What Are You Hungry For? (6 page)

Positive:
“Today’s a new day. Whatever happened in the past doesn’t count. There’s always a solution.”

2. Negative:
“I must be genetically programmed to be overweight.”

Positive:
“I can’t change my genes, but I can trigger other genes that regulate normal appetite. Anyway, I know there are people who have lost huge amounts of weight. Their genes didn’t hold them back, and mine won’t either.”

3. Negative:
“I’m unattractive anyway. My appearance makes me miserable.”

Positive:
“The ugly duckling was miserable, too, until he amazed everyone by becoming beautiful. I’m going to be like that. I already have beautiful aspects that others appreciate. I’m going to accentuate those qualities with a body to match.”

4. Negative:
“I’m too old to start all over again.”

Positive:
“Age doesn’t matter, because when I lose weight, I am going back in time. I’m reversing the aging process to get back to where my body used to be—and wants to be.”

5. Negative:
“This is my body, and I have to live with it.”

Positive:
“Every cell in my body is being renewed all the time. I don’t have the same body today that I had a year ago. So if I am always renewing my body, I can renew it to be better.”

6. Negative:
“I know I should exercise, but I can’t stay motivated.”

Positive:
“I don’t need to exercise if that’s too hard right now. All I need to do is move, and there are lots of ways I can do that. Some, like dancing or doing simple yoga, are even fun. Once I remember how good it feels to walk and move around, motivation won’t be a problem.”

7. Negative:
“I know the right foods to eat, but I give in to temptations and cravings.”

Positive:
“Cravings mean that my body wants to be satisfied. I will give it what it wants by tuning in and listening. I’d like to be fulfilled, and food isn’t the only way to get there. The happier I make myself, the less I will use food as a crutch.”

8. Negative:
“It’s all just too hard.”

Positive:
“The hard part was deprivation, discipline, and struggling against hunger. I’m not going to do any of those things anymore. Finding satisfaction is easy, and it’s my new path.”

Substituting new thoughts is really a kind of brain therapy, using the higher brain’s capacity for belief. Thinking is a complex business, but beliefs gain their power by attaching themselves to emotions. It’s now well known that memories stick with us largely because we invest in them emotionally. Everything from your first kiss to being told off by your first-grade teacher can stay with you for years, while events that have no emotional value quickly fade. (Can you remember the first time you brushed your teeth or made your bed? The first bottle of detergent you bought or how many times you parked your car last week?)

The belief system of overweight people can be tagged with words that are loaded with emotion:
fatty
,
loser
,
failure
,
lazy
,
greedy
,
sloppy
,
gluttonous
,
ugly
, and so on. We need to alter these loaded terms with new ones that are equally emotional yet positive. Feeling good requires your brain to fill specific receptors with chemical messages. If these receptors get overloaded positively, food won’t give you the fix it once did—this is just like drug addicts whose receptors for pain and pleasure are so overloaded that they must take more and more of their drug to get even a small fix. If you keep eating all day, your brain response gets dulled. The natural balance of hunger and satiation is thrown off. Basically, you are throwing damp logs on the fire. The fuel is right, but it won’t catch fire.

Let me introduce words that carry positive emotional coloring:
light, vital, success, winner, satisfied, buoyant, renewed, free.
When you feed
them into your brain, you reinforce new pathways that affect every cell in your body. Thanks to the mind-body connection, which is holistic, each word influences you as a complete person. Every level of our life gets nourished. In fact,
nourished
is the best single term to describe how you are going to change your life story. No doubt you already see why. Food satisfies our need to feel nourished; it’s the opposite of deprivation. Being complex creatures, we associate food with all kinds of related experiences: home, mother, childhood, family, togetherness, warmth, protection, abundance, giving.

These are powerful tags for powerful experiences. When you mix them with negative experiences that are also powerful, the good gets polluted. I’m not suggesting that your story should be all sweetness and light; feeding your brain with propaganda is wrong and pointless. In everyone’s life those potent tags—mother, home, family, childhood—carry memories of hurt and sorrow, too. But reality is always renewing itself. You can and should inject fresh messages if you want to move forward in your life. There is no reason to be the prisoner of old conditioning and negative memories.

You can prove to yourself how nourishing a new word can be once it begins to be your personal theme. Let’s use the word
light.
Since it’s the opposite of
heavy,
this word is one of the best for our purposes. The more you bring
light
into your life, the easier it will be to lose weight. Why? Because
light
covers so many positive experiences. Look at the following usages:

Lighthearted

Light-handed

Enlightened

Feeling light and bright

The light of inspiration

Lightness of being

The light of the soul

The light of God

If you had these things in your life, it would be much easier for your body to be light. Your mind would be sending messages that are the opposite of
heavy
,
dull
,
inert
,
tired
,
bored
,
dark
,
unenlightened.
Start to rid yourself of those messages and let your body conform to
lightness
and all of its positive connotations.

With this background, you can proceed to use
light
in various ways, beginning with the physical sensation of being light.

Exercise:
Filling with Light

Sit in a quiet room by yourself. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths until you feel centered and ready. (It’s best to sit upright if you can rather than lounging back in your chair.)

Breathing normally, visualize light filling your chest each time you inhale. The light is soft, warm, and white. Watch it suffuse your chest. Now exhale normally, but leave the light inside.

On your next breath, take in more light. See the light filling your chest now begin to suffuse the rest of your body, moving down into your abdomen. Don’t force the visualization, and don’t worry if you have trouble seeing the light—even a faint sense of white light is good enough.

With each breath, let the light suffuse your arms, then your hands all the way to the fingertips. Let it suffuse your legs down to your toes. Finally, send the light into your head and out the top in a beam that reaches high.

Sit with the light for a few moments, then lift your arms, letting
them float upward as if the light is causing them to rise. You are like a balloon filled completely with light. Enjoy the sensation, then open your eyes.

This is a good exercise to counteract feelings of dullness, heaviness, fatigue, and sadness. The sensation of being physically light, paired with the visualization of inner light, creates a big change in how you relate to your body. But there’s much more that you can do with the theme of light:

Once you get it—that
light
nourishes at every level—this is a wonderful theme to play with. Each meaning of a single word can be turned into countless actions. A life that is lived in the light is the best anyone could ask for.

Since every life story is complex, there’s a need for simplicity so that you can change without getting lost in the weeds—and let’s face it, everyday existence gets pretty weedy, filled with distractions, complications, accidents, and obstacles. Anyone can benefit by using the simple model of themes or tags. If you devoted yourself to just two themes we’ve been discussing—
light
and
nourishing
—your existence would be totally transformed.

Let’s go deeper into the mind-body connection. The words in your head follow a circular path known as a feedback loop.

You have a thought.

It registers in your brain.

The brain sends chemical signals to every cell in your body.

The cells react and send a message back to the brain.

As feedback runs through the loop, you experience a new sensation, emotion, or thought. Some aspects go unnoticed, however, which is why it took decades before modern medicine discovered that every mental event affects the body, too. The research to discover the brain’s microscopic, fleeting neurotransmitters—the carriers of messages from cell to cell—was quite painstaking.

Changing negative input to positive input makes a world of difference. A few basic principles apply to everyone (assuming the absence of serious physical or mental disorders). We’ve been discussing them already, but it’s good to be specific.

Principle #1:
To change your body, first change your story.

Principle #2:
Every story is about how to be happy.

Principle #3:
If you find a better way to be happy than by overeating, your body will naturally return to its balanced state.

If you are chronically overweight, one or more of these basic principles needs your attention. You are the author of your own story. Let me give an example of how the plot can go out of control, even though it doesn’t have to.

Jerry is forty-five and securely employed. He went through a
rough divorce this year. Now it’s ten months later, and Jerry must have started to find comfort in overeating, because he can squeeze the beginning of an inner tube around his waist. But this doesn’t worry him; he’s not in the market for a new relationship yet. He can afford to let himself go a little; it’s one of the perks of being a bachelor again.

A month later Jerry goes to the doctor for a routine physical. He tells the nurse she’s made a mistake when she weighs him at 20 pounds heavier than the year before. But the scale is right, and Jerry’s doctor notices a rise in blood pressure and what he calls “prediabetic” blood sugar. Something needs to be done. Jerry immediately joins a gym. He cuts out frozen pizza, a mainstay of his diet since his wife left him, but in the end, he works too hard to get to the gym more than once or twice a week. He starts dating a woman who has no problem, she says, with his extra weight. She’s been gaining some herself, and although Jerry isn’t too pleased with the medical side of things, the two happily indulge in going to expensive restaurants. A series of tiny rationalizations starts to accumulate in his mind:

I look good for my age, and I feel good.

I’ve had a rough time. I can let myself go a little.

I never liked being nagged about my weight.

I’m an adult. I can eat what I want.

There are lots of people heavier than I am.

There is no villain in this story, only a steady stream of thoughts and feelings that gradually produce a bad result. And while all of this was happening to Jerry, the mind-body feedback loop was always paying attention.

Your mind has tremendous power, so as you begin to change your story, you need to know some guidelines:

Because they see themselves in the mirror as a solid object standing alone in space, people don’t grasp that the body isn’t a thing at all. It is an ever-shifting process. Imagine a building that looks like any other except that when you get closer, you see that the bricks are flying out of place and renewed with fresh bricks all the time. That’s your body. Even though your skeleton seems solid, for example, it exchanges calcium constantly with the rest of the body, and as these atoms move, their replacements respond to change. A marathon runner’s skeleton looks totally different when examined at the cellular level from that of someone who is totally sedentary. Even wearing a new pair of shoes is enough to change the shape of your leg bones. When you were twenty, your upper leg was composed of twice as much muscle as fat. In the absence of physical activity, there will be twice as much fat as muscle when you turn fifty or sixty.

Even though your organs hold basically the same shape, they are constantly exchanging their fundamental building blocks. That’s why I like to say that the body is a verb, not a noun. People are surprised to discover that this extends down to their genes. You can’t add or lose the genes you were born with, but genes aren’t fixed; they are switched on and off by many factors. Dr. Dean Ornish and
his Harvard colleagues have shown that up to five hundred genes change their output when a person makes positive lifestyle changes, such as improved diet, moderate exercise, meditation, and stress management.