Eating Is a Symptom of Why You are Fat - Insights July 2007
Weight loss programs focus on diet and exercise to reduce inches and pounds. These solutions are temporary because the real cause of fat is not addressed. To provide context, I’ll explain some surprising realities about body chemistry and fat.
Fat produces cytokines. Cytokines are an immune system chemical. Why would fat cells do something that triggers your immune system? The reason is because fat cells actually produce wounding that causes a physical reaction just as bumping your knee or catching a cold would. Your fat cells are producing wounding.
This is a radical concept, and contrary to a lot of the information you’ve been told about why fat happens, or why ‘bad’ eating habits occur. It’s contrary to the information you’ve been told all your life, because it deals with the root causes of weight problems. Those root causes are in chemical reactions you are not consciously aware of. Until you learn how your subconscious mind interprets your experiences, and how to manage the results, you can’t solve the root problems that cause weight issues.
When people learn how to deal with their subconscious, and therefore these reactions, the food issues go away. That’s because the food issues are a symptom, not the cause, of the problem.
The hardest part of dealing with your subconscious is understanding that it has a very different view of your life and your world. For your primitive brain, many ordinary parts of life are threatening. Your subconscious might decide traffic is threatening, if it believes that traffic might make you late for work. Then, any time you’re in traffic it will produce threat reaction chemistry in your body, even if you don’t have work that day, or even if you have plenty of time to get to work that day. The subconscious does not distinguish time or circumstances, so once it labels something a threat it is always a threat. (Unless you reprogram it.)
Once a threat reaction is triggered, your body is flooded with threat reaction chemistry that activates your immune system and floods your bloodstream with nasty chemicals like cortisol. One of the requirements of threat reaction chemistry is high blood sugar, which triggers a physical requirement for food to support the high blood sugar state. This might be fine if it would burn off a few pounds, but that’s not how it works. The threat reaction is supposed to be an emergency handling system, for dealing with attacks. Therefore, it requires the fastest possible supply to sustain high blood sugar, creating overwhelming cravings for sugars and carbohydrates.
Since the requirement is physical, will-power is not going to help resist these urges. That’s why dieting is so stressful: it requires resisting physical requirements of your body. That’s also why the weight comes back when the diet is over: because resisting physical requirements of your body is unnatural. The only real, long-term solution is to reprogram your subconscious so it’s not feeling threatened all the time, and you don’t have those physical requirements. It’s actually stunning to experience going through days with no cravings, and no desire for ‘bad’ foods. In fact, as people continue to make changes, they often find that foods that used to be compulsive become repulsive.
When a threat reaction includes an emotional element, cytokines are also triggered. It may be that someone criticizes, or ignores, or is irritable, and your primitive brain considers their behavior a threat. This may occur even if you didn’t notice their behavior, or thought it wasn’t important. It will definitely occur if the person’s behavior bothered you in any way.
Cytokines are produced by cells to trigger healing functions, by activating your immune system. Inflammation is part of the immune system response. That means that this system is also responsible for any chronic illness or pain – any physical problem that involves inflammation.
To stop the fat cycle, it is necessary to identify the trigger that activates the immune system, and reprogram the subconscious mind so the trigger is no longer active. Any eating behaviors that are physically required to sustain the chemical state of the reaction go away as the immune system stops reacting.
After a lifetime of judging everything that’s eaten or desired, it is both maddening and freeing to realize that what you were told is a very small part of the whole truth - a truth that is vital to real change in how you judge your relationship with food, and the state of your body.
Many people are aware of emotional eating behaviors, but that doesn’t help stop it. That’s because those behaviors are the domain of your subconscious, and require learning a different process to effect change. Consider watching for a few days, and see if you notice the patterns of threat reactions and the behaviors that they trigger. A sure sign that you’re in a threat reaction is to be eating something at the same time you’re thinking you shouldn’t be eating it. Another certain sign is to realize you’ve eaten something and didn’t decide to eat it – it’s already happened. We’re so used to considering our cognitive brain as the ruler of the mind, it’s hard to accept that the subconscious has so much power in our lives. And yet, we’re often wearing the results of our reactions.
If you’re familiar with yogic breathing or other techniques, it will help calm your subconscious. By maintaining a slow, deep breath, you can notice when a reaction occurs because you’ll switch to a faster breath. Since it’s not typical to pay attention to how we’re breathing, it’s hard to notice reactions occurring until you’ve done something you didn’t decide to do, and wonder why. Just noticing your reactions is a powerful step in making change. Until you know the truth, you are not in a position to make a different decision about your body and your life.
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