Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (4 page)

I began to notice the pattern and the relationships between feeling too much of the environment I was exposed to, the stress due to my weight fluctuations, my eating patterns, and my feeling of being emotionally overwhelmed. The detours began to become more and more obvious. Could it be that I finally found that rogue thread in the fabric that had been hidden from me until now?

WEIGHT AND LIFE STAGES

Being overwhelmed by feelings has been a common experience for me ever since I was a small child, and this has never changed fundamentally. It has been acutely noticeable in cycles, depending on what was happening in my life. Your story may have similar threads. We all go through stages and changes, and those of us who feel too much can be profoundly affected by a big emotional shift. Teenagers on the whole are hormonal messes, which makes it difficult to perform the job of adolescence: to find one's identity. When you don't know where you end and others begin, that separation is even more unsettling. Motherhood and pregnancy can bring up issues of separateness and togetherness, of loving your child without losing yourself, of having to trust that you can become a good mother. One of my friends was excited to see that the 37 pounds she gained during pregnancy dropped off in a week after she gave birth, and credited the weight loss to breastfeeding. Her delight was short-lived, as all the weight crept back in a few weeks, even though she went back to her pre-pregnancy eating habits. “My baby wasn't nursing properly; I knew there was something wrong with him, and people were doubting my instincts. My mom had gone back home, and now the weight of being a mom was fully on me—and apparently, on my butt, belly, and thighs as well!”

Midlife brings all of us new emotional stressors as we assess what we've done or didn't do up to this point in our lives, and we begin to recognize that the consequences of our choices over the years weren't necessarily what we expected. Caretaking for children, our elders, or close friends who unexpectedly become ill stir up more emotions. One of the participants in my online class told me that she had always been incredibly vigilant with her weight, controlling herself well, being mindful of never going past a size six. She was so proud of herself. She admitted the control was always on her mind, and she spent hours sometimes deciding she would not have the evil piece of cake. Then her sister got cancer and she became her caretaker. She felt very conflicted about it because she and her sister had not gotten along, although she loved her dearly and felt obliged to help. She was angry that she was inconvenienced, guilty because she felt angry, and terrified of losing her sister. She began eating more because, well, it made her feel better. She added an extra piece of this, a helping of that, choosing fast foods on the way to the hospital, adding wine when she got home. She came to my class a year later, a size sixteen, exhausted and filled with fear. Her sister recovered, but she found herself the one needing help.

Menopause, and becoming an “elder of the tribe,” as well as losing our parents, brings to the surface unresolved issues and, with them, fears of abandonment. You feel that as an elder, you are responsible for all the problems in society that need fixing. You're supposed to clean up the mess and offer wisdom. This is the time you should be feeling more secure, yet that feeling can elude you, especially if you may have seen the shifts in the economy eat away at your retirement security. You can't help watching the news, and as you fill yourself with information you can barely process, and fears course through your body, your boundaries become weaker and
kaboom!
You're in Chubbyville.

If you look at your life tapestry and focus on increments of time, you discover how empathy has affected you as you began to be aware of your surroundings, you piled the emotions of others on top of your own feelings, and as a consequence, you isolated yourself or found other detours to avoid the intensity of what you were experiencing. Look closely, and you also begin to see the patterns that connect your emotional issues and your unique relationships to food and weight.

ARE WE ALL GETTING MORE EMPATHIC?

You and I are not alone in feeling too much and in struggling with the discomfort of being overly sensitive and empathetic. Elaine Aron, author of
The Highly Sensitive Person,
estimates the number of highly sensitive people to be around 20 percent of the population. I believe the number may have grown larger since she did her research because, as Jeremy Rifkin, expert in economics and international affairs, explained in his book
The Empathic Civilization,
we're experiencing a far greater and more intense sense of connection to other people at this stage of human evolution. Globally, 845 million (that's 1 in 8) people are on Facebook, and software and applications are allowing them to connect Facebook to other social media on a variety of telecommunications devices at the touch of a button. The Arab Spring came about because of a passionate message and cry that spread virally, person to person, through Twitter and on smartphones. Technology communications are changing the human experience rapidly. Are we really up for this?

How are you supposed to feel when we're in a world that's more connected than ever? How do you constantly confront information you need to process not just intellectually but emotionally? You can be standing in line for coffee, checking a social media site or your e-mail on your smartphone, and find out that a former schoolmate or your cousin's husband just got diagnosed with cancer. Or, you're home, bored, and you pick up the television remote and start clicking your way to your favorite channel, then suddenly see graphic crime photos of a murder victim. Some people aren't emotionally affected by these experiences, but you sure are.

Around the world, unemployment rates are high and people are worried about finances more than ever before. Our institutions are dysfunctional, we have no idea how to fix them or where we're headed, and everyone seems to be arguing and hurling insults at each other. Every day there are stories to trigger you, from the implication of nuclear war to the looming threat of currency devaluation, recession, and more. Then, when you decide you can't take the serious news anymore and you reach for a gossip magazine at the grocery store, you see stories and photos of movie stars far thinner than you are being ridiculed for being fat!

How does it feel to pick up on all that every day? Bombarded by stories about financial threats, or being too fat, do you start thinking, “OMG, I need to go on a diet! Or “Gee, today would be a good day for a martini—with a giant bowl of bar snacks”? Some people aren't easily tempted by racks of chips and sugary sodas, which seem to be within reach wherever we go. Some people aren't experiencing information overload, and they don't feel overwhelmed by the emotional turbulence. Maybe they compartmentalize their emotions better than we people who feel too much, or they easily talk themselves out of worrying about people and situations they can't influence.

It's likely that these people just are not wired, as we are, for extreme empathy. They have “thicker” boundaries. But if you're more sensitive, more empathetic, you're likely to struggle with your weight and with disordered eating. You are taking on the weight of the world, figuratively and literally.

How does this work, exactly? How does fear become fat, and how does frustration end up on your belly and thighs? Let's look next at the way our weight is influenced by the energy field we share with each other, and the research that shows its physical effects on us.

KEEP IN MIND
 …

• We're able to take on others' emotional energy and feel what they feel. This experience is called
empathy
, and people who feel too much are more empathetic than most.

• Humans are becoming more empathetic because we're all more connected than we have been in the past.

• The discomfort of empathy overload causes people who feel too much to shut down and withdraw from social interactions, and to detour into behaviors such as overindulging in food. We turn to food to feel grounded in our own physicality, separate from the confusing jumble of emotions we're experiencing. Our eating becomes disordered as a result.

• Empathy overload can also cause weight gain that seems to defy logic.

• At very stressful times in our lives, we are more likely to be overwhelmed by our emotions and respond with disordered eating.

• To release the weight of the world we are carrying emotionally, energetically, and physically, we must develop the ability to close up our porous boundaries and manage our empathy. Then it will be easier to address any disordered eating.

• To start this process of learning to manage our porous boundaries, we need to look back at the threads in the tapestry of our lives and see how feelings, foods, and our relationship to our bodies are intertwined. That's the focus of Step One.

2

When You Carry the Weight of the World

If this were any other weight-loss book, you would not expect Chapter 2 to be about shared energy fields and our interactions with our bodies, emotions, and thoughts. Why am I sending you down a quantum rabbit hole after chocolate-covered carrots? Because this is not a typical weight-loss book. We're going beyond mechanics and into quantum mechanics, into exploring the energy of thoughts and feelings and interactions. It's not just the food that goes in your mouth that makes you fat, or the physical energy you expend that makes you thin. What you take in from the field of energy around you filled with information whizzing around like radio waves affects your weight, too—and this is the thread we've got to look at if you are going to get to the bottom of why you're not losing the weight.

Researchers are still learning about the mind/body/spirit connections, so I can't tell you
exactly
how your weight fluctuations and your mental state are related, but I can suggest some connections. There have been many intriguing scientific discoveries lately that will make the wheels in your mind start turning and will validate what your intuition has already told you: that this weight-loss stuff is more complex than you've been told, and that emotional and mental stress
can
make you gain and retain weight. For instance, did you know that your thoughts and emotions affect you at a
cellular
level?

These complex ideas, which are so different from what most of us have been exposed to in school or in the media, certainly make my head spin, so I'm going to simplify them a bit. I'll start by explaining the nature of the energy field that both surrounds us and includes us (we're each a part of this “fabric” of reality), and how we communicate in ways we can't see, sending information back and forth through the energy field. Then, I'll then touch on why our thoughts and feelings have energy, and how metabolism works, and then I'll go into why you may never have heard these ideas before. The more you understand the science behind the mind-body connection, the more you'll realize how important it is to do the exercises in this program and why they'll help you stop carrying the “weight of the world.”

THE FIELD AND YOU

Just as there is a fabric of your life, there is a fabric of reality that all of us are part of. We all can sense this fabric, or field of energy, although some of us are more aware of it than others. The energy field comprises many types of energy, which is coming from people, animals, plants, the earth, the sun, the planets, and so on; but for simplicity's sake, let's just call it the
electromagnetic field
that we all share.

Even people who don't think of themselves as sensitive can pick up on extremely subtle changes in this energy field. Studies by the HeartMath Institute, which conducts research and educates people about stress, energy, and the heart, show that our brain waves respond to electromagnetic signals from the heart of a person in the same room with us. If someone is staring at us, we'll almost certainly look up because we sense that person's energy.
Haven't we all had that experience?
Our senses regularly pick up stimuli that can be observed and measured by scientists, but clearly we're also able to pick up the presence of another person, even when we can't see, hear, smell, or touch that person.

Something very subtle is going on. We know we have sensory receptors: the receptors in the inner ear, for example, pick up sound waves and send the information to the brain; the receptors in the skin tell the brain that something's happening—a change in temperature or touch, for instance. Maybe somewhere on our bodies there are sensory receptors we don't know even about. Maybe our sensory receptors are receiving subtle signals that a scientist's instruments can't detect but that our brains notice and register.

Some people insist that they can smell snow, perceive the flicker and sound of fluorescent lights, and even, in cases of a rare condition called
synesthesia
, perceive that sounds have certain colors and shapes. It seems their brains take in and process sensory information differently from the rest of us; they are more sensitive. Remember: dogs have a fantastic, heightened sense of smell, and bats and dolphins have sonar and can perceive solid objects they can't see. It's possible that, early on, humans used to have more acute senses, too, and perhaps some of us have retained that ability, for whatever reason. We just don't have the measurement tools to prove that the person who smells snow isn't making it up.

What if you can pick up on the tension or anger lingering in an empty room after two people have argued in that space? Could the changes in the room's energy field, which a highly intuitive person might pick up on, be perceived and even measured by scientists some day in the future? It wouldn't be the first time people thought “nothing's there” when it actually was. Years ago, surgeons scoffed at the “preposterous notion” that there were tiny little creatures called bacteria that could get into a patient's bloodstream and make him sick if the doctor didn't wash his hands before operating. Thank goodness we figured that one out.

And maybe we simply have areas in our energy field that are open to receive whatever signals come from outside of us—say, we're like radios with our personal energy fields serving as one, big antenna. Whatever the nature of our porous boundaries, we pick up signals much like a radio picks up radio waves that convey information and music being broadcast. None of us is immune to changes in the energy field that occur all around us.

FROM ENERGY TO PHYSICAL REALITY: THE NATURE OF THE “BOND”

When our personal energy field changes, our body responds. Neuroscientist Candace Pert's pioneering research has shown that whenever we feel an emotion, we also experience an instant physical response: our bodies create molecules called
neuropeptides
that travel through our bloodstream and hook up with receptor cells in the brain, the skin, the stomach, and so on, and they let those cells know what we're feeling. Two of the more well-known peptides are serotonin and endorphins, which, when they meet up with receptor sites, change our mood for the better. There are also peptides that let our cells know we're angry, resentful, or fearful. When the cells in the digestive system receive these peptides, we say, “I feel in my gut that something's wrong”—which is literally true.

The body also responds to thoughts and emotions by releasing hormones into the bloodstream. For example, when we're scared or under emotional stress, upset or angry, our adrenal glands release
cortisol
. That's why when someone says something upsetting, we can feel ourselves shaking: the body has instantly created the “juice” needed for us to put up a fight or to run away. In fact, our emotional and physical responses happen so quickly that our logical brains may take a few seconds to catch up. (
Wait, what did he just say to me?
) Then, if we start thinking about just how angry or scared we are, the anger is intensified. (
I can't believe he said that! He's a jerk! Who does he think he is? He's always doing this to me.
) We talk ourselves into freaking out and the adrenals pump out more cortisol.

Why do thoughts and emotions, which seem like incredibly subtle energies, have such powerful effects on our bodies? Because physical objects are collections of energy that interact with each other.

At the smallest level of physical reality—the subatomic level—our bodies are not solid, unless we choose to see them that way. If we had far better eyesight, we could see what the most powerful microscopes can: that any solid object, including a human body, is made up of
photons
, or waves of light. These are only shaped into matter, or particles, when they're observed or perceived. If you expect to see a photon, it's a photon. If you expect to see a particle, well, that smallest unit of reality will oblige and appear as a piece of matter. In other words,
our consciousness—our thoughts and intentions—determine the nature of reality itself.

These photons, or particles, are constantly vibrating through empty space, so your body is actually made up of quite a lot of air—although it doesn't feel that way when you step on a scale! Now, if you think about anything else that vibrates, like a guitar string, you know that it's easily affected by a vibration outside of it. Play an A string on a guitar, and the A string on a guitar across the room will vibrate in sympathy. Your body works this way, too: you can actually get your heart to entrain to the rhythm of music just by listening to it. Your energy field is not sealed off with solid boundaries; it will always interact with the energy fields around you.

THE MYSTERY OF THE BOND BETWEEN US—AND BETWEEN OUR CELLS

Lynn McTaggart, a science writer and author of
The Intention Experiment
and
The Bond,
points out that we're constantly communicating with the field outside of us and experiencing what she calls “the bond.” As she writes,

Between the smallest particles of our being, between our body and our environment, between ourselves and all of the people with whom we are in contact, between every member of every societal cluster, there is as Bond, a connection so integral and profound that there is no longer a clear demarcation between the end of one thing and the start of another. The world essentially operates, not through the activity of individual things, but in the connection between them—in a sense, in the space between things [
The Bond
].

What else is in this space between things? What's in the dark matter that we find between the stars, planets, and comets? What information is exchanged between me and you, between one starling and another as they fly in unison? What information is exchanged between our cells? Cellular biologist Bruce Lipton upended the world of biology when he discovered that the brains of the cell—the seat of its intelligence—is not in its nucleus, safely ensconced deep inside that cell, but in its membrane, the part of the cell that interacts with everything outside of it. Is it communicating with “the bond,” the space between it and the next cell? Is there a vast network of messages being communicated between cells, just as invisible as radio waves when you look into the sky and see nothing moving from transmitter to receiver?

What happens in the space between you and me when one of us creates loving, supportive thoughts and imagines sending them to the other? Researchers at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, in Petaluma, California, conducted an experiment in which they had one member of a couple send loving, healing thoughts to the other, who was in another room, with instruments measuring the response. The recipient experienced changes in heart waves, brain waves, breathing, and blood flow. What's more, another experiment showed that when two people were in separate rooms with their eyes closed, and one was exposed to a flashing light, the other person's brain responded as if it had seen the light, too.

Is this what happens when birds, flocking together, suddenly shift direction simultaneously, then shift back, and back again, in perfect synchronization? The scientists may have theories, but they really don't understand how the birds are communicating with each other instantly, as if they're of one mind. Maybe we are
all
of one mind and just don't realize it! If this is true, then our bodies are responding to a lot more than just our own, personal anger or sadness.

As we're talking about the body's response to emotions, we should also consider the role of thoughts and beliefs. Clearly, thoughts and beliefs can exacerbate emotions, but do they
create
emotions? Or, do we have the emotions and then make sense of them by creating thoughts and beliefs? Or, perhaps there is no real line separating them the two. (
I'm furious. Well, no wonder. He just insulted me
.) For people who feel too much, emotions and thoughts are always intertwined.

Obviously, our beliefs can affect our emotions as well. (
He thinks she's better than I am! Boy, that burns me up!
) Our emotions and others' emotions affect our bodies, and so do our personal beliefs—and the beliefs of those around us that we've come to internalize. It seems we
feel
long before we understand what's going on. Our limbic brains experience fear before our prefrontal cortexes can make sense of it all, using words (
Oh, I get what's happening. Hey, I'm not actually being insulted here, so there's no need to feel anger. I'm just misinterpreting his anger as being directed at me
.) That is
not
our instant reaction.

We don't just affect other people with our feelings, thoughts, and beliefs; we also affect physical objects that don't have feelings or emotions (at least, as far as we can tell, they don't). In
The Intention Experiment,
Arizona University professor Dr. Gary Schwartz and Lynn McTaggart describe an interesting experiment they conducted. People in a controlled laboratory setting in London, England, were asked to focus their thoughts on a particular leaf sitting in a laboratory, thousands of miles away, in a lab in Arizona. The subjects had to imagine the leaf glowing. Shortly, the leaf began to emit biophotons that were picked up by a very sensitive camera, while another leaf lying next to it, which was not the object of the subjects' thoughts, remained the same. Similar experiments involving beans and water showed similar results.

So, if thoughts and feelings have such a powerful effect on a leaf, or on water, how much do you suppose your beliefs and emotions, or the thoughts and beliefs you take in from others, affect your cells and organs? For instance, what happens when you think,
I'm fat
? How does your body respond to the belief,
To be a good person, I have to take care of others, no matter how hard the burden is
”? Does that get your cortisol running? What if you feel the disapproval of others, believe others think you're fat, or pick up on their beliefs that you're not good enough?