By Deepak Chopra MD: A mind-body approach is the key to lifelong wellbeing.
After promoting this message worldwide for thirty years, Deepak Chopra focuses on the huge problem of weight control in America with exciting new concepts. What Are You Hungry For? is the breakthrough book that can bring weight under effortless control by linking it to personal fulfillment in every area of a reader’s life.
What are you hungry for? Food? Love? Self-esteem? Peace? In this manual for higher health, based on the latest findings in both mainstream and alternative medicine, Deepak Chopra creates a vision of weight loss based on a deeper awareness of why people overeat – because they are trying to find satisfaction and wind up using food as a substitute for real fulfillment. Repudiating the failed approaches of crash dieting and all forms of deprivation, Deepak’s new book aims directly at the problem of finding fulfillment. When that problem is solved, he argues, normal eating falls into place automatically, and the entire system of mind and body achieves what it really desires.
“Everyone’s life story is complicated, and the best intentions go astray because people find it hard to change,” Deepak writes. “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.”
Wherever you are in life, this book will help point you in that right direction.
“What Are You Hungry For?”
Excerpt from the book:
Awareness and Weight Loss
Why This Will Work For You
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, a massive 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 quickly a completely new way of eating has 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 ate what I enjoyed. But as I looked around at the medical literature, new findings were emerging every day. All kinds of linkages 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 was 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 eating. Lack of sleep throws the balance off between two hormones (leptin and gherkin) responsible for making you feel hungry and full. People who don’t sleep well easily overeat when their body stops sending the right hormonal messages. (Belly fat disturbs the same hormones.)
I didn’t worry that I was becoming a purity nut. 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 absurd extremes. The average American consumes 150 pounds of sugar a year, a grotesque amount of empty calories that wreak havoc with 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, soda pop, 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, adding 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, 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 has been reached. Collective consciousness had gotten the message.
When I sat down to write this book, I had confidence that many, many 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 past 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, snacks, and a quick stop at McDonald’s.
It’s a formidable list. The things on it 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 buzz words 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 body. Being a rigidly “good” eater who follows a set of rules and never deviates isn’t a happy solution, 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 isn’t like that. 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.
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.
Eating, Weight, and Hunger
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:
• Your body with healthy food
• Your heart with joy, compassion, love
• Your mind with knowledge
• Your spirit with equanimity and self-awareness
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 up. If you fill yourself up 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, slides 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 need, 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, 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.
Reprinted from the book What Are You Hungry For? The Chopra Solution to Permanent Weight Loss, Well-Being, and Lightness of Soul by Deepak Chopra. Copyright 2013 by Deepak Chopra. Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.