What Are You Hungry For? (5 page)

My experience in private practice was more everyday but just as much about stigmas. Many of the patients I saw—literally thousands—were overweight women who felt ashamed and hoped that they had a “gland problem” instead of some personal flaw. It was discouraging when I told 99 percent of them that their hormonal levels were normal. They went away sad, discouraged, and sometimes hopeless. Many had to fight against their own shame and guilt simply to go to a doctor and ask for help. What I left them with was worse than what they came in with. That was unacceptable to me; I began searching for a missing link. Starting in the late eighties, I saw that a body problem was actually a mind-body problem, and it wasn’t long before another dimension appeared. What my patients—and countless more people—had was a mind-body-spirit problem.

For me the breakthrough in seeing medical problems as mind-body-spirit problems was exciting and productive. I learned how
good it felt to be centered and relaxed, to feel comfortable within myself all the time. You value something more when you know you can reach it. Empty dreams are lulling, but once you find that mind-body-spirit is real, nothing is more enticing. At last you get to fulfill your deepest yearnings. The secret is revealed:
Life is about fulfillment.

Once this secret is no longer hidden, everything changes. You see with sudden clarity that all kinds of things aren’t fulfilling. Some are distractions, like having a martini at five o’clock or getting hooked on video games. Some are obstacles, like ignoring your negative feelings and letting them fester. It feels good to think you have no issues with anger, fear, guilt, and shame, but your body can’t be fooled. It feels everything you try so desperately to avoid.

I had no deeper wish than to show others the way out. Years of sending away patients to feel discouraged and frustrated needed to be turned around. For people who struggle with their weight, the body they see in the mirror is a mask. Behind it lie bad habits, distorted beliefs, low expectations, and every variety of discouragement. The cruelest form of starvation is to tie someone up and put a banquet before them, inches out of reach. Fulfillment is such a banquet, and for countless people it is being held out of reach. They are starved for fulfillment and don’t know why they can’t reach it.

Getting a fulfilling life isn’t as easy as watching the Super Bowl with a plate of nachos in your lap or enjoying a nice lunch with a friend while the waiter brings an extra dessert fork “just in case.” But I promise you that the journey to fulfillment is the most exciting project you could possibly undertake. Let’s be companions in the spirit of hope, trust, and joy.

Making It Personal:
A Commitment, Just Between Us

There’s much more to say in the following pages, but now you know where our journey is taking us—toward a holistic solution. I’d like you to pause here and make a commitment. It’s your side of a silent contract between us.

Your side:
You agree to follow the mind-body program outlined in the following pages for 30 days. You will not go on a diet. You will not indulge in negative judgments against your body. You will live in the present and disregard the old conditioning that has led only to frustration and disappointment. With an open mind, you will focus on walking the path of fulfillment.

My side:
I agree to guide you to holistic change, giving you tested principles and action steps that have proven effective at the Chopra Center for years. Together, you and I are going to get your brain’s messages back into balance by giving you what you really want. Fulfillment must exist physically, emotionally, and mentally. You’ll know how to measure your success on each level.

Body:
Your body will feel lighter, more energetic, and increasingly vital.

Emotions:
Your mood will be happier, more uplifting, and increasingly positive.

Mind:
Your decisions and choices will add to your vision of a better life and make the vision come true.

Your brain is meant to take care of you, which is what its amazing complexity is designed for. The mind-body approach fills an aching gap in every program for weight loss that I’ve encountered. The pounds always come back after they’re lost because what needed to change—the person who uses food to fill invisible
holes—remains the same. Here is a chance to transform yourself. When that happens you’ll see a change not only in the way you look but in the way you work at your job, the way you see your surroundings, and the way you love the people in your life, including yourself.

Power Points

•  You are writing your own life story. Your body is a physical projection of your story.

•  Your story consists of your experiences and how you process them, physically and mentally.

•  If you are overweight, your story probably reflects negative themes about food, eating, and body image.

•  Before you change your story, you should know some facts about the mind-body connection. Knowledge is power.

•  To activate the mind-body connection, state your conscious goals to yourself. This is the most powerful message you can send to your body.

At this moment you and I, even though we’re complete strangers, are doing the same thing. We are living out our life stories. The biggest part of everyone’s story could be titled “How I Make Myself Happy.” Every story contains the same goal, because even if person A is playing professional football in order to
reach the Super Bowl, person B is commuting to work every day, and person C is raising two small children at home, those differences disappear before the overriding aim to be happy as best we can.

You can change your story so that one chapter will read, “How I Lost All the Weight I Wanted To (and Kept It Off, Thank You).” Now, every story has themes that run through it, and presently your themes around food and eating are probably negative. When I talk to overweight patients, the same themes repeat themselves, often for decades. Any of this sound familiar?

When most doctors hear such remarks, they aren’t paying attention to the psychological implications—the doctor is trying to isolate a physical complaint. Beyond that, most physicians, including myself, received no training in nutrition when they were in medical school, only the most basic training about weight (covered in lectures on endocrinology), and spent almost zero hours studying the effects of dieting. As for emotions, those require a psychiatrist or other therapist. They aren’t part of a typical physician’s job description.

It’s incomplete medicine when the mind-body connection is being ignored. In anyone’s story, the main themes aren’t incidental or irrelevant.
When you feed negative input into the brain, it changes, shaping itself to conform to the messages it receives. The brain has no mind of its own. It cannot choose which instructions to obey and which to ignore. You are the one who possesses a mind, and you are the author writing your story. Which means that you have the most control. You can feed negative messages to your brain or positive messages—the choice is yours.

I realize that neuroscience treats the brain and the mind as one and the same. That’s because the mind is invisible, while the brain is a semisolid object that can be touched and measured. My position is different and I think closer to real life. The brain is like a radio receiving what the mind has to say. When you hear a concert broadcast, you don’t mistake the radio for Mozart. If someone whispers “I love you” into your ear, you are the one who falls in love, not your limbic system. The mind comes first because the person comes first.

Your body is the physical record of your life story as you’ve lived it until today. Every pound represents a choice to eat a certain way, and each bite is silently influenced by a set of habits, a list of likes and dislikes, and how others around you are eating. If you are unhappy with your weight, those extra pounds are likely to represent some unhappy experiences: moments of frustration, high levels of stress, anxiety over a job or a relationship. If your body represents your story so far, the natural way to change your body is to change your story.

In my experience, when someone is overweight, they say negative things to themselves over and over. Remember, when you change your internal messages, you aren’t just talking to yourself. You are writing new pages in the book of your life. The key is to change the negative messages so that instead of reinforcing bad behaviors, you begin to reinforce good ones.

When you feel unfulfilled, you can’t fool yourself into feeling satisfied. But you can reverse the negative messages that make you feel stuck. Unhappiness thrives on inertia—it’s easy to keep feeling the same way today as you felt yesterday. The brain supports inertia unless you give it something new to process.

So let’s start doing that. Whenever the familiar themes voiced by overweight people come to mind, stop and notice what you’re thinking. Then substitute a counterthought, a positive antidote. In this way, you jump-start the process of rewriting your story and changing your body as you do.

In the following list, the positive messages are just suggestions. Feel free to invent your own new messages. That’s the best way to really take control of the input your brain is receiving.

1. Negative:
“I’ve tried everything and read all kinds of diet books, but nothing has worked. I might as well give up.”