Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Deepak Chopra
Title Page
OVERVIEW
AWARENESS AND WEIGHT LOSS
Why This Will Work for You
The Mind-Body Connection
PART ONE
THE CHOPRA SOLUTION
Change Your Story, Change Your Body
Purity, Energy, and Balance
“What Should I Eat?”
The Ayurvedic Way
The Six Tastes at Every Meal
Expanded Flavors
The Earliest Prevention
PART TWO
RAISING YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS
The Joy of Awareness
Self-Regulation: Let Your Body Take Care of You
Emotional Well-Being: It’s a Choice
Lightness of Soul
PART THREE
RECIPES FROM THE CHOPRA CENTER KITCHEN
Light Breakfast
Starters
Soups
Main Courses and Side Dishes
Salads
Condiments, Dips, and Sauces
Desserts
Beverages
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind
Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment
Grow Younger, Live Longer (with coauthor David Simon)
How to Know God
Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment
Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
Muhammad: A Story of a Prophet
Peace Is the Way: Bringing War and Violence to an End
Perfect Health
Quantum Healing
Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul
Self Power
Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-Being (with coauthor Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D.)
The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
The Path to Love
The Return of Merlin
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
The Shadow Effect (with coauthors Debbie Ford and Marianne Williamson)
The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore
The Way of the Wizard
Is God An Illusion? (with coauthor Leonard Mlodinow)
Ask Deepak About Love and Relationships
Ask the Kabala (with coauthor Michael Zapolin)
Boundless Energy
Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream (with coauthor Sanjiv Chopra)
Consciousness and the Universe: Quantum Physics, Evolution, Brain and Mind (with coauthors Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose)
Creating Affluence
Creating Health
Everyday Immortality
Fire in the Heart
God: A Story of Revelation
Golf for Enlightenment
Healing the Heart
Journey into Healing
Kama Sutra
Magical Beginnings, Enchanted Lives (with coauthors David Simon and Vicki Abrams)
Manifesting Good Luck: Love and Relationships
On the Shores of Eternity
Overcoming Addictions
Perfect Digestion
Perfect Weight
Power, Freedom, Grace
Raid on the Inarticulate, Infinite Possibilities
Restful Sleep
Return of the Rishi
Soulmate
Teens Ask Deepak
The Angel Is Near
The Chopra Center Cookbook (with coauthors David Simon and Leanne Backer)
The Chopra Center Herbal Handbook (with coauthor David Simon)
The Daughters of Joy
The Deeper Wound
The Essential How to Know God: The Essence of the Soul’s Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries
The Essential Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: The Essence of Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence
The Essential Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: Essence of the Quantum Alternative to Growing Old
The Ultimate Happiness Prescription
The Lords of Light
The Love Poems of Rumi (edited by Deepak Chopra; translated by Deepak Chopra and Fereydoun Kia)
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: Pocketbook Guide to Fulfilling Your Dreams
The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes (with coauthor Gotham Chopra)
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga (with coauthor David Simon)
The Soul in Love
The Soul of Leadership
Synchrodestiny
Unconditional Life
Walking Wisdom: Three Generations, Two Dogs, and the Search for a Happy Life (contributor; authored by Gotham Chopra)
Why Is God Laughing?
On My Way to a Happy Life (with coauthor Kristina Tracy, illustrated by Rosemary Woods)
You with the Stars in Your Eyes (illustrated by Dave Zaboski)
Science Set Free by Rupert Sheldrake
Infinite Potential by Lothar Schäfer
Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities by Dean Radin
The Generosity Network by Jennifer McCrea and Jeffrey C. Walker
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Published in 2014 by Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
First published in the United States of America by Harmony Books, an imprint of the
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Copyright © 2013 by Deepak Chopra
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AT THIS MOMENT there’s a groundswell that is changing people’s lives. It can be sensed from the headlines. A former president, shocked by suffering an early heart attack, announces that he has become a vegan. That’s an amazing statement, and to back up his conversion, Bill Clinton tells everyone how good he feels—and looks. On another front, an extensive study in Spain finds that people who eat a Mediterranean diet high in fish, nuts, and olive oil can reduce the incidence of heart attacks by one-third. This is the biggest dietary finding in years. Everyone who was weaning themselves off red meat is medically vindicated.
The groundswell is moving on many other fronts. The toxins present in processed and manufactured food are less and less acceptable. Organic has become a mainstream word. More people than ever are becoming vegetarians, a lifestyle whose benefits have been known for a long time. (In one poll, half of British women described themselves as basically vegetarian.) In a sustainable world, there’s no room for the polluting effect of pesticides and herbicides. People are waking up to a new reality, and a completely new way of eating has quickly emerged.
I got swept up in the groundswell about five years ago. I was already a “good” eater. My diet didn’t include much red meat, and I had long ago curbed obvious toxins like alcohol and tobacco. I enjoyed what I ate, and I ate what I enjoyed. But as I looked around at the medical literature, new findings were emerging every day. All kinds of links were being made between sugar and obesity, alcohol and disturbed sleep rhythms, simple carbohydrates and diabetes—and many of these findings affected being overweight.
Evidence was piling up that pointed in only one direction. I needed to find the ideal diet, because there was every good reason to. Only habit and neglect were keeping me from maximizing the connection between food, body, and mind.
Not to mention that I was carrying 20 extra pounds.
Despite my “good” eating, I had become a statistic, joining the two-thirds of Americans who are either overweight or obese. I became a statistic despite the fact that I had medical training, motivation, reasonably good habits, no major toxins, and access to any food I wanted. I also knew that going on a diet was futile—look at the numerous studies that prove, over and over, that the rebound effect makes you regain the weight you lost on your diet, and then 5 or 10 pounds more. The surplus pounds are your body’s way of saying, “You tried to deprive me. Don’t do it again.”
My solution was to adopt the ideal diet, and I did it more or less overnight. There was no reason not to, given all the medical evidence I knew.
I eliminated all processed foods.
I ate the purest foods, always natural, as much organic as possible.
Already a nondrinker, I also eliminated fermented foods like cheese.
I gave up refined white sugar.
I drastically cut back on salt.
I gave up red meat, mostly eating chicken and fish but moving in the direction of being a vegetarian.
I drank pure water.
I paid attention to getting proper sleep.
Because everything is connected, something like getting a good night’s sleep was part of my new way of eating. Lack of sleep throws off the balance between two hormones (leptin and ghrelin) responsible for making you feel hungry and full. People who don’t sleep well overeat easily when their body stops sending the right hormonal messages. Belly fat disturbs the same hormones. And what you end up with is a self-perpetuating cycle that is not only unhealthy but potentially dangerous.
I didn’t worry that I was becoming a purity fanatic. Nothing in my new eating was imposed. I wasn’t motivated by worry or fear. The simple fact is that “normal” eating, American style, has gone to unhealthy extremes. The average American consumes 150 pounds of sugar a year, a grotesque amount of empty calories that wreak havoc on insulin levels and blood sugar. As for our addiction to processed foods, which account for 70 percent of what Americans eat, take a look at your local supermarket. There are whole aisles devoted to cookies, crackers, other snack foods, fizzy drinks, frozen pizza, and ice cream. Economics rule, and if those foods didn’t sell in abundance, they wouldn’t get all that shelf space.
What’s not extreme is to eat naturally, based on the best medical knowledge available. That’s what the groundswell has been all about. Attention must be paid, and for the longest time our society hasn’t been paying attention to the distorted way we eat.
I was pursuing “awareness eating.” All the steps I took made me feel very good. My body felt lighter, even before I dropped 19 pounds, which came off effortlessly. I stopped doing unconscious things like taking cell phone calls during a meal—why not fully enjoy what you’re eating? I didn’t deprive myself either. Every meal was satisfying because my eating was now in tune with my body, and this in turn raised my mood level. Although I’ve always been an energetic person, I had energy and buoyancy as never before.
But the most gratifying thing was other people’s response. When I talked about awareness eating, they nodded. Most had already been going along the same path that I was on. The groundswell was real and growing. Standing back, I saw that a tipping point had been reached. Collective consciousness had got the message.
When I sat down to write this book, I had confidence that many more people want to walk this new path. They didn’t need to be coaxed into new beliefs, because healthy eating is already their goal. Yet certain things hold them back.
Bad habits and old conditioning.
Fear of change and family pressure not to change.
A stubborn belief that the next diet will work.
Discouragement about being overweight.
A history of not losing weight.
Hunger cravings, especially for salty, sweet, and fatty foods.
Time pressure, which makes it easy to reach for processed foods and snacks, and to make a quick stop at McDonald’s.
It’s a formidable list. These are huge obstacles in the lives of millions of people. In fact, it’s amazing that a new way of eating has managed to become so popular—just look at television advertising, which uses buzzwords like natural, light, and nutritious to sell almost nothing but processed food, while the advertising for fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and organic produce is next to nil.
To get past the obstacles that have led to your weight gain, whether it’s a little or a lot, I’m not going to repeat the same advice about healthy eating that has existed for decades. The advice is all good. What’s missing is how to change. Awareness is the key, because we have all been trained through massive conditioning to damage our bodies in the following ways:
Eating unconsciously, not caring what’s in our food.
Losing control over our appetite.
Opting for bigger and bigger portions.
Using food for emotional reasons, e.g., to soften the stress of daily life.
Reaching for the fastest food that will satisfy our cravings.
All of these obstacles begin in one place: the mind. The body is a physical reflection of the choices you make over a lifetime. Knowledge is important, but adding more good advice isn’t the solution to healthy eating. The solution is to transform your awareness.
I decided to show people how transformative awareness works, how they can achieve it, and why. Otherwise, the best advice, even when it leads to improved eating, will still leave us enclosed in limited notions of our bodies. Being a rigidly “good” eater who follows a set of rules and never deviates isn’t a happy situation, either. But with transformed awareness, all of your ingrained, self-destructive behaviors can be changed easily. You can’t control what you aren’t aware of. If you had a rock in your shoe, you’d remove it immediately. The signals of pain tell you instantly that something is wrong. Eating poorly isn’t like that. More often than not, it sends no pain signals, and the harmful effects often happen invisibly, gradually, and out of sight. You must gain a new level of awareness in order to notice what’s going wrong inside you. Only then can you proceed to change it.
So, if you’re overweight or feeling sluggish, or if your energy levels are low or you are unhappy about your body image, remembering how much better you looked and felt when you were younger, this book is for you. It will bring many surprises and discoveries—chief among them is that ideal weight is the most natural state you can be in. Your body can become your ally in finding a better way to live, reaching beyond weight loss. Awareness reveals many unexpected solutions, what I call applied wisdom.
Let’s get down to it—the journey is exciting, and you can join the groundswell with real enthusiasm, knowing how much better you will look and feel.
If you want to return to your ideal weight, two choices face you. You can go on a diet or do something else. This book is about that something else. Dieting involves the wrong kind of motivation, which is why it rarely leads to the desired goal. You are taking the route of self-denial and doing without. Every day on a diet involves struggling against your hunger and fighting for self-control. Is there a more unsatisfying way to live?
Weight loss needs to be satisfying in order to succeed—this is the “something else” that works after dieting has failed. If you bring the body’s hunger signals back into balance, your impulse to eat becomes your ally instead of your enemy. If you trust your body to know what you need, it will take care of you instead of fighting back. It’s all about getting the messages straight that connect mind and body.
Medically, I was trained to analyze hunger in terms of the rise and fall of certain hormones. Hunger is one of the most powerful chemical messages sent by the body to the brain. It shouldn’t happen that a person can feel hungry right after eating a meal or that having a snack in the afternoon should lead to a second snack or a third. But I’ve experienced these things—as have millions of people—which means that the experience of hunger can exist even when the need for food doesn’t.
It’s this experience of hunger that you need to change when you find yourself overeating. Cravings and false hunger aren’t the same as giving your body the fuel it needs. Your body isn’t like a gas-guzzling car. It’s the physical expression of thousands of messages that are being sent to and from the brain. In the act of eating, your self-image is involved, along with your habits, conditioning, and memories. The mind is the key to losing weight, and when the mind is satisfied, the body quits craving too much food.
A mind-body approach will work for you because it asks you for only one thing: Find your fulfillment. To be fulfilled is something that food alone can’t do. You must nourish:
With awareness, all of these things become possible. But if you neglect them, they move further and further out of reach.
It sounds like a paradox, but to lose weight, you need to fill yourself. If you fill yourself with other kinds of satisfaction, food will no longer be a problem. It was never meant to be. Eating is a natural way to feel happy. Overeating isn’t. For centuries life has been celebrated at feasts, and some of these celebrations, such as wedding banquets and retirement dinners, can be the highlight of a person’s life. What child doesn’t brighten up when the birthday cake appears? But the delight that food brings makes overeating a peculiar and unique problem. Feeling happy, which is good for you, morphs into something that’s bad for you.
At this moment you fall somewhere on the sliding scale that connects food with happiness:
Normal eating 
Overeating Cravings Food Addiction
Eating normally feels good.
Overeating feels good in the moment but leads to bad results in the long run.
Giving in to cravings doesn’t feel good at all—remorse, guilt, and frustration set in almost immediately.
Being addicted to food brings suffering, declining health, and total lack of self-esteem.
The slippery slope to becoming overweight starts with something that’s actually positive: the natural goodness of food. (You can’t say the same about drugs and alcohol, which can be toxic substances even when a person isn’t addicted to them.) Food nourishes us, and when eating goes wrong, we are torn between short-term pleasure (such as a delicious bite of chocolate ice cream) and long-term pain (the many drawbacks of being overweight for years at a time).
So why does normal eating start to slide into overeating? The simple answer: lack of fulfillment. You start overeating to make up for a lack somewhere else. Looking back on my medical residency, when I was still in my twenties, I can see now how bad eating habits insinuate themselves. I’d come home from a grueling shift at the hospital feeling stressed out. My mind was still filled with a dozen cases. Some patients were still in jeopardy. What awaited me at home was a loving wife and a home-cooked meal.
In terms of getting enough calories, sitting down to dinner met all the requirements. You had to look at the human situation to see the hidden problems. I had hit the coffee machine and grabbed snacks on the run at work. From lack of sleep I didn’t really notice what I was eating. The minute I walked in the door I usually had a drink, and there was a half-empty pack of cigarettes lying around somewhere.
In the seventies I was a normal working male following the same habits as every other young doctor I knew. I counted myself extremely fortunate to have such a loving wife and two beautiful babies at home. But the ravenous way I dug into a nourishing home-cooked dinner, combined with all the other signs of stressed eating, was setting a pattern that was desperately wrong. Ironically, even back then I considered myself pretty aware.
What turned the corner was becoming much more aware—the solution I’m proposing in this book. No matter how much it gets abused, the body can restore balance. The first rule is to stop interfering with nature. In its natural state, the brain controls hunger automatically. When your blood sugar falls below a certain level, messages are sent to an almond-sized region of the brain known as the hypothalamus, which is responsible for regulating hunger. When it receives messages of decreased blood sugar, your hypothalamus secretes hormones to make you feel hungry, and when you’ve eaten enough, the hormones reverse, making you no longer hungry. This feedback loop between blood and brain operates on its own, as it has for millions of years. Any animal with a spinal cord (vertebrate) has a hypothalamus, which makes sense, because hunger is so basic.
But in humans, hunger can get interfered with quite easily. The way we feel emotionally can make us ravenous or unable to eat at all. We can be distracted and forget to eat, or we can be obsessed and think about food all day. However, we are always in search of satisfaction. There are lots of things you can fill up on besides food. Desire comes from needs, starting with the most basic ones:
Everyone needs to feel safe and secure.
Everyone needs to feel nurtured.
Everyone needs to feel loved and appreciated.
Everyone needs to feel that their life is relevant and meaningful.
If you have filled these needs, food will be just one delight out of many. But countless people turn to overeating to substitute for what they really want. It becomes a game of switch-up, and often they don’t even see what’s happening. Is that the situation you find yourself in? Here are some common indicators.
You don’t feel secure unless you are dulled by eating too much. Dullness brings a kind of calm that lasts a short while.
You don’t feel nurtured except when your taste buds are overstimulated with sugar, salt, and fat.
You don’t feel loved and appreciated, so you turn eating into “giving myself some love.”
Your life lacks meaning, but at least when you eat, the emptiness inside can be ignored for a little while.
If you stop focusing so hard on diet and calories, you can see that the story of overweight in America is the story of missed fulfillment. We have the best foods in the world at our disposal, but we gorge on the worst. We have blessed opportunities to grow and evolve, but instead we feel empty.
My goal is to bring you to a state of fulfillment. Once that begins to happen, you will stop eating for the wrong reasons. The solution is simple but profound: To lose weight, every step of the way must be satisfying. You don’t have to psychoanalyze yourself; you can stop obsessing about your body and dwelling in disappointment and frustration. There is only one principle that applies: Life is about fulfillment. If your life isn’t fulfilled, your stomach can never supply what’s missing.
Everyone’s life story is complicated, and the best intentions go astray because people find it hard to change. Bad habits, like bad memories, stick around stubbornly when we wish they’d go away. But you have a great motivation working for you, which is your desire for happiness. I define happiness as the state of fulfillment, and everyone wants to be fulfilled. If you keep your eye on this, your most basic motivation, then the choices you make come down to a single question: “What am I hungry for?” Your true desire will lead you in the right direction. False desires lead in the wrong direction. You can take a simple test to prove this to yourself: The next time you go to the refrigerator for something to eat, stop for a second. What’s making you reach for food? There are only two answers:
1. You’re hungry and need to eat.
2. You’re trying to fill a hole, and food has become the quickest way to do that.
Modern medicine has quite a lot of knowledge about the “triggers” that set off the impulse to eat. Your body secretes hormones and enzymes connecting the hunger center in your brain with the stomach and digestive tract. When you were a baby, this was the only kind of trigger you responded to. You cried because you were hungry. Now the reverse might be true: When you feel like crying, you get hungry.
Over a lifetime, we create new triggers that a baby could never anticipate. Depression is a well-known trigger for overeating. So are stress, sudden loss, grief, repressed anger—and there are many others. Which ones are you most vulnerable to? You probably have only a vague idea. Most people are unaware when their eating behavior is being triggered, because triggers are often unconscious—that’s what makes them so powerful. You respond automatically without thinking.
Quiz:
What Triggers You to Overeat?
The most common triggers for overeating appear in the following checklists. Some are easier to overcome than others. Look at the lists and check the most common causes that make you eat even when you’re not hungry. Mark as many items as you feel apply to you.
Group A: I tend to overeat if
__ I’m busy or distracted at work.
__ I’m rushed and on the go.
__ I’m tired. I haven’t had enough sleep.
__ I’m with other people who are eating.
__ I’m out at a restaurant.
__ I’m in front of the TV or computer and need something to do with my hands.
__ I have a plate of food in front of me, and I feel I must clean my plate.
Group B: I tend to overeat if
__ I’m depressed.
__ I’m lonely.
__ I’m feeling unattractive.
__ I’m feeling anxious or worried.
__ I’m having negative thoughts about my body.
__ I’m under stress.
__ I want to be comforted.
Rating Yourself
If all or most of the items you checked come from Group A, your triggers are the easiest to overcome. You need to pay more attention to your eating habits, but that should be relatively easy. You can catch yourself eating when you’re not hungry because your main problem is distraction. Once you focus on one thing at a time—the meal in front of you—you will bring inattentive eating under control.
If all or most of the items you checked come from Group B, you are hungry for something else besides food, and paying attention to those things will be your best way to lose weight. One important thing is not going on a diet. Your pathway isn’t deprivation; it’s to find satisfaction in things other than eating.
Now that you know your triggers, you can monitor them. You don’t have to fight against your hunger, just give your brain enough time to make a choice. Instead of robotically reaching for food, which is a reaction that comes automatically, let yourself find a way to choose what you really want. At first, this involves a simple moment of mindfulness, or self-awareness, as follows:
Any time you are about to eat outside mealtime, go through the following simple steps:
1. Pause and take a deep breath.
2. Ask yourself if your hunger is being triggered by a familiar pattern, such as feeling bored, restless, or sad, or wanting a distraction. You now know some of your most common triggers, so see if any of them are involved.
3. Once you’ve identified a trigger, ask yourself if you really need to eat. Maybe you can find an alternative activity, one that simply postpones reacting to your trigger, such as:
Doing a household chore.
Calling a friend.
Checking your e-mails and answering some saved ones.
Reading a book.
Drinking a glass of water.
Any harmless diversion will do. Your goal is to insert a pause before you automatically react to a trigger. If you still feel hungry, go ahead and eat. But get in the habit of noticing your triggers this way—it’s a basic step toward overcoming them and giving yourself more freedom to choose.
I promised myself one thing before addressing the problem of overeating: The solution should work here and now. A great fault in dieting is that you make yourself unhappy today on the promise that you will be happier tomorrow. But desire doesn’t work that way. “What am I hungry for?” exists in the present moment. The impulse you feel can be simplified into a few basic categories:
You’re hungry for food.
You want to fill an emotional hole.
You want to fill a hole in your mind (such as low self-esteem, bad body image, or a sense of failure and frustration).
To these I would add a fourth impulse, which is spiritual. You want to fill a hole in your soul.
These are strong motivations, fueled by desire. Once you turn desire in the right direction, real transformation can take place. We all follow the path of desire every day. The impulse to get more out of life is natural and deep-seated. In this book we’ll find out exactly what you’re hungry for. Once you know, you will have a clear path that makes total sense in terms of mind, body, and spirit. Here’s how you’ll be transformed:
You will eat only when you are hungry for food.
You won’t eat when what you’re hungry for is emotional, in terms of comfort, security, love, bonding with others, or a feeling of joy.
You won’t eat when what you are hungry for is a life that is relevant and meaningful, where you have a purpose and can meet your goals. These are needs of the mind.
You won’t eat when what you’re hungry for is spiritual, such as lightness of being or a higher vision of the soul.
Some readers will say to themselves, “This all sounds well and good, but frankly, I just want to know what to eat and what not to eat.” I know exactly how that goes. Crash diets offer the ultimate temptation, a quick fix. But look at what really happens:
Karen is an attractive middle-aged woman who stands in front of her mirror, frowning at what she sees. She wants to lose 10 pounds before her daughter’s wedding, which is two weeks away, but Karen isn’t discouraged. When she was twenty, she could lose 5 pounds over the weekend by going on a juice fast. If it worked then, it will work now.
And it does, almost. On her daughter’s wedding day Karen has lost 7 pounds. She nearly starved to get there, but now she can celebrate. What she doesn’t realize is that she’s fallen into a trap. Her old eating habits will return soon, and so will the extra pounds. You can see her standing at the fridge the next day, as the following telegrams arrive at the mind-body connection:
Thank goodness the wedding’s over. I can relax.
I worked hard. I deserve to treat myself.
Look at all the leftovers.
I can’t starve myself forever.
I can’t let this good food go to waste.
There is little chance, with these messages urging her on, that Karen will hold back from a nice big chunk of leftover wedding cake. Excuses come to mind every time you decide to overeat. The fact that Karen lost weight in a two-week sprint to the finish line means little compared to a lifetime of eating habits that keep adding extra pounds.
America is crazed over dieting. We’d all like to find a magic bullet that will solve years of bad habits. This has led to a bipolar condition in this country. At one extreme, McDonald’s is the epitome of fatty, calorie-laden fast food, with 11 percent of all meals being eaten at chain restaurants, while at the other extreme most of the country is either on a diet or cheating on one. Crash dieting involves a voluntary form of amnesia. You forget what didn’t work yesterday to plunge into the next gimmicky fad.
When you stand back, it’s quite strange that people do exactly the opposite of what they know is good for them. But you can see it happening all around. Someone might say, “I’m trying to lose ten pounds,” but then an hour later they reach for bread and butter in a restaurant as soon as they sit down and then end the meal with a warm brownie à la mode “just this once.” A report from the Centers for Disease Control in 2013 found a small cutback in calories among schoolchildren—between 4 and 7 percent—but no weight loss, which was explained by a decrease in physical activity. Although American consumption of fast food fell by about 2 percent in the past decade, the people who were ranked as obese actually gained weight over the same period. One large online support group for people who have lost a large amount of weight takes the same “monkey on your back” approach as Alcoholics Anonymous. Overeating is a disorder that always threatens to return. Once you know that you are an overeater, you are resigned to living with cravings and must keep constant vigilance to avoid succumbing. Thus every calorie must be counted every day, and relapses are omens of impending loss of control. I am not judging this approach, but my intention is to find an alternative to the “monkey on your back.”
What has worked for me is steady focus: I kept my eye on what I really wanted. First and foremost, I wanted to get back to normal, healthy eating—and never slip again. We all know that the second part is the real issue. Doctors call it noncompliance. The patient is told the right thing to do—eat a balanced diet with lots of fruits and vegetables, cut back on red meat, exercise regularly, give up smoking and excessive alcohol—but after a few days, weeks, or months, old habits are back in the saddle. Good advice about weight loss is everywhere, yet 70 percent of the adult population is either overweight or obese.
People aren’t deliberately self-destructive. We don’t follow good advice because, frankly, overeating makes us feel better than depriving ourselves or engaging in strenuous activity. A bucket of buttered popcorn triggers powerful, primitive brain mechanisms; the prospect of jogging three miles doesn’t. Sharing dessert with your friends at a cozy restaurant feels convivial and comforting; running on a treadmill by yourself at the gym doesn’t.
Dieters keep doing more of what never worked in the first place.
The slogan “Diets don’t work” has been with us for decades, and it’s absolutely true. Every long-term study has shown that less than 2 percent of dieters manage to lose a significant amount of weight (20 pounds or more) and keep it off for two years. We aren’t a nation that totally lacks willpower. Failure is built into the whole diet scheme. What is a typical dieter’s first impulse? To deprive themselves. They drastically cut their calorie intake. They fight against their cravings and vow to subsist on something like wheatgrass juice for a week. But all that deprivation creates another hole. Instead of feeling sad or lonely or unloved, you feel sad, lonely, unloved and starving at the same time.
I fully understand why people deprive themselves. A physical problem must require a physical solution. The extra pounds are visible every time you look in the mirror. The invisible holes aren’t. Also, if overeating stands for lack of self-control, depriving yourself is a burst of super self-control. “I hate eating broccoli with lemon juice, but I’m forcing myself to.” But added misery only compounds the problem. Keep in mind the classic moment in the movie The Producers when Zero Mostel can’t calm down a gasping, panicky Gene Wilder.
“I’m hysterical! Once this starts I can’t stop!” Wilder cries.
Not knowing what to do, Mostel throws a glass of water in his face. Wilder freezes in place.
“I’m hysterical! And now I’m wet!” he shrieks.
Still not knowing what to do, Mostel slaps him in the face.
Wilder wails, “I’m in pain! I’m wet! And I’m still hysterical!” A good reminder that making yourself feel worse never works. So pursue the next fad diet if you want to—you can even pursue it while you read this book, because once you see that fulfillment is better than depriving yourself, crash dieting will no longer be a temptation. The fact that weight loss can be connected with increasing happiness is the secret to why my approach works.
TO FIND OUT what you’re hungry for, you must reconnect mind and body, looking beyond the simple circuitry we talked about before, which controls the basic hunger impulse through the hypothalamus. Because you can override simple signals from your body, even something as basic as hunger becomes involved in the whole brain. Not everybody has interfered with the natural setup that regulates appetite. We all know someone whose weight has never fluctuated since their late teens. They say things like the following:
My body tells me what it wants.
I feel uncomfortable if I gain 2 pounds.
I exercise because it feels so good.
These are statements rooted in the mind-body connection when it is working properly. Unfortunately, when it isn’t working correctly, the mind-body connection short-circuits and bad habits tell the body what to do. The wrong signals are sent, and as the body reacts by getting fatter, more imbalanced, and ultimately sick, the mind ignores these signs of distress. Let’s see why this happens.
Imagine that three telephone conversations converge at one junction, which in reality is the meeting of three basic regions of the brain. Each region has something to tell you; each is sending neural messages to you at once. Each is seeking a different kind of satisfaction. The lower brain is satisfied when you feel good physically. The limbic system is satisfied when you feel good emotionally. The higher brain is satisfied when you are making good decisions for yourself.
The miracle of the human brain is that all three lines can merge and cooperate. The lower brain can send the message “I’m hungry,” which the emotional brain accepts, because “Eating puts me in a good mood,” so the higher brain can say, “Let’s stop for a meal.” This balancing act is natural, and it works to the benefit of all three regions of the brain. None of them must force its message through, trying to get heard by pushing the others out of the way.
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.