Do you even know that your body is talking to you? Yes, that’s right: and actually, it never dies! It’s not totally our fault that we have lost the ability to hear messages from the body. One thing that’s true about humans is that once something (an event, thought, emotion, or whatever) becomes familiar to us, it slips below the brink of our awareness (through a process called habituation) and we become unable to feel it. our conscious mind.
Another reason why we’re not fully wrong if we are blind to the inner messages of the body is that in English “body” and “mind” are two separate words, implying two separate things or concepts. But this linguistic anomaly fails to describe the elegant processes that occur within the human body. A far better way to consider this subject is to use the concept of “bodymind,” that’s, the body which is the visible manifestation, the inescapable result, of a group of subliminally held ideas that interact with one another.
The biggest obstacle to reading bodymind messages is that we lose the key to understanding what it’s saying. It’s as if the body spoke highly rhetorical classical Greek, but since we do not understand Greek, we dismiss it as nonsense. Or maybe it is better described as a mistranslation problem.
When it comes to food, body language, like classical Greek, is historical: our dietary needs were determined millions of years ago, long before the invention of processed foods. Therefore, there may be an enormous gap between the food or substance that the body really demands and what we choose to eat out of our ignorance.
Take, for example, the everlasting human “sweet tooth”, the bane of the existence of fat people. The question is logical: why do we even have a sweet tooth if we’re not supposed to be eating Twinkies? Now, from the perspective of historical bodies, it’s hypothesized that our innate taste for sweets was meant to be a sign of the source of vitamin C. Millions of years ago—via an evolutionary hiccup—humans lost the ability to synthesize their own vitamin C. Since vitamin C is important for stress management in the body, humans must develop a passion that will make them search for fruits which are the richest source. Similarly, our innate taste for salt may exist because millions of years ago we were mainly herbivores and (like deer) needed salt to balance the surplus potassium provided by our vegetarian diets. Today, however, food manufacturers are taking advantage of this taste, increasing their profits by giving us too much of “what we want”—more concentrated sources of salt and sugar than we should be consuming—and so we suffer. (Another example of a mistranslation between the body and conscious mind is the body’s habit of “copying,”—for example, the effects of chocolate “mimic” the effects of estrogen in the body, so what a premenstrual woman experiences as a yearning for chocolate is in fact a desire expressed by the body to return previous high estrogen levels.)
People who are overweight have an extra reason for not hearing their bodies’ messages precisely: they have a tendency to actively mistrust, or even hate, their bodies and may not want to listen attentively to what they’re saying. The problem is not a dieter’s lack of factual knowledge about calories, carb grams and such, but a basic lack of respect for the body’s inner wisdom. Such people become so insensitive to the tempo of their own bodies that they try to run it as if it were an organization—through directives issued from above. This misguided try to control the body is quite common amongst dieters.
Dieters are normally terrified by the idea of giving up control over themselves; they view it as tantamount to letting a mentally incompetent person do a responsible job—who knows what disaster will follow next? Their rational minds, used to control things, cannot comprehend that the irrational things the body appears to be doing (holding water, for example) are only the things the body really does. must do, given the circumstances. A major source of difficulty is failure to understand the body rather than jumping into moral judgments about what it “should” be doing.
Diets as we know them are evil schemes to keep overweight people off their bodies. Every month or so, a “new” one appears in a magazine or online. You decide to try it. (It’s like seeing a size 4 pair of shoes in a store window and buying them even although your feet are a size 8.) Following all directions, you cannot be bothered to pay attention to what your body is trying to tell you—until it starts talking loud enough and persistently (you fainting, or feeling dizzy, or getting very upset). You drop off the diet and blame yourself for your “lack of will.” You are absolutely not alone. In his book EnergeticsGrant Gwinup wrote, “The average person will stick to [a fad diet] for about three days.”
Dieters: everything your body tells you — just like its unacceptable messages — makes sense; everything said has a reason. Ignoring the message, or trying to drown it out or change it, is solely a willful disregard for the clearest form of reality you have access to. You may not like your overweight body very much, or what it says, but be honest with yourself in this moment. Every weakness speaks of a desire to return to health.
The body is continually trying to keep itself in the best balance; if you continually make yourself feel anxious and thus keep your body continually out of hormonal balance, it will create cravings that will correct the imbalance. As strange as it may sound, compulsive eating and other addictions are a misguided attempt by the body to restore health under very adverse circumstances.
But let’s be honest: the body at all times rules the last word. The body performs innumerable invisible activities just to keep one’s balance. The body is a miracle, each day performing an extremely complex array of functions under conditions that would cause other, smaller machines to sputter and shut down. Every essential mechanism of the body (breathing, cooling oneself, transporting water, and so on) has at least five “fail-safe” mechanisms or alternative pathways by which the function can be accomplished, making sure that the body won’t fail even if the component parts do. We need to discuss all the fail-safe mechanisms because it is very important for any dieter to be impressed with this one fact about the body: it will do what it has to do, come hell or tide.
If we want to be our body’s ally rather than its enemy, perhaps one place to start is with the words of Don Gerrard from the fantastic little book. One Bowl:
“I eat because I’m hungry but I also eat to define my existence, my personality, my sense of life. By nature, eating is an important emotional experience. My diet concept starts with isolating you from external noise so you can concentrate on your internal sound. Then it shows you how to interpret and evaluate these sounds for their important signals. I used to mostly eat with my head, paying attention to my ideas and memories of food and its taste, but ignoring food after it’s been swallowed. Now I eat more with my whole body.”
Sounds like a really reasonable plan to me.
About Nancy Brian
Nancy Bryan, Ph.D., author of this revised and updated edition Thin is a State of Mind (first published in 1980 by Harper & Row, and later by CompCare Publications), has spent his entire working life as editor: in the sixties at The Rand Corporation; in the seventies at the ARPANET research institute; in the eighties at a worldwide employee benefits consulting firm; and in the nineties for the J. Paul Getty Trust. In addition to Thin is a State of Mind, Bryan has written a doctoral dissertation on Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, and has written best-selling self-help books for others. His work has appeared in Vogue, Self, Family Health, and numerous museum and computer science publications. He is currently working on an upcoming title, Metathinking: Working Knowledge for Women.
