"Tall and thin all his life, he was partly drawn to study obesity because it lent itself to the pursuit of 'beginner’s mind,' a Buddhist consciousness concept...."

From the NYT obituary for Dr. Albert J. Stunkard, who "was the first to identify binge eating as a medical disorder, one of the first to link obesity to socioeconomic factors, and the first scientist to show why so many obese people have about as much control over their body weight as they do over their parentage [and] also one of the first medical professionals to condemn the stigmatization of overweight people."

The NYT links here for the meaning of "beginner's mind," which extols the book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" and quotes the first sentence — "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few" — but gives very little basis for understanding what drove the skinny Stunkard to study the stout.

Searching, I found such awful garbage — like "How to Live Life to the Max with Beginner’s Mind" — that I had to end this post right here so I could begin somewhere else.