At the end of the tale, an old lady cut the baby in half, freeing all the people inside.

And so, the baby's insatiable appetite led to its own destruction.

After I read the tale, I wondered how many of my own holes were the result of the family,

Could I even fill all of these up on my own?

By failing to sate myself, how am I affecting the people around me and those who will come

And how many holes have I created in others?

As I discovered and filled each hole, I came to believe this process could not be separated

from uncovering and fulfilling one's own destiny.

The journey to satiation, to wholeness, of old and new habits, might all be the same—and

So I continue to ask myself, “what's the shape of the hole?”, “what do I think

can fill it?”, “when I get that thing, do I feel deprived, or do I need more and

more?”, or  in other words, “do I feel sated?”