have shown that drinking large amounts of sugar-sweetened beverages can not only increase the risk of gaining weight but also of developing Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and gout.3 Over a couple of months, that one shift helped Reena remove fifteen pounds she’d been dragging around since graduate school six years earlier.
Adapted from Rick Hanson, “Mindfulness in Clinical Practice,” paper delivered at the Northern California Psychiatric Society’s Integrative Psychiatry Conference, Berkeley, CA, Sept. 10, 2011.
Are you concerned that a more controlled approach to food and cooking might leave you feeling miserable? Researchers at the University of Chicago suggest just the opposite. They found that the psychic effects of taking this kind of control can actually make you happier.6 The fact that you no longer have to struggle with yourself about what you should do—now that you’re automatically making the right choices—simplifies your life and makes you feel proud. We could call this the framework effect: Having an explicit program to hang on to and return to can quiet down the anxiety that extra choices provoke. I’ll provide plenty of tips and suggestions in chapter 5 to help make the transition to anti-inflammatory foods satisfying and simple, and I’ll offer meal plans and recipes in part 3.
I’ll also guide you through some meditation and imagery that allows you to let go of the negative self-talk that plagues every person in Negative Feedback mode. These harsh words are what I think of as the “evil eye”—the negative specters of danger or worry that can cloud your psyche, even when you’re not aware of them. Your continued meditation practice will start to increase the power of your brain’s prefrontal cortex (PFC), the area of your brain that helps you stay on task and modulate your emotions. If you tend to be absentminded or short-tempered, it can be a sign that your prefrontal cortex isn’t as healthy as it could be. Not only does this PFC weakness lead to emotional reactivity; in addition, by not helping to temper your sympathetic nervous system, your weak PFC may speed your aging.
However, once you’ve been doing your Positive Feedback program for a week or two, you may find that you’re becoming less emotionally reactive, less impulsive, and more focused. That’s a sign that you’ve begun to take possession of that magic moment between stimulus and reaction—that moment that is the portal to the Adaptive Response. If you can choose to remain neutral and nonreactive in those split seconds, you’ll more easily make the choices that keep you in the positive.
RADIATE
The Radiate phase involves discovering the full realization of who you were meant to be: your dreams, your passions. With your pain out of the way, important life goals begin to light you from within. Now that you’ve made it through the cleansing action of the vegetable-focused Release program, your palate is ready for more fruits, lean meats and goat’s-milk yogurt (and other proteins), and occasional grains. Rather than start a vigorous exercise program just for vanity’s sake, one that might throw you back into an inflammatory state, work on developing an individualized fitness approach that helps strengthen your ever-broadening sense of connection with the world.
Maybe you’ll take up overnight backpacking; maybe you’ll schedule a long-distance biking trip; maybe you’ll sign up for a trip to Machu Picchu or a 5K run to benefit a charity you feel strongly about. No matter what kind of exercise you select, you’ll reap the benefits of exercise’s ability to increase your body’s supply of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). This miracle protein not only creates new brain cells and increases brain volume but also helps regulate blood sugar and encourage cardiovascular health, particularly by helping to further strengthen your parasympathetic nervous system.7
Once you get to the Radiate stage, you will spend much more of your time consciously basking in the beauty of your life, sinking deep into it. Training yourself to really key into the experience will help to counteract any negative conditioning you’ve experienced. Drawing on the skills you developed in the Reflect stage, you’ll be mindful of shifts in your mood and take care to thoroughly drench yourself in the neurochemical bliss that’s triggered by happy moments. The neurotransmitters that are released with success and happiness—endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine—will help you develop the inner strength, self-confidence, resilience, and determination to go out and achieve other goals.
As you become more mindful of how you feel, you develop your ability for meta-cognition—in other words, for thinking about how you think.
You’re able to be reflective and self-aware in every moment, without it feeling awkward or navel-gazey. True self-awareness, no longer being
divorced from your feelings, will allow you to feel and experience new pain right away, before it can take root in your body. You will start to see what patterns make your body and your mind feel stronger, cleaner, healthier—and which ones leave you feeling trapped in the negative. You’ll be living in the positive and thriving.