What Are You Hungry For? Read Online Free PDF Page B

she needed to lose, but by the time I saw Dana, most of it had returned. Ironically, the fact that she was getting new clients in her consulting business fueled the problem. There were more lunches eaten out with clients, more hoursspent on the phone, more days when she arrived home exhausted after six at night.
    It took a mind-body approach to change these negative trends. I proposed that she do the three things we covered earlier: feel her body, observe her emotions, and make more-aware choices.
    My aim was to get Dana to tune in, because her story is about losing the connection between mind, body, and emotions. This new approach intrigued her, especially when I assured her that it was effortless—the only demand was for moments of paying attention, which was an expenditure of time that she could easily afford.
    “At first it was strange to watch myself,” she said. “I began to catch myself thoughtlessly buttering a roll in a restaurant, so I’d stop, and when I tuned in, I found that I wasn’t actually hungry. The message was right there in front of me. All I had to do was feel it.”
    Now, a year later, she is back down to her college weight, but more important, Dana has learned the power of paying attention. Awareness is the key to weight loss, once you train yourself to notice the natural signals present in the body at any moment. It takes time and repetition to cause long-term imbalances to shift, but they will. You are the choice-maker who can create any change you desire.

A Doctor’s Perspective
    Like every other young doctor in the seventies, I came of age in medicine knowing absolutely zero about the mind-body connection. My medical specialty was endocrinology, the field that deals with hormones. As a young doctor I was fascinated with how the tiniest secretion of chemicals could make someone afraid, courageous, angry, sexually aroused, or hungry in a matter of seconds. The secret to Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde lies in a molecule! That discovery sparked my imagination, and I originally thought I’d be content to stay in thelaboratory examining the effects of hormones, because their action and interaction is astonishingly complex.
    But when I went into private practice, I saw the devastating effect of hormones firsthand. Stress hormones were culprits in disorders that could ruin people’s lives, often in cruel social ways. “He’s lazy and dull” is the stigma attached too often to thyroid deficiency. Soldiers have been anxious about seeming to be cowards for centuries, but another hormone, adrenaline, leads to flight as much as fight. In addition, when the adrenaline rush is over, the body is physically depleted. Expose a soldier to enough situations where fight-or-flight is triggered, and the result is shell shock. Countless combatants have accused themselves of being cowards—and were stigmatized by fellow soldiers—because they were simply exhausted at the hormonal level. This stigma didn’t begin to fade until it was realized that every soldier will become shell-shocked given enough time at the front lines. No moral failing is involved; the stigma was incredibly unfair.
    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