What do weight loss and healing have to do with each other? Everything.
In America, we use words like "healing" when we talk about getting rid of asthma, arthritis and other diseases. But if we’re overweight, we don’t talk in terms of healing ourselves. We don’t say, "I’ve got this extra 30 pounds of bodyweight, so I really need to heal myself." However, being overweight is frequently said to lead to health problems – heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and others – as though excess weight itself is in some special category of its own.
This reveals the crucial misunderstanding in our culture – and points the way to a great and powerful secret (in fact, the only real secret) to permanent, genuine weight loss. That secret is that excess body weight comes from the same root cause as any other chronic, degenerative disease like heart disease, diabetes or cancer. They’re all signs of toxic, depleted biological terrain.
Before we look at the solution, we need to get a better picture of how this works.
One unified system
Your body is not just a machine of separate parts, where some parts can function perfectly while others just mysteriously start breaking down and going haywire. Your body is one, elegantly unified system. When any part is compromised, it means that the vitality of the whole body has been compromised. (Obvious exceptions to this model would be acute, virulent infections, acute toxic poisonings and so on.)
One cause of this deterioration is deprivation, the fact that the refined, processed, fragmented foods we eat don’t provide our bodies with the nutrients our cells and organs desperately require. The other cause is toxicity – the acidic wastes: amyloid, urea, indole, skatole, ammonia and so on – that gradually poison the entire biological terrain of the body.
Our cells, which "float" in a "sea" of extra-cellular fluid, are bathed in more and more of a swampy, stagnant sludge, instead of the clean "stream" they require to receive nutrition and carry away cellular wastes. The cells become weak and depleted.
When this deprivation and toxicity have gone on for a while, the entire organism loses vitality and starts breaking down, developing illnesses. Indeed, if most Americans cut out the stimulating substances they use to cattle prod themselves into a semblance of vitality – sugar, caffeine, refined starchy carbs, salt, red meat, nicotine – they’d quickly discover just how exhausted their bodies truly are.
Breaking down
Our bodies are incredibly resilient, but after enough of this gradual deterioration, things start breaking down. What breaks down is a complex matter, depending on genetics, lifestyle, emotional patterns and other variables. One person gets heart disease, another gets arthritis, while a third person gets excess body weight. Of course, most Americans have several chronic, degenerative diseases – gout, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, allergies. The list is endless.
Now we get to the good news: There is one and only one way to lose weight in a way that’s healthy, real and permanent. That is to build actual health – deep, whole-body health and rejuvenation. This is how you heal your obesity. You heal its actual cause. You cannot just reduce calories and lose weight in a healthy, lasting way. For your body to heal the systemic metabolic and hormonal imbalances behind your excess weight, you must feed your body’s starving cells, and you must clean house – deep, cellular cleansing. You must regenerate your body. Somewhere in us, we intuitively know this to be true.
The terrific thing about this "secret" is that, when you lose weight by creating this deep, authentic health, you get infinitely more benefits than just losing weight. You get radiant well-being! You get virtually boundless energy. You slow and even reverse much of the aging process. Your moods and thinking improve. You heal and prevent numerous other chronic, degenerative health problems. You save gazillions in medical expenses.
Yes, of course, exercise and stress reduction also are vital. But most fundamentally, the key is to transform how you eat – for good – to a diet of fresh, whole, rejuvenative foods. Your body is made of food. Food is the bottom line.
Getting cleaned up
This holistic understanding also shows us why, when people transform how they eat, some lose lots of weight very quickly, while others take five, even six months before the pounds come off. This is because healing obesity, like healing anything else, requires a lot from your body – lots of nutrients, lots of energy. As the average, run-down body starts getting cleaned up, it can’t suddenly heal every compromised organ or system at the same time. But the body has a magnificent innate intelligence. It "knows" exactly what most needs to be healed, and in what order.
Dropping excess pounds works in exactly this way. Don’t concentrate on some strange, compartmentalized thing called "losing weight." Simply concentrate on creating health. If you’re not losing weight by creating health, you’re losing weight through a disease process. And, to be sure, there are many varieties of disease processes that will make you lose weight. Sheer deprivation and acid toxicity (ketosis) are perennial favorites. But, with these approaches, either the weight comes right back on or you create (eventually) degenerative disease elsewhere in the body, or both.
Trust nature. Nature knows how to heal a cut on your finger, how to perfectly neutralize incoming pathogens and how to orchestrate about 10 million other mind-boggling processes. It knows exactly how to heal the conditions behind your excess weight. All you have to do is get out of the way – cooperate. Move your body a lot, cultivate a tranquil heart, and eat clean, fresh, whole, pure foods. Nature will easily and certainly take care of the rest.
Copyright © 2005 Mark Powell. All rights reserved.
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