Rhythm beats willpower

What Oprah taught me about discipline, biology, and the plate

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There’s a line I read almost twenty years ago, attributed to Yogi Bhajan, that lodged in my body:

If you can’t be disciplined with food, you can’t really be disciplined anywhere else.

Whether or not that’s the exact wording hardly matters. The feeling of it shaped how I lived and taught for years.

Food as the first test.
Food as the gateway to a disciplined life.
Master the plate, master yourself.

Fast-forward to now, when I teach Food as Medicine as a path to self-referral, and a question keeps circling in my mind:

If that quote is true, what do we do with Oprah?

She is one of the clearest examples of self-mastery we have in public life: trauma alchemized into purpose, a media empire built from nothing, decades of consistent, intentional work, a global impact that’s hard to overstate.

And yet, her relationship with food and weight has been a visible, painful struggle for just as long.

By the old logic, that shouldn’t compute. If discipline with food is the first step to discipline everywhere else, how did she become that person without “mastering” her plate?

This is where the philosophical tension lives for me:
between willpower (the traditional yogic idea of self-discipline) and biology/disease (the modern understanding of weight, hormones, and predisposition).

For a long time, we moralized food. Thin meant disciplined. Struggle meant failure. If you could just try harder, you’d fix it.

Even Oprah believed that for years.

Now she openly talks about obesity as a chronic condition, about genetics and GLP-1 medications, about how “no amount of willpower” could override certain biological realities. That doesn’t erase agency, but it absolutely complicates the old spiritual soundbites.

So if she can be deeply disciplined in work, spiritually awake, wildly productive—and still not have an easy, linear story with food—maybe the quote needs an update.

Maybe the problem isn’t discipline.
Maybe the problem is what we’re trying to use discipline for.

Willpower is a short-term tool

Here’s the part where I diverge from the old frame.

I don’t teach “be more disciplined” as the main lever.

I teach that rhythm beats willpower—time, habit stacks, and muscle memory will win over “try harder” every single day of the week.

Most of us cannot white-knuckle our way through every food decision, every day, for the rest of our lives. We have jobs. Kids. Aging parents. Group chats. Slack. Life.

Willpower is like sprinting up a hill. You can do it for a bit. You cannot live there.

Rhythm is different. Rhythm is gravity once you’ve laid the track:

• You eat warm, at roughly the same time every day.

• You sit down, you breathe, you chew.

• Your body starts to expect it.

• Your nervous system starts to trust it.

You’re not “being good.” You’re following a beat you already set.

Oprah as a rhythm case study

When I look at Oprah through this lens, I don’t see a failure of willpower. I see two competing rhythms.

She created an obsessive, all-consuming rhythm around work: show tapings, production, meetings, philanthropy, interviews, the endless emotional labor of holding other people’s stories.

That rhythm built an empire.

Now imagine the emotional cost of being that visible, that responsible, for that long. You’re carrying the world’s pain and projections on your shoulders.

Food, in that context, isn’t a simple “choice” you’re failing at. It’s:

• A shield.

• A buffer.

• A counter-rhythm that lets your system keep going.

For her, food may have been emotional protection against the exposure her work required. The plate became the place where the cost of that empire quietly landed.

That doesn’t mean everything is destiny and nothing can change. It means the “just be more disciplined” take is lazy. It refuses to see the rhythms that already exist and the biology that’s already in motion.

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What about the rest of us?

Most of us are not building media empires.

We’re not on national television every day, but we are suppressing our expression in quieter ways:

• Biting our tongue at work.

• Saying yes when our whole body is no.

• Swallowing our opinions to keep the peace.

Every time we do that, something in us has to hold the excess. I call that indigestion—not just in the gut, but in your system as a whole.

When we chronically suppress expression, we end up:

• Foggy instead of clear.

• Restless instead of creative.

• Striving to survive instead of playing in our “obsessions”—the work and life that actually light us up.

This is where Food as Medicine enters, not as a moral report card but as a daily task that creates rhythm.

You don’t need an empire.
You need one simple, repeatable job:

Put one warm, on-time meal on the table and treat it like it matters.

That’s it.

Done consistently, that one “small” task:

• Gives your digestion a steady beat.

• Calms your nervous system.

• Frees up energy you’ve been spending on chaos—skipped meals, panic snacks, grazing, guilt.

Over time, that energy moves from survival to creativity. Your clarity comes back. Your self-referral comes back. Your real “obsessions” become visible again—the ones that feel like a playground, not a grind.

How I resolve the tension

So where do I land on that old teaching now?

I no longer believe:

“If you can’t be disciplined with food, you can’t be disciplined anywhere else.”

Plenty of people prove that wrong.

What I do believe is this:

If you don’t have a rhythm with food, your body will keep asking for your attention—louder and louder—no matter how disciplined you are elsewhere.

Food isn’t the first test of your virtue.
It’s the most honest feedback loop you have.

• When meals are late, cold, or chaotic, your 3 pm will tell you.

• When you rush, scroll, and gulp, your sleep will tell you.

• When you chronically override your own signals, your mood and cravings will tell you.

Rhythm with food is how you start listening.

Not to please a teacher.
Not to earn a gold star in discipline.
But to reclaim digestion, energy, clarity, self-reference, creativity, and the freedom to pursue the life that actually feels like yours.

That’s the path I teach:
Rhythm over willpower. Digestion over discipline. Expression over obsession.

In the next piece, I’ll show you how I translate that into a practical “Rhythm of the Plate” you can actually live with—one warm, on-time meal you can repeat until your 3 pm calms down.

In my next paid letter, I’ll map out the actual Rhythm of the Plate framework so you can build this into your day. If you want that in your inbox, upgrade before then.

— Savitree
Your guide to Food as Medicine—warm meals, calmer gut, clearer days.