What Are You Hungry For? (10 page)

My training in endocrinology gave me a head start regarding balance, because the study of hormones is all about balance. These naturally produced chemicals of the endocrine system tell the body how to sleep, eat, grow, have sex, and respond to stress. Being overweight is a state of imbalance involving five hormones:

Insulin

Cortisol

Leptin

Ghrelin

Adiponectin

The first two have become widely known, since insulin is key in digestion, blood sugar levels, and energy. Cortisol is recognized as a major stress hormone. But the larger truth is that all five of these hormones interact with one another. Leptin and ghrelin are tied into appetite but also sleep, as is cortisol. Adiponectin, which has the same root as
adipose
or fat, regulates fatty acid breakdown; when you go on a fast, only to find afterward that everything you eat winds up around your waist or on your thighs, the reason is that this hormone promotes fat retention. The body is reacting to what it senses as a famine by storing more fat for the future.

A balance of these five hormones leads to overall balance in body weight. It appears that obesity has two basic types. One is based on excess cortisol due to stress, and the fat is deposited as belly fat. This kind of fat is the worst you can have, because it secretes ghrelin, the so-called hunger hormone. It’s a double whammy because the more fat you eat, the hungrier you are, while the fat you put on also makes you hungrier. The other type of obesity is traced back to insulin and the blood sugar problems we’ve discussed.

Drug companies work constantly to develop new pharmaceuticals that will rebalance hormones. But unless you need drugs for a disease condition like type 1 diabetes, adding more chemicals to the delicate endocrine system isn’t the way. Hormones get out of balance when your life is out of balance. Being in balance means:

Good sleep

Reduced stress

Proper food

Positive emotions

Sense of well-being

If you fiddle with hormones, you are putting the cart before the horse. Instead, all you need to do is balance your life; hormonal balance will follow naturally.

The reason that the theme of
balance
may seem boring—and is so often ignored—doesn’t come as a surprise. Leading a balanced life sounds like something you settle for after middle age sets in. We glamorize youth, a time when impulses ran free, there were no responsibilities, and excitement was fueled by new adventures (and a surge of hormones). But it’s just as true that adolescents have the highest rates of suicide and traffic accidents, that they are afflicted with insecurity and anxiety over the future, and that misbegotten adventures can turn out badly.

I’m not intentionally painting a gloomy picture for its own sake.
Most people eat today the way they ate in childhood and adolescence. Think of the following labels that fit our social concept of being a teenager:

Breaking the rules

Running wild

Going crazy

Rebelling against authority

Bingeing

If you transfer these labels to how you eat, bad things will happen. I’m not being judgmental. As far as your body is concerned, you aren’t breaking the rules or acting like a rebel when you consume six beers, a plate of chili fries, and half a pint of Chunky Monkey. You are, however, throwing your body into drastic imbalance. As you burden your digestive tract, your body is forced to shut down or minimize other functions that need energy and attention. It can’t send fire trucks to every fire; the worst one has to be dealt with first.

The chronic imbalance of overweight, if it continues long enough, leads to the following:

Dullness and tiredness

Poor sleep

Uncontrolled appetite

Decreased sex drive

Incipient health problems (a wide range beginning with joint pain, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, etc.)

Theoretically, almost all of these effects could be cured with a ten-second lecture to yourself that begins, “Grow up. Act more mature. Take responsibility.” But that would be futile. Maturity, and the balance
it brings, aren’t compulsory. If you harbor beliefs that cling to adolescence, you won’t elect to lead a more balanced life—why not keep fantasizing about a glamorous one where youth never ends?

As with all the themes in this book,
balance
has to be more appealing than the alternatives. Of course, one appeal comes from knowledge and experience. If you remember what it felt like to be wasted after a night of bingeing, your desire to repeat it won’t be strong. But I’m not at all confident that negative motivation works. The brain’s first-response team consists of drives, impulses, appetites, and desires. This team doesn’t listen to “You’ll be sorry later.” It knows no later, only now. (Adding morality doesn’t help, either, or we’d all have a needlepoint cushion with the old Protestant proverb, “Sin in haste, repent at leisure.”)

The positive spin on negative motivation is this:
Do the right thing, then see how good it feels.
You can put this into practice today. Try any of the activities listed on
this page
, then half an hour later, check in with yourself. Notice how good you feel. Mentally register any positive sensations that you notice, naming them to yourself:

I feel focused.

I’m alert.

I’m thinking clearly, without drowsiness.

I’m ready for action; I have energy.

I feel satisfied.

I feel content.

Here are the suggested activities, which you can test one at a time or combine however you like:

1. Eat a light, satisfying meal.

2. As already mentioned, leave a little empty space in your stomach rather than filling up.

3. Drink a nonalcoholic beverage.

4. Skip dessert.

5. If you are in pleasant company, cut your food intake by half.

6. Have a small serving of protein accompanied by colorful, tasty vegetables in abundance.

7. Eat a vegetarian meal where you like all the foods.

Notice that you aren’t imposing “balance” as a tiresome commonplace but putting into action a new way of eating. The theme of
balance
is mature because it is measured by how you feel afterward. Craving immediate stimulation isn’t bad; after all, the delicious taste of food is experienced here and now. The mark of maturity is to balance
immediate
and
long-term.
If a benefit is too long term, it won’t work. But a delay of half an hour does work, because how you feel is still connected to the meal you just enjoyed.

Balance is a natural state, but so is imbalance, which adds another piece to the puzzle. Your body is a miracle of adaptability. It can adapt to the elevation in Death Valley, the lowest place on earth, or to the high Andes of Peru, more than 16,000 feet above sea level. We are omnivores; our bodies can adapt to almost any diet, as opposed to a panda, who will die without tender green bamboo shoots, or a koala, who cannot survive without eucalyptus leaves (and a huge amount of them, since the koala and panda have never evolved a completely efficient digestive system to go with their diets—both animals must eat constantly during their waking hours, and even then they derive so little energy that the rest of the time is spent sleeping).

The mechanism that lies behind adaptation is known as
homeostasis,
a special kind of balance. If you stir a spoonful of sugar into your morning coffee, the sugar will dissolve evenly throughout, and
so any sip of coffee, whether from the bottom or the top of the cup, will have the same balance of sugar and liquid. Your body couldn’t survive in such a static, even state. Thousands of chemicals require their own unique balance, which is always shifting. The bloodstream is a superhighway carrying every imaginable kind of message to and from the brain. Your muscles and heart must respond to your demand for action at a moment’s notice, causing changes in blood flow, heart rate, and oxygen consumption automatically.

Homeostasis is like a rubber band that can snap back into place after it is stretched out of shape. Going out of balance is highly beneficial, if what we’re talking about is exercising instead of sitting still, pushing the limits of your creativity instead of following the same routine, being proactive instead of resigned and passive. As it applies to eating, homeostasis is incredibly adaptive to all kinds of consumption, from gorging to extreme fasting. But just as you can put demands on your muscles to move, the automatic process of digestion allows for all kinds of interventions:

You can skip a meal or not eat altogether.

You can put food in your mouth to compensate for negative feelings.

You can eat to your heart’s content, regardless of how much.

You can eat to forget your troubles.

We’ve already been discussing these things, but the point here is that the messages you insert into the process either work to balance the mind-body system or throw it into imbalance—and your body must adapt, without choice or complaint. Cells have a life of their own—a complex, fascinating life—but when the mind calls, they must listen.

Depression

Lack of sleep

Bad body image

Low self-esteem

Failure

Loss

Grief

If you were Sherlock Holmes looking for a villain in hiding, Mister X would turn out to be one of these things, silently throwing your body into a state of stress, chaos, chemical imbalance, and so on. Lacking a Sherlock Holmes, the only sleuth is your awareness.

Here is where
balance
becomes a positive. Taking a balanced attitude to negative messaging brings healing. Instead of rejecting the message or forcing yourself into positive thinking that is just a coat of paint, you can intervene in the name of balance.

Be easy with yourself.

Take extra time when making choices.

Exercise patience if you backslide.

Offer yourself reassurance.

Seek comfort from warm friends.

Give yourself peace and solace.

Minimize stressful experiences.

All of these things apply to losing weight, because carrying excess weight is an imbalanced state for the mind-body system, just as much as losing your job or grieving over a loved one you’ve lost. Your
body doesn’t have words to label what is happening to it, but if it did, its message would always be, “I’m doing the best I can to get us back into balance.”

Understand this message without words, and then intervene by giving your body what it needs to rebalance itself. If you consider the healing interventions listed earlier, their opposite hinders the return to balance:

Being hard on yourself

Demanding instant solutions

Seeing yourself as a failure

Repressing how you really feel

Being impatient and thoughtless

Stabbing at answers without thinking them through

Self-judgment

I said at the outset that you don’t have to psychoanalyze yourself to lose weight with a mind-body approach. That’s still true. But you do have to be aware. The most basic awareness applies to balance—either you are balanced or you aren’t. Since an overweight body by definition is out of balance, it’s up to you to help it return to balance with healing thoughts and deeds.

Knowing that you are healing yourself is one of the biggest satisfactions that the theme of
balance
brings.

Making It Personal:
Purify Effortlessly.

Although its first aim is to purify by removing toxins, doing a mild detox once a week benefits the other two themes at the same time. Your body gets to rebalance itself without the normal call for energy that is necessary for the digestive process. Traditional medicine in every culture has recommended some kind of purification ritual, and the wisdom behind this is holistic: when I take one day a week to follow a mild purification regimen, I feel lighter in every way, including my mood and my thoughts.

The basics of purification all come from natural products. In your general diet it’s good to include foods with purifying properties, including the following:

Kale, cabbage, and broccoli

Oranges, lemons, and grapefruit

Mung beans

Watercress

Artichokes

Asparagus

Beets

Ginger

Garlic

Apples

Sesame seeds

Almonds

For a day set aside to purify the system, three groups of food are time-tested; they figure into my weekly routine now, without fail.

Oils:
Various oils have a laxative effect but are also considered to have detox properties. On my purification day I take a mixture of four oils—olive, sesame, flaxseed, and evening primrose—easily found in health food stores already made up. I use 1 or 2 tablespoons of the mixture in the morning, taken by itself or with food.

Fiber:
The medical benefits of fiber are well documented, especially as a buffer in the intestine—moderating cholesterol, for example, and possibly protecting the wall of the intestine from carcinogens. The natural fiber in vegetables is easier on your body than bran and other grain-based fiber (these can have an abrasive effect on the intestinal wall). I take 2 tablespoons of powdered fiber in the morning, mixed with club soda. Some delicious varieties of this fiber are sold in health food stores.

Juices:
Juice fasts have been popular for decades, but they have been criticized for relying so heavily on sugar, and in any event they shouldn’t last more than a few days. On my purification day I have only vegetable juice, followed in the evening by a broth-based vegetable soup like minestrone. The juice extracted from leafy green vegetables is especially high in phytonutrients (more about these later), which are micronutrients known to have antioxidant properties. Herbal and wheatgrass juices are even more packed with concentrated micronutrients. If possible, fresh-squeezing your own or buying them fresh-squeezed is best.

Vegetable juices, except for tomato juice (technically a fruit), supply almost no calories, so be cautious about jolting your system by suddenly removing all caloric intake. I have done purification for more than one day several times and find it easy to sustain, but for anyone the key is that you feel fulfilled—no deprivation.

Fruit juices have fallen out of favor, in part because separating the juice from a fruit’s fiber (the pulp in an orange, the peel of an apple) reduces it to being a surge of sugar. Because they contain fructose, fresh fruit juices supply energy without putting any pressure
on the digestive tract. But they must be taken in moderation, since you don’t want to throw your insulin levels off with jolts of sugar on an empty stomach. Mixing the juice with fiber in the morning works well. For the rest of the day, sip juice diluted with warm water, always in moderation.

My weekly purification, based on oils, fiber, and juices, feels like the best day of the week. I have the satisfaction of devoting quality attention to my body and listening to what it has to say. The messages of lightness and energy are rewarding, so there’s no sense of deprivation.

If you want to go further—as we all know, purification programs exist all around us, as close as a Google search—start out with the effortless steps just outlined, then see if other purification steps work well for you. Tune in to your body. Suffering isn’t purification; being hard on your body isn’t being cruel to be kind—it’s just cruel.

The tradition of purification has given us some time-honored recommendations:

•  Make your purification day a day of rest. Devoting time to meditation is even better.

•  Going into silence for a day adds the element of self-reflection and calmness.

•  Fasting can be tried in all of its guises. A moderate fast for an adult male would be 1,000 to 1,500 calories; for an adult female, 700 to 1,100 calories. Fasting also includes doing without meat and alcohol and drinking plenty of water during the day. It’s also good to monitor your energy level, taking a small amount of food if you feel dull or listless. (More serious discomfort means that you should stop fasting immediately.)

•  Cleansing for purification appeals to many people consulting a wide span of healers. At the Chopra Center we use specialized herbs and fruit extracts combined with
panchakarma,
the five purification methods of Ayurveda. Panchakarma is done under
clinic conditions with trained professionals. But for many people, “doing a cleanse” generally means taking a single purifying food all day or for several days (like the green vegetable soup known as Bieler broth) or dosing with a mixture of olive oil and lemon juice. If you’re in good health, a cleansing, although rigorous, can add to your sense of healthy well-being. See how your body reacts and pay attention to its messages.