The Thought Diet

Consider that every time you get upset, frustrated or feel any negative emotion at all your body reacts as if there was an impending danger. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a real threat like a bear running after you and you being angry at yourself for gaining five pounds. Physiological stress and psychological stress both stimulate a “fight or flight” response which results in a release of Cortisol (among other chemicals), which is a hormone that stimulates the mobilization of blood sugar. This blood sugar was designed to give you energy during your flight or fight ordeal.

This extra energy is great if you use it for fight or flight but if you are stuck in traffic and are upset or you are looking in the mirror and feeling insecure you create the same stress response but have no real need for the energy. If you have no real need for it your body will just store it as fat.

Now let’s say that every time you stress out about your body (for example, you feel disappointment) you produce 20 calories worth of blood sugar. Not a huge number considering you are producing energy to help you with your impending danger. Would 20 calories be enough for you to escape danger (remember, the part of your brain that is reacting to stress doesn’t know the difference between you being stressed out mentally or if you have a real impending danger–it’s going to respond the same way)?

Now consider that you have 2,000 to 10,000 thoughts a day (most of which you don’t consciously pay attention to) and let’s say 5000 is the average. Is it possible that you think about your body, which is the center of our physical experience and the main way in which you relate to the world, at least 1% of the time? This would be 50 thoughts about your body in one day. It could be when you are in the shower, getting dressed, going to the bathroom, looking in the mirror, seeing your reflection anywhere, putting your seatbelt on, standing in line, seeing someone attractive and in shape, being with your partner, sitting in a chair, eating food, getting undressed, etc. If it is possible for you to have 50 thoughts a day that reflect how you feel about your body (negatively) and you are unaware to most of those thoughts (thoughts that create an emotional response that you no longer notice) and each of those thoughts creates 20 calories of blood sugar that doesn’t get used, you can see how quickly having a negative perspective would create up to 1000 extra calories that your body produced and didn’t use.

I am not saying this is exactly the way it works or that these are the actual amounts but it should give you some perspective as to how much we might be working against ourselves when we think negative thoughts. If you were even at half of this amount is it possible to see and understand why your body is where it is?

Just understanding that your thoughts have contributed to your current body and health should be enough to help you ease up about where your current body and health is. It is most likely a reflection of how you have been thinking. If this is the case, imagine what kind of body you would have (as a reflection) if you change your thinking to something more positive–like what it is you DO WANT, instead of focusing on the problem, which is what you DON’T WANT.

If you learned you were eating something you didn’t know was full of unwanted calories you would not be surprised that you were in your current predicament with your body. You would simply chalk it up to a learning experience and move on to make the appropriate corrections. This is the same thing here. Most people don’t understand how much their thoughts have an effect on their body. I give you permission to claim ignorance on this one and let your self off the hook for being where you are. Now move on and figure out what your current body has helped you to determine you now want. From what you don’t want arose the desire for something new, an improvement. Figure out what that is an give you undivided attention to that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.