Chapter OneThe Mind/Body Approach
to Weight Management
We must change direction
or we will end up where we are headed.
-- Chinese proverb
All diets work.
Really. You can bet that for every bit of wacko dieting wisdom out there, somewhere there is someone who at some time lost some weight by taking that wisdom to heart. No carbohydrates for two weeks? Sure. Jenny Craig frozen entrees for two months? Okay. Forty, percent protein, 30 percent carbohydrates, and 30 percent monounsaturated fats every meal? Probably works, if you're a chemist.
All diets work, which is to say you'll lose weight while you're on them. Even a lot of weight. But then what? Say you've adopted the latest all-protein regimen. Say you've dropped fourteen pounds in as many days. Say you're happy with your new weight. Now the big question: are you going to keep eating this way?
Better not. Every piece of research conducted over the last twenty years by everyone from nutritionists to nephrologists, from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to Harvard Medical School, underscores the correlation between diets low in fiber (low in fruits and vegetables) and high in fat (high in animal and dairy products) and the six major killers in this country-cancer, stroke, heart disease, atherosclerosis, diabetes ... and obesity. A diet consisting of mostly protein is invariably a diet of meat, fish, and dairy, because few other foods offer a comparable concentration of protein. Chances are, if you're making protein the predominant source of your calories, you're probably getting plenty of fat and cholesterol, too, and nowhere near enough dietary fiber. You're also missing out on the cancer-fighting phytochemicals and antioxidants that vegetables, fruits, and grains provide insurance you could really use, because animal products these days are laced with hormones, pesticide residue, heavy metals, and antibiotics.
Add to this argument the fact that excessive protein leaches vital minerals from your bones and tissues, putting a toxic load on your kidneys and setting you up, for osteoporosis, and you've got a diet that provides short-term weight loss at the cost of long-term health. Which is the trade-off that every diet since the refinement of sugar has asked you to weigh: your waistline or your life. Your weight or your health. The way you look, or the way you feel and function.
No, wait just a minute, you're shaking your head. I'm dieting to get healthy! That's what everyone's been telling me.
If I don't lose the weight, I'll lose my health.
Ah. Glad you brought that up. Because this is what years of experience have proven to us repeatedly: You have a weight problem because you're not well. You're not in balance. In fact, you won't lose weight unless you get healthy. And dieting is no way to nourish your body back to a state of well-being.
Never Say Diet
Diets win you battles but lose you the war. They work, and then they don't work, because all the while you're reaping results you're sowing the seeds of your undoing. They undermine you at the most fundamental of levels, conning you into believing that your body is an enemy, an unruly child to be disciplined, punished, constantly denied. A diet asks you to see yourself as two separate entities: the half that's in charge (the mind) and the half that's out of control (the body). The typical diet book takes the disciplinarian in you aside and says, "You've let this child of yours get way out of hand. Now it's time to get toughIt's time to lay down the law. From now on, the kid gets no more ______ " (you fill in the blank).
The disciplinarian nods. The body rebels. And so continues the endless cycle of punishment and indulgence, diet and weight gain. Every time the scale reads a higher number, the child is rebuked and denied certain pleasures. The child is put on a diet. The child dutifully performs under scrutiny, all the while biding his time for the next opportunity to disobey.
This kind of power struggle never works-not in childrearing, and not in weight management. A child who acts out is really crying for comfort and attention; a body that won't "behave" in its eating habits is likewise crying out for nourishment and nurturing. A child denied love doesn't learn to stop needing it; a body denied the foods it craves only intensifies its search. A child who's told repeatedly he's not good enough will eventually stop trying to be good; a body admonished repeatedly that it's not thin enough will ultimately balloon up with weight until the mind feels the despair of total failure.
If you want to set yourself up for this kind of failureover and over-then you'll adopt the dieter's image of mind and body in constant struggle
If you're ready for a new tactic-if you're ready for Feeling Light-you'll stop seeing yourself this way. You'll stop fighting yourself. You'll stop pitting allies against each other.
Parent and child, mind and body, are one and the same. This isn't just New Age-speak: Candace Pert, a Georgetown University biochemistry professor, actually quantified it, showing how brain and body communicate using a network of chemical messengers called peptides. According to Pert, these peptides are the "biochemical units of emotion" because they translate our every thought, reaction, and emotion into physiological change. Our organs, tissue, skin, muscle, and endocrine glands all have peptide receptors on them and can store, access, and "act" upon emotional information. "Thoughts" or "feelings" may not only affect, say, the operation of the digestive organs; they may, in A likelihood, originate in those organs. This means that conceptualizing mind as the seat of emotional memory is a false conception: memory is a string of protein molecules that can be stored in the tissues of the pancreas just as easily as in the nerve cells of the brain...
