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

around his waist. But this doesn’t worry him; he’s not in the market for a new relationship yet. He can afford to let himself go a little; it’s one of the perks of being a bachelor again.
    A month later Jerry goes to the doctor for a routine physical. He tells the nurse she’s made a mistake when she weighs him at 20 pounds heavier than the year before. But the scale is right, and Jerry’s doctor notices a rise in blood pressure and what he calls “prediabetic” blood sugar. Something needs to be done. Jerry immediately joins a gym. He cuts out frozen pizza, a mainstay of his diet since his wife left him, but in the end, he works too hard to get to the gym more than once or twice a week. He starts dating a woman who has no problem, she says, with his extra weight. She’s been gaining some herself, and although Jerry isn’t too pleased with the medical side of things, the two happily indulge in going to expensive restaurants. A series of tiny rationalizations starts to accumulate in his mind:
    I look good for my age, and I feel good.
    I’ve had a rough time. I can let myself go a little.
    I never liked being nagged about my weight.
    I’m an adult. I can eat what I want.
    There are lots of people heavier than I am.
    There is no villain in this story, only a steady stream of thoughts and feelings that gradually produce a bad result. And while all of this was happening to Jerry, the mind-body feedback loop was always paying attention.
    Your mind has tremendous power, so as you begin to change your story, you need to know some guidelines:
    1. Youare not your body. You are the creator of your body.
    2. You have created your present body using both conscious and unconscious thoughts.
    3. You can create a new body through conscious choices.
    4. Your body is a verb (a process), not a noun (a fixed object).
    5. You continually recycle your material body—almost all of it—once a year (stomach lining every five days; skin once a month; skeleton every three months; liver every six weeks; genetic material every six weeks).
    6. You constantly change the activity of your genes by the same signals sent by thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
    Because they see themselves in the mirror as a solid object standing alone in space, people don’t grasp that the body isn’t a thing at all. It is an ever-shifting process. Imagine a building that looks like any other except that when you get closer, you see that the bricks are flying out of place and renewed with fresh bricks all the time. That’s your body. Even though your skeleton seems solid, for example, it exchanges calcium constantly with the rest of the body, and as these atoms move, their replacements respond to change. A marathon runner’s skeleton looks totally different when examined at the cellular level from that of someone who is totally sedentary. Even wearing a new pair of shoes is enough to change the shape of your leg bones. When you were twenty, your upper leg was composed of twice as much muscle as fat. In the absence of physical activity, there will be twice as much fat as muscle when you turn fifty or sixty.
    Even though your organs hold basically the same shape, they are constantly exchanging their fundamental building blocks. That’s why I like to say that the body is a verb, not a noun. People are surprised to discover that this extends down to their genes. You can’t add or lose the genes you were born with, but genes aren’t fixed; they are switched on and off by many factors. Dr. Dean Ornish andhis Harvard colleagues have shown that up to five hundred genes change their output when a person makes positive lifestyle changes, such as improved diet, moderate exercise, meditation, and stress management.

The Biggest Obstacle: Mixed Messages
    If the mind has so much power, why do people feel powerless when they want to change? It’s a question of mixed messages being processed at the mind-body connection. Every overeater knows what it’s like to fight