learn · 2026-09-20
I am not a monk. That sentence took me ten years and several kinds of hunger to say plainly, and it is the useful conclusion of everything below, so I put it first. What follows is not advice. I said so on camera when I told this story in Russian on my channel, and I say it again here: nobody should repeat any of it. I am telling it because the reason it ended is worth more than any of the diets.
Before my first ten-day course in 2012 a normal morning was a sandwich with sausage. On the course the food was vegetarian, which to me was nonsense, and what I took home was not a diet at all — it was the regime. Up early, two sittings a day, in bed at a sensible hour, for the first time in a life spent going to bed late with friends. The butter-and-tomato sandwich came with it, because that was what I had been eating for ten days, and I noticed I felt lighter. That was the whole method, and it stayed the method for a decade: change one thing, then watch the next morning's sitting.
A year later I started travelling and did not stop for a long time. In Bali in 2014 I discovered that vegetables came in more kinds than my parents had ever bought. I did not know what an avocado was; I cut one open, took out the stone, and carried the stone to a friend as the interesting part. In India, doing breathing practices for the first time, I noticed how much mucus there was when I breathed hard, asked what I was eating that caused it, dropped dairy and eggs, and the breathing cleared. I could not touch my toes then. I had come from pull-up bars and boxing and could not do a single forward bend.
Back in Barcelona after eighteen months away, the hard one was flour — I grew up there, on my mother's cakes. Then vegan. Then, around 2016, raw: sprouted green buckwheat carried in a bag through a Moscow winter, soaked seeds for calcium and iron, because by then I had learned that you cannot remove a food without knowing what replaces it. Then, back in Bali in 2017, fruit only, and finally one fruit at a time: twenty-one days on mango, ten on dragon fruit.
At every stage the instrument was the same. If I ate late, I did not get up at half past four. If I ate something heavy, the next morning's sitting was dull, and I sat down later or wanted not to sit at all. Practice was the measuring stick, and without it none of the eating meant anything — I have watched people go through the same diets without a practice and learn nothing from them, because there was nothing to read the result on. This is the one thing in the story I would still say to anyone: whatever you change, the morning sitting is where it shows.
On fruit alone something else happened, and this is the part I misread. The emotional weather went flat. I had energy — I slept four hours, finished every project I had, recorded a thirty-day meditation course in that state — and I had almost no feelings. It resembled the mind after a ten-day retreat, even and quiet, and I took the resemblance for progress. Less food, fewer emotions, more of the retreat feeling. My circle fell away; I could only talk to people who ate fruit. I got thin and let it happen.
Somewhere in there I had a question I could not answer. Monks who meditate all day eat whatever is put in front of them — cooked rice, sweets, whatever the village brings — and are calm. Some are thin and some are big, and the big ones practise as much as the thin ones. And I, on the cleanest food a person can eat, was afraid of a monastery kitchen. I had wanted to sit a long course in Myanmar and had been putting it off for exactly that reason.
I went anyway, with the question. Fifteen days at Pa-Auk in 2019. The day starts around three; the monks accept all the food that is offered, set aside what they will not eat on the way to the hall, and eat what remains slowly, piece by piece, as a practice. What I saw was that they were not working on the body at all. They were working on the mind — on concentration, on the senses, on reaction — and the food did not reach that work. The power was coming from the mind, and whether a monk ate a lot or a little did not change it. Every day the meal was different, and it was received, not chosen.
That turned a switch. I had spent years guarding a bag of the right food, and the people I had gone to learn from did not guard anything.
I did not come back straight away. In 2020 I was in Rishikesh when the world closed, and I went further: seven days without food or water, then a month on mango and fresh ginger. I was very thin, I was short of breath, and I honestly did not know whether I would return to Europe. When I did, later that year, I could not do one pull-up. It took two years to eat normally, to run again, to stand on my hands in a yoga class on Koh Phangan and enjoy the body I had spent a decade trying to leave.
The Buddha's fourth truth names the path as the one that avoids two extremes: indulging the senses and tormenting the body. I had taught that in my own course. By then I had also done both, and can report that the second is not the middle any more than the first. Ascetic pride is still pride, and a body starved for the sake of the mind is still a body being used as an argument.
Where it landed is unremarkable, which is the point. I eat mostly raw because I feel better on it, and sometimes cooked, without fear. I want this body, and sport, and an ordinary human shape. I keep the two rules that survived every stage: change one thing at a time, with understanding, and replace rather than remove; and read the result on the next morning's sitting, not on the scale and not in the mirror. Everything beyond that was mine to go through, and there was no need for you to.
The Vipassana Path · Retreat and home, honestly · About the teacher