What Are You Hungry For? by Deepak Chopra Read Free Book Online

that memories stick with us largely because we invest in them emotionally. Everything from your first kiss to being told off by your first-grade teacher can stay with you for years, while events that have no emotional value quickly fade. (Can you remember the first time you brushed your teeth or made your bed? The first bottle of detergent you bought or how many times you parked your car last week?)
    The belief system of overweight people can be tagged with words that are loaded with emotion:
fatty
,
loser
,
failure
,
lazy
,
greedy
,
sloppy
,
gluttonous
,
ugly
, and so on. We need to alter these loaded terms with new ones that are equally emotional yet positive. Feeling good requires your brain to fill specific receptors with chemical messages. If these receptors get overloaded positively, food won’t give you the fix it once did—this is just like drug addicts whose receptors for pain and pleasure are so overloaded that they must take more and more of their drug to get even a small fix. If you keep eating all day, your brain response gets dulled. The natural balance of hunger and satiation is thrown off. Basically, you are throwing damp logs on the fire. The fuel is right, but it won’t catch fire.

Nourished on Every Level
    Let me introduce words that carry positive emotional coloring:
light, vital, success, winner, satisfied, buoyant, renewed, free.
When you feedthem into your brain, you reinforce new pathways that affect every cell in your body. Thanks to the mind-body connection, which is holistic, each word influences you as a complete person. Every level of our life gets nourished. In fact,
nourished
is the best single term to describe how you are going to change your life story. No doubt you already see why. Food satisfies our need to feel nourished; it’s the opposite of deprivation. Being complex creatures, we associate food with all kinds of related experiences: home, mother, childhood, family, togetherness, warmth, protection, abundance, giving.
    These are powerful tags for powerful experiences. When you mix them with negative experiences that are also powerful, the good gets polluted. I’m not suggesting that your story should be all sweetness and light; feeding your brain with propaganda is wrong and pointless. In everyone’s life those potent tags—mother, home, family, childhood—carry memories of hurt and sorrow, too. But reality is always renewing itself. You can and should inject fresh messages if you want to move forward in your life. There is no reason to be the prisoner of old conditioning and negative memories.
Action Step:
Nourished by “Light”
    You can prove to yourself how nourishing a new word can be once it begins to be your personal theme. Let’s use the word
light.
Since it’s the opposite of
heavy,
this word is one of the best for our purposes. The more you bring
light
into your life, the easier it will be to lose weight. Why? Because
light
covers so many positive experiences. Look at the following usages:
    Lighthearted
    Light-handed
    Enlightened
    Feeling light and bright
    The light of inspiration
    Lightness of being
    The light of the soul
    The light of God
    If you had these things in your life, it would be much easier for your body to be light. Your mind would be sending messages that are the opposite of
heavy
,
dull
,
inert
,
tired
,
bored
,
dark
,
unenlightened.
Start to rid yourself of those messages and let your body conform to
lightness
and all of its positive connotations.
    With this background, you can proceed to use
light
in various ways, beginning with the physical sensation of being light.
    Exercise: Filling with Light
    Sit in a quiet room by yourself. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths until you feel centered and ready. (It’s best to sit upright if you can rather than lounging back in your chair.)
    Breathing normally, visualize light filling your chest each time you inhale. The light is soft, warm, and white. Watch it suffuse your chest. Now exhale normally,