What Are You Hungry For? (19 page)

Power Points

•  Your body/mind is a self-regulating system. Self-regulation is called homeostasis—dynamic nonchange in the midst of change.

•  All bodily functions are self-regulated through feedback loops. Your thoughts, feelings, and desires are the most important input your body receives in the loops.

•  The signals for body awareness are satiety/hunger, comfort/discomfort, energy/lethargy, and lightness/heaviness.

•  Hundreds of feedback loops function effortlessly to keep you alive, healthy, vital, and moving without your conscious participation. But your input is needed to maintain important biorhythms, especially sleep.

•  Optimal biorhythms are related to optimal metabolism, which leads to more energy and normal weight. Impaired biorhythms create hormonal imbalances, disrupting many feedback loops. Overweight exacerbates the negative effects.

•  Your body is aware of itself as a symphony of intermeshed processes. It doesn’t see itself as a machine or a “thing.” You should consider your body a verb, not a noun.

You can ignore your body, but your body will never ignore you. It has faithfully taken care of you since the moment you were conceived. No matter how much you neglect or abuse it, your body doesn’t abandon its mission. It exists to take care of you, if only you will let it. When you go unconscious at night during sleep, your body continues to regulate thousands of processes with no attention from you. Your body’s mission is to keep you alive, healthy, and moving. This ability is known as self-regulation—fifty trillion cells operating on the honor system, so to speak.

If you consciously let your body take care of you, it will become your greatest ally and trusted partner. The most important thing you can do right now is to stop interfering with self-regulation. In cases of serious overweight, the interference takes physical form. Added weight puts unnecessary pressure on the whole system. If the body is like a supercomputer, constantly processing input and output, it wouldn’t help to pour melted beef fat and caramel into a computer.

I say that only slightly tongue in cheek because the works get gummed up far worse when you throw in mental and emotional toxins. Every negative belief weakens the partnership between mind and body. We’ve lightly touched on a key issue known as homeostasis, the body’s ability to preserve nonchange in the midst of activity. Those abstract words point to the miraculous abilities of self-regulation. Life is structured to keep self-regulation out of sight so that you can do what you want to do. You might put on your jogging clothes, thinking, “It’s time to go around the park,” which seems like a simple message. You are asking your body to get moving. But at a hidden level, your instruction affects blood sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure, body temperature, body fat, muscle mass, bone density, hormone levels, metabolic activity, immune function, and body weight. There’s never a moment when every one of these functions isn’t being regulated. And the main goal is homeostasis, letting you
do something dynamic (jogging around the park) while maintaining a constant state of balance in your body.

If homeostasis gets thrown off, your body sends you a signal. For example, maybe you haven’t jogged for three months and are suddenly inspired by a beautiful spring day to jog around the park. Unprepared for your sudden decision, your body does everything it can to take care of you. But pushed too far, it will send you signals of discomfort and strain: You feel winded, your muscles are weak, your joints ache, your breathing becomes ragged, you feel your heart pounding in your chest. These are the automatic results of homeostasis being pushed to the point where you must intervene. What you do next is up to you.

Too many processes are simultaneously going on in the human body to think of it as a noun. As I mentioned earlier, I like to think of the body as a verb. Your conscious mind can’t possibly monitor all the biological processes in the body. The basic signals that your body wants you to be aware of embrace the themes that we’ve been working with:

Satiety/hunger

Comfort/discomfort

Energy/lethargy

Lightness/heaviness

The first term in each pair indicates a state of balance—homeostasis is taking care of you without undue pressure, stress, and strain. The second word in each pair indicates that homeostasis is under pressure. You are receiving feedback from an automatic
system that needs you to consciously correct the situation. If you make the correction, self-regulation returns to its normal miraculous operation, and everything starts to hum again.

The best way to correct imbalance is through body awareness, which is basically effortless. You monitor how you feel, paying attention to the primary signals listed above: satiety/hunger, comfort/discomfort, energy/lethargy, and lightness/heaviness.

The more fine-tuned your awareness, the more in touch with your body you will be. Too often we say, “I’m famished” and reach for a lot of food when the body is actually saying, “I’m a little bit hungry” and would be satisfied with half a sandwich or a green salad.

The next time you’re hungry, stop and rate your hunger on a scale from 0 to 8.

0 to 1 Your stomach is completely empty—you cannot feel the presence of food in your system from the previous meal. At the same time, there is a sensation of hunger. This is the point at which you should start eating.

2 to 4 This is how you feel when you are eating comfortably, or after you’ve just eaten and are comfortably digesting the food. You do not feel hunger at these levels.

5 As you are eating, you start to feel satisfied.

6 This is the point of maximum comfort. You feel completely satisfied—there is neither a sensation of hunger nor any discomfort from overeating. This is the level at which you should stop eating.

7 to 8 You have gone beyond the level of comfort. After eating there is a sensation of discomfort, such as heaviness, dullness, and distension of the abdomen.

Many people feel compelled to eat even when, according to their bodies, they are full already. They may not be compulsive eaters, but these people are under some sort of pressure, in need of some kind of comfort. Or sometimes life just happens; for instance, a client might unexpectedly call and ask to meet for an early dinner, so going to a restaurant becomes mandatory only a few hours after a filling lunch.

Whatever your situation, being aware of your hunger level, and then obeying it, keeps the feedback loop between mind and body strong.

Some tips:

Being aware of your body comes naturally. If something aches, for example, discomfort is an unpleasant signal, and you instinctively want it to go away. But the mind’s response isn’t always so simple. For many overweight people, negative beliefs have been in place for so long that they barely get noticed. Even so, you can spot them through the damaging thoughts they generate. What kind of mind-body partnership is going on if you have thoughts like the following?:

My body is ugly and inferior.

I’m stuck with this body. There’s nothing I can do about it.

No matter how hard I try to lose weight, my body won’t cooperate.

I’m so disappointed in my body.

It’s just a matter of time before something inside really goes wrong.

The best thing is to ignore how my body looks and feels.

Clearly the partnership is in trouble. In my experience, people with a history of weight issues are generally quite detached from the mind-body connection. They certainly aren’t using it to their benefit.

Amanda, a patient who came to me, had developed type 2 diabetes at age fifty-five after carrying too much weight since she was a teenager. I was just one in a long string of doctors she was seeing, which is no surprise since diabetes has systemic effects. Her eye doctor told Amanda that her blurry vision was the result of retinal deterioration, which fortunately was mild so far. Other doctors were addressing her fatigue, mood swings, oversensitivity to medications, erratic blood sugar, and lower back pain (this last was not related to her diabetes).

Amanda is a stoic and forthright woman. She trudges from doctor to doctor determined to fix these symptoms. The first thing she told me was, “I consider myself a healer. I do body work but it’s holistic. My clients tell me I’ve changed their lives.”

“And you wonder why you can’t change yours,” I interjected. She nodded.

I asked Amanda what she was doing for herself, and she rattled off an impressive list. She went to a wide array of alternative therapists. She took supplements and was extremely concerned with avoiding processed foods. She did a cleanse once a month. All of these steps were proactive, but there was a catch.

“I like the things you’re doing,” I said. “But how do you feel?” To me, she looked worried and tense.

“I’m frazzled,” Amanda admitted. “I hate all these doctor visits. I just want these problems to go away.”

“I get the idea that all this worry has made you eat more,” I said. She had gained 10 pounds in the two months since our last appointment.
Amanda nodded, looking distressed. Her body told her she was in trouble, but her answer to added stress was more food. So her body was no longer in partnership with her, and she needed to change that. There was lots of melodrama, too, along with the medical concerns.

“You care about the whole situation,” I pointed out. “But you are caring in a negative way. Your body has gone so far out of balance that it’s sending up distress flares. You have to get your body’s distress down, and when you do, your own distress will decrease. The two are intimately connected.”

The right kind of caring aids the body in restoring homeostasis; healing cannot progress until this happens. Amanda could do a lot to give her body a chance to reset itself:

She could stop eating so much.

She could take up meditation.

She could take proactive steps to reduce her stress levels.

She could examine her negative beliefs.

She could feed the mind-body connection with the positive reinforcements of fulfillment.

Those are all forms of positive feedback. I also had an immediate suggestion. I asked Amanda to close her eyes and sit quietly for a moment. Then I guided her through the following meditation:

“In your mind’s eye, visualize your body as healthy and balanced. Visualize it at your ideal weight. Feel the contentment this brings. Visualize yourself smiling, feeling pleased with your body. Say to yourself, ‘This is the real me. I want to have the body I’m seeing. It’s going to be my body as soon as possible.’ ”

As she went through the meditation, Amanda smiled. You could see the tension flowing out of her system. Her face relaxed into a look of contentment and hope.

Why didn’t Amanda’s previous doctors help her? Because they looked on her body basically as a broken machine that needed to be fixed. They had little expertise—or interest—in the whole human picture. But the whole picture was of utmost importance to her. “Stop eating so much” was just the opening wedge of a mind-body strategy to get her into a better place in her life.

Your body wants positive input. Its feedback loops work automatically, which is why you could survive in a coma for months or years. But the nervous system has a second half—the voluntary nervous system—that calls for your participation. It responds to what you say, think, and do.

Detachment means that you refuse to participate. You are instructing your brain and nervous system to carry on without you. That may sound neutral, but it isn’t. Detachment takes various forms rooted in self-judgment. The main ones are denial, inertia, apathy, and resignation. People with weight issues know them all too well. Theirs is not the wise, calm detachment of a Buddha. Spiritual detachment is a state of peace. The kind of detachment that ignores what your body is telling you is born of negativity—there’s nothing peaceful about it. A mix of toxic feelings and beliefs boils down to this:
My body is against me.