Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much by Colette Baron-Reid Read Free Book Online Page B

not smile in return, unless I stop and think, “Oh, he’s smiling. I should probably smile back so he thinks I’m a nice person.” I wouldn’t actually experience your happiness. And when I got stung by that bee, you would know to be polite and express sympathy, but you wouldn’t tense up as if you’d been stung yourself. Mirror neurons are believed to be associated not just with empathy but also with our ability to pick up on others’ intentions, our sense of self, and our ability to learn language. They probably played an important role in our development of social groups, too. If we didn’t feel each other’s pain and joy, we might not have become so committed to helping each other, even at risk to ourselves—something necessary for humans to survive in difficult times.
    What if those of us who feel too much have more mirror neurons than most people or if our mirror neurons are somehow more sensitive? Maybe people who feel too much have brains that are better able to experience what others are experiencing emotionally. If so, we are taking in more, processing more, and being more sensitive to subtle changes in people’s energy fields that are intertwined with ours.
    METABOLISM: BEYOND THE SIMPLE EQUATION
    Aside from being influenced by what’s going on in “the bond,” our cells, and our brains, we also experience the effects of something called our metabolism , which is our body’s process of using the calories we take in. Metabolism is a fairly simple concept: our bodies burn calories, or units of energy, at a particular rate. We burn more calories when we’re engaged in activity; and when we have good muscle tone, we’re getting enough quality sleep, and we’re managing emotional stress well. That’s when our metabolism is fairly high. When we’re not doing all those things, our metabolism slows down and our bodies use fewer calories to do the same activities it always has, from thinking to moving to digesting. The extra calories are stored as fat, so as we use fewer units of energy, we get fatter.
    All of us have a predetermined set point for metabolism, meaning that there are limits to just how much we can speed up our rate of burning calories. For that matter, we also are programmed to have a particular body shape. If we come from ancestors who are short and stocky, there’s little we can do to change that basic body shape. Additionally, we’re programmed to have our metabolism slow down as we age. It’s harder to lose weight as we get older.
    However, let’s look again at the list of things we can do to affect our metabolism for the better. Two of them are moving more and getting more sleep, which I do want you to do as you move through this program and you’ve begun to work on managing your empathy. The third is to reduce stress. Is taking on the weight of the world just a teeny bit stressful? And does stress make it hard to get a good night’s sleep? Are you seeing some of the threads in the tapestry? By not taking control of your porous boundaries, you’re actually lowering your metabolism and using fewer calories. That’s going to change as a result of this program.
    SO WHY DOESN’T MY DOCTOR KNOW THAT MY FEAR AND FRUSTRATION ARE MAKING ME FAT?
    Physicians and scientists all acknowledge a mind-body connection, that our thoughts and feelings affect our immune systems, our hormones, our digestive systems, and so on. Every day, there are new discoveries about the relationships between thoughts, feelings, and physical reality. Even so, many people underestimate just how much thoughts and feelings affect their bodies; they might get to this point in the book and say, “What a bunch of woo-woo nonsense.” I get it. But let me explain why the medical community, the media, and most people are just a bit behind on all the evidence for this connection—and why I’m not crazy!
    Science has