What Are You Hungry For? (4 page)

Your brain is structured to find happiness at every level. For a baby, who operates almost totally with basic instincts from the lower brain, happiness means eating when he’s hungry, sleeping when he’s tired, being held when he’s cold. But things become more complex when the other regions, the limbic system and the higher brain, start developing. Their version of happiness is far more complex.

As a young doctor, I knew these things medically but I wasn’t paying attention personally. I look back at the dinner table and see a frustrated young man (with a patient young wife) whose brain was teeming with so much technical information (higher brain) that the inner voice, which cried out, “I’m unhappy and dissatisfied” (limbic system), got suppressed. At the same time, the most primitive voice in my head, which was afraid of failure and crashing under the pressure (reptilian brain), added disturbing background noise. No wonder meals passed by in a blur, offering a momentary flash of satisfaction. (I was fortunate to have been raised by loving parents, because at least my new family didn’t fall apart as happened to so many young doctors I knew. I knew the value of giving and receiving love.)

You can’t escape the three conversations going on in your mind all the time. Hundreds of choices are filtered through the higher brain every day, and each one carries an emotional coloring. This is uniquely human. If you put a pellet of food in front of a laboratory rat, it automatically eats it, and just as automatically the pleasure center in its brain lights up. But when you put food in front of a person, there can be any response imaginable. How often do people say things like the following?:

I’m too upset to eat.

I don’t want this fish. I only like meat and potatoes.

I’m too busy right now.

Our brains have a pleasure center for food, just as a lab rat does, but our inner life is incredibly sophisticated. Emotions can override hunger or make it unnaturally strong. Distorted beliefs, arising in the higher brain, can interfere with both emotions and hunger—hence the anorexic teenager who sees a starved body in the mirror but feels “too fat” because of a warped mental image (I’m referring to one aspect of a complicated psychological and genetic disorder).

When you overeat, it may appear that the lower brain has run amok, forcing you into uncontrollable hunger. But the problem is actually systemic. Typically, it’s a blend of impulse control (lower brain), trying to find comfort (emotional brain), and making bad choices (higher brain). All three are involved, forming a continuous dance.

This dance moves in a constant circle, as illustrated here:

Impulse: Your lower brain tells you if you’re hungry, afraid, threatened, or aroused.

Emotion: Your limbic system tells you about your mood, positive or negative, and your emotional response in the present moment.

Choice: Your higher brain tells you that a decision must be made, leading to action.

Let me illustrate how all of this works with a personal story. Tracy has had a weight problem since she was a teenager. She slid into several kinds of self-defeating behavior starting back then. She became defensive about her weight whenever her parents tried to talk about it. She developed a domineering personality, thinking that if she acted confident and bossy, no one would see how fragile she felt inside. When it came time to date boys, she quickly moved into sexual activity, because it was what boys wanted, and in turn she felt wanted. The more she acted out, though, the worse she felt about herself, so drugs and alcohol eventually followed.

All of that is well behind Tracy now. She is fifty and happily married, and she generally feels good about herself. But there’s no getting around the fact that she is 80 to 100 pounds over her ideal weight. She was never my patient but a personal friend instead, and when we meet socially, it’s usually at a restaurant. I don’t judge how she eats or give advice, but at a typical meal, I’ve noticed a few things:

When she sits down, Tracy’s first remark is usually that she’s not hungry, but she’ll find something to eat.

Waiting for the first course, she talks and eats several pieces of bread from the bread basket at the same time. She butters the bread without looking down at what she’s doing.

She orders two courses, an appetizer and entrée, as soon as the server asks what she wants.

She always cleans her plate.

She never orders dessert but picks away at mine if I order one, generally eating at least half of it.

Looking at these habits, what strikes me is that Tracy acts them out unconsciously. She pays attention to me and our conversation but not to what her hands are doing. She’s learned to blank out what she doesn’t want to see. I’m sure that you now get what’s going on here: Three areas of the brain are fighting a silent conflict, each using its own kind of message.

Tracy’s lower brain keeps saying, “I’m hungry. More food. I’m still famished.”

Her emotional brain keeps saying, “I don’t feel good about myself. More food. I still feel bad.”

Her higher brain keeps saying, “I know I shouldn’t be eating like this. More food. Why bother resisting? It doesn’t matter because the impulse will keep returning anyway.”

It would be wonderful if somebody could take a snapshot of this cross talk in her brain, show it to Tracy, and make her see what’s going on. Perhaps one day advanced brain scanning will do precisely that. But even with a perfect snapshot, the brain never stands still. Tracy’s problem is always shifting. One minute she’s obeying one part of her brain; the next minute another part takes charge. That’s why in a single meal she can enjoy her food, hate herself for eating so much, promise to do better, and ignore the whole thing. Her behavior constantly contradicts itself.

This is the inner war being fought by everyone who struggles with their weight. Here’s a secret:
You will never win this war.
If you could, you would have long ago. As long as you keep fighting with yourself, you will be stuck at the level of the problem. You must rise above the level of the problem and reach the level of the solution.

Tracy is following a typical and unfortunate pattern. Every hour of the day she obsesses about food, controlling her eating, and being overweight. She is mired at the level of the problem. What would it take to lift her to the level of the solution?

I assured her that the answer exists. “It’s right inside you,” I said. “When you obsess and worry, you are giving your brain the wrong assignment. You’re telling it to send negative messages to every cell in your body. You can choose to stop doing that.”

“But I feel bad,” she protested. “I don’t have any positive messages to send.”

“No, not when you’re so anxious and unhappy with yourself,” I agreed. “But there’s a positive message you’ve overlooked. Paying quiet attention to how your body feels is a powerful message, all by itself. Awareness isn’t noisy or emotional. It looks on quietly, and that’s the best state for your body to start rebalancing itself.”

Tracy looked a bit mystified, but she smiled, because some part of her caught on. She was relieved that there was a way to get unstuck. Whenever anyone is trapped by habits, old conditioning, and out-of-control eating, they need to become quietly aware, without judgment, in a state that quiets the constant inner dialogue filling the mind. Awareness takes you from the level of the problem to the level of the solution.

So how do you go about increasing your awareness? Becoming more aware is easy and can be done anytime during the day using three basic techniques. They bring the three major regions of your brain into balance naturally and without effort.

Become
aware of your body.
Go inside and tune in to its physical sensations, whatever they are. Experience what your body is experiencing.

Become
aware of your emotions.
Close your eyes, put your attention on your heart, and see how you feel emotionally. Without getting involved, be centered and observe these feelings.

Become
aware of your choices.
Find a time when you are calm, maybe early in the morning upon waking or while you are relaxing in the shower, and examine the best way to make the decisions you are facing. The best decision making comes from an inner state of restful alertness.

I experienced a real transformation by adopting these basic techniques, which take only a moment to practice. I hadn’t realized something quite fundamental about my mind. It’s a perpetual motion machine. Given a chance, it runs all the time, piling up thought after thought, emotion after emotion. I wasn’t giving it time to do some important things. It needed to calm down, to reflect upon the moment, to consider how I felt, to ask my body how it felt. “How are we doing?” is such a simple question—the
we
including body, emotions, and intellect—and yet most of us don’t ask it often enough. Asking a friend “How are you doing?” is a reassuring thing to do. You deserve the same if you want your body to be your friend.

Try these techniques out for yourself, with no expectations or pre-judgment. Being in tune isn’t difficult, but many overweight people have gotten out of touch with their bodies because when you get right down to it they don’t like themselves anymore. They are reluctant to look at their emotions, because they worry about what they might find. They feel trapped by bad choices in the past, which makes it harder to look afresh at new possibilities. All of this can be overcome by weaning your brain away from its old conditioning. There’s no need to struggle. Just make these new techniques into a habit and allow change to arrive naturally.

Dana is a success story of the mind-body approach, and she illustrates what I mean by an effortless way to lose weight. What’s so important is how she reached her turning point. Here is her story:

“I maintained my college weight for years,” Dana recounts. “In my thirties I changed jobs and landed in a company that provided on-site meals. I got into the habit of popping downstairs for lunch, and most of the time I was either thinking about my job or talking to a co-worker while we ate. I didn’t walk outside enough, and if something looked really good in the cafeteria, I ate it without thinking.”

Without really noticing it, Dana gained 15 pounds over one winter, which shocked her. She began dieting to get the weight off but found it hard to stay motivated. Assuming that all it took was more willpower, she kept promising herself that she would take charge of her appetite, but somehow that day never came. Instead, her stress level rose.

“I left the company and started a small business, just as the downturn came. The business stalled, and then I ran short of money. I began doing something I had never done before. Every afternoon I had a big Snickers bar washed down with half a can of diet soda. Frankly, I didn’t even think about my weight. I was too anxious all the time.”

Eventually her business troubles reversed, which was good news. But none of her old clothes fit anymore, and when Dana looked in the mirror, she felt frustrated and disappointed in herself.

A crash diet took off about half the weight she needed to lose, but by the time I saw Dana, most of it had returned. Ironically, the fact that she was getting new clients in her consulting business fueled the problem. There were more lunches eaten out with clients, more hours
spent on the phone, more days when she arrived home exhausted after six at night.

It took a mind-body approach to change these negative trends. I proposed that she do the three things we covered earlier: feel her body, observe her emotions, and make more-aware choices.

My aim was to get Dana to tune in, because her story is about losing the connection between mind, body, and emotions. This new approach intrigued her, especially when I assured her that it was effortless—the only demand was for moments of paying attention, which was an expenditure of time that she could easily afford.

“At first it was strange to watch myself,” she said. “I began to catch myself thoughtlessly buttering a roll in a restaurant, so I’d stop, and when I tuned in, I found that I wasn’t actually hungry. The message was right there in front of me. All I had to do was feel it.”

Now, a year later, she is back down to her college weight, but more important, Dana has learned the power of paying attention. Awareness is the key to weight loss, once you train yourself to notice the natural signals present in the body at any moment. It takes time and repetition to cause long-term imbalances to shift, but they will. You are the choice-maker who can create any change you desire.

Like every other young doctor in the seventies, I came of age in medicine knowing absolutely zero about the mind-body connection. My medical specialty was endocrinology, the field that deals with hormones. As a young doctor I was fascinated with how the tiniest secretion of chemicals could make someone afraid, courageous, angry, sexually aroused, or hungry in a matter of seconds. The secret to Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde lies in a molecule! That discovery sparked my imagination, and I originally thought I’d be content to stay in the
laboratory examining the effects of hormones, because their action and interaction is astonishingly complex.

But when I went into private practice, I saw the devastating effect of hormones firsthand. Stress hormones were culprits in disorders that could ruin people’s lives, often in cruel social ways. “He’s lazy and dull” is the stigma attached too often to thyroid deficiency. Soldiers have been anxious about seeming to be cowards for centuries, but another hormone, adrenaline, leads to flight as much as fight. In addition, when the adrenaline rush is over, the body is physically depleted. Expose a soldier to enough situations where fight-or-flight is triggered, and the result is shell shock. Countless combatants have accused themselves of being cowards—and were stigmatized by fellow soldiers—because they were simply exhausted at the hormonal level. This stigma didn’t begin to fade until it was realized that every soldier will become shell-shocked given enough time at the front lines. No moral failing is involved; the stigma was incredibly unfair.