By
John Roland Stahl
© MMVI
THE EVANESCENT PRESS
Introduction
By Lacky Pillpusher, M.D., Author of Drugs Will Make Me Rich, etc.
After the Author’s flippant remarks about the uselessness of a medical degree, at least with regard to weight loss programs, it is amusing to be invited to write some introductory remarks to this surprising little volume.
As the Author will be telling you himself, however, all of his suggestions make an appeal to Common Sense which will be very easy to understand. Having reviewed all of his suggestions from the view of a trained medical professional, I can verify that none of his suggestions are contrary to known medical knowledge, and, in fact, anyone following the program outlined in this volume will be as likely to achieve satisfactory results as they would from following any other weight loss program known to me.
However, a supplementary program of these little pills . . .
And Blah, Blah, Blah . . .
Chapter I
In Order To Lose Weight, You Must Eat Less.
No, I don’t have any medical degrees, or any other qualifications for writing this book. However, I need some extra money, and I figured that I’m pretty clever, and have some facility with words. A weight loss book is the easiest book to sell both to the general public and (for that very reason) to a publisher, and I actually have a lot of ideas that I think can be very useful for a serious weight loss program. The degree carrying medical professionals can’t seem to agree anyway, and, besides, their diets are all so arcane that you have to just accept them on faith – eat these obscure foods, and don’t eat those obscure foods, for complicated medical reasons which the layman is not expected to understand anyway, so just pay me your money, buy my book, and let me get back to my holiday in the South of France.
In contrast with that approach, all of my suggestions are intended to appeal directly to your Common Sense – you should be able to appreciate all of my suggestions as reasonable on their face, taking nothing on faith. In my arrogant opinion, I expect to lay out a program of eating habits that should actually cause you to lose all the weight you want, not gain it back, improve your overall health and happiness, make you feel good, and improve your sex life – all in one package – and save you money besides.
In order to lose weight, you must eat less. What? That wasn’t what you wanted to hear? OK, let’s start again –
In order to lose weight, there are many effective approaches. One very effective approach which will guarantee that you will lose as much weight as you please while promoting an improvement in overall health, is to eat plenty of deep fried foods – French Fries, potato chips, etc, with plenty of salt, washed down with Coca Cola. And remember, if you only eat one slice of cucumber instead of two, you might as well treat yourself to a big slice of New York Cheesecake, with sweet cherry topping.
No? Not buying that one? Well, here is something a bit more substantial –
So you think you want to lose weight? Actually, that is not really the issue at all, is it? What is really important is How You Feel About Yourself. Now, if you will just send $29.95 to the Author, we will send you a tape of subliminal messages that you can play while you sleep. Just pop the little speaker under your pillow at night, and you will be wafted to a gentle sleep while you learn to understand that you are Not Really Overweight At All – in fact, most men actually prefer a woman with a bit of meat on her bones, and you are actually just the ideal form and figure for optimum health and happiness, Just The Way You Are. OK, if you are a man, most women, or men, whatever you’re into – they all want you Just The Way You Are Right Now.
But if neither of those approaches will pass muster, then we are reduced to fall back upon our original thesis, that if you want to lose weight, you must eat less.
This is not a frivolous suggestion. I actually have some very specific suggestions which may help you to accomplish this objective of eating less. But first, let me review the causes of excess weight (we certainly don’t refer to it, in these polite pages, as Obesity.) Some very small percentage of people are overweight due to some organic problem – a specifically medical problem unrelated to eating habits. In spite of my glaring lack of qualified medical credentials, I will actually tackle this very subject, with all suitable disclaimers, of course – I think I know more about this anyway than all those fancy doctors. Even if you have a specific medical problem, I can advise you how to overcome it and lose weight anyway – but all of this is for a later Chapter.
Next, there are those whose problem with excessive weight gain is caused by eating the wrong foods. This, of course, is the usual stuff of weight loss books, and I will not neglect this topic, but, again, it is the subject for a later Chapter.
So now I take up the problem of Why Are You Eating Too Much, Anyway? Let us look at some of the more common reasons –
First on the list is the issue of Food As A Substitute for Love And/Or Sex. Many people are aware of this phenomenon consciously. Others are aware of this subconsciously. And some people, hard to believe, are actually not aware of this at all. There you are – not enough love (and/or sex) in your life, so what do you do? You Eat, Eat, Eat. Now, the solution to this situation is rather obvious, isn’t it? The old Freudian school of psychology held that you merely need to become aware of the underlying dynamic of your problem in order to solve the issue and move forward, onwards and upwards, to greater and better things, and health and happiness will follow you all the days of your life. Well, you need to become aware of the underlying dynamic, and then do something about it, if I may somewhat modify the old Freudian approach.
So let’s not mince words here – if you are stuffing your face with chocolates because you’re not getting enough – well, you need to get some. Love is most effective, of course, but, in a pinch, plain old sex will actually do the trick just as well, at least as far as your weight loss program is concerned. Nobody loves you? Not a problem. In fact, as far as losing weight goes, you will find that loving other people is even more effective than other people loving you. It should be relatively easy to find someone to love. If you are a young woman, all you have to do is stop fighting them off – just let some of them in (OK, just one of them will do, if you have the old fashioned style – sorry if you find my breezy style too scandalous, but I’m just trying to sell books, here, after all.)
If you are an older woman, try a young man – young men are usually ready to provide the services you require, and are actually better suited to the task than most older men. There are so many available young men out there that it really shouldn’t be hard to find one. In fact, here is your perfect come-on line – “Hello there, honey. I’m actually pursuing a weight-loss program, and the author of this book suggests that I need to get a little action so that I can forget about food for a while. So, if you’re into it, I’m ready to make myself available for you as often as you want. So, what do you say? Shall we get a bottle of wine and go up to my place? Bring your friends.” (Sorry – I’m just suggesting the general idea here and trying to be amusing at the same time, but you can modify the approach to suit your personal style.)
If you are a young man trying to lose some weight, and you are too dorky or ugly or stupid to get a get a really fine young woman, you can always go for an older woman – single older women are very often surprisingly ready for a hook up with a potent young man who offers no complications, and just wants to pursue his weight loss program with a suitable partner.
If you are an older man – well, unless you are rich, who wants an old man, anyway? You might as well eat those Cheesecakes and French Fries and stop worrying about it. Life is short, and you can’t have everything.
Moving right along, let us look at some other strategies for eating less.
Here are two very simple but very effective strategies for eating less –
In the first place, there is the problem of feeling those hunger pangs. When you are used to eating plenty of food, as soon as you cut down at all, you will feel that pang in your stomach that is sending urgent messages to your brain that you want more food going on. Here, it is all a matter of interpretation of those electrical impulses surging through your pointed little head. Here is the way to think about it – you are only losing weight when you feel those hunger pangs. If you can get that idea going on, then you can turn it all around – whenever you find yourself “enjoying” hunger pangs, that is the time, the only time, in which your body is actually LOSING WEIGHT. Once you get that notion implanted in your feeble brain, then you will not only be able to endure those hunger pangs, but rejoice in them.
I want to emphasize that, so I could either repeat that idea several times in different ways, or you could simply read that paragraph over several times – it will accomplish the same thing, and I want to move on, anyway.
So read that paragraph over a few times until You Actually Get It. Learn to rejoice in that delicious feeling of being Hungry. It means you are losing weight.
Next, there is another idea of very practical value. In fact, I think I will start a new Chapter to celebrate this new idea.
Chapter II
Don’t Eat When You Are Not Hungry.
Don’t eat when you are not hungry. At first grab, this idea may sound as frivolous as the idea of the preceding Chapter, but my whole point is that the issue of excessive weight gain is not rocket science – it is a matter of Common Sense.
The issue here is a very simple one and a very common one. Most people start eating, and then they go on eating until they are no longer hungry. Wrong. That is a Big Mistake. Here is one of the most useful ideas I have to offer, right here. Take a look, briefly, at the physiology of hunger – “Hunger” is basically a learned phenomenon – your body goes through its various trips and, from time to time, it gives off these “Feed Me” vibes that basically require you to stuff food into your stomach at regular intervals. When your “stomach clock” goes off, you feel hungry, and your body is craving food. This is a physiological response that you really cannot control. What you can control is the way you respond to these demands.
As we learned in the last Chapter, you only lose weight when you are experiencing hunger pangs, so you might be tempted simply to ignore the urgent messages of your body, and glory in the hunger pangs that are slimming you down while you watch. But that isn’t a friendly way of dealing with the issue, and I have a better suggestion.
The key is understanding the time delay between your feeding activities and your “hunger response.” The way your body works (unfortunately) is that once you are in “feeding mode” your body is going to continue sending out “Feed Me” signals until long past the time when you have actually had enough food. So here is the solution: When your body sends out its “Feed Me” messages, you should respond to it by supplying food – but only a carefully measured amount. The problem is that you might eat what you know to be enough food, a reasonable and modest amount, yet your body goes right on sending out that insistent “Feed Me” business. So here is the way I trick my body. I don’t say, “Just forget it, food-brain. That’s all you’re getting. I’ve given you plenty of food for now, so just take a walk.” Oh, no. That’s not the way to deceive a hungry food-brain. What you do is say, sweetly, “Oh, my dear food-brain – I am merrily feeding away over here, and it is all just lovely. Presently I will be feeding you some more, but I am going to take a short break for right now. In a short time, I will resume the feeding, so, not to worry. I’m just taking a very short break –just hang in there.” And then you get up from the table, fully intending to eat another whole plate of food, but just “not yet.” You must find some distraction – argue politics and the state of the world, or the spiritual crisis of the Modern Predicament with your companions, or spend half an hour in your garden, pruning your fragrant roses, fully intending to return to the table for another session of gorging yourself on more food. In order for this ploy to work, you have to retain the conviction that you are just taking a short break – if your food-brain ever gets the notion that you are not actually intending to return to the feed trough, you are in trouble. So it is imperative to retain the fiction that you are just taking a short break.
Well, you see where I’m going with this. After about half an hour, to your amazement, you will not feel any more hunger pangs. In fact, the whole “Feed Me” hunger thing will have passed on. Oh, well, just put away the food, and that’s that – another round won for the home team.
This cycle has to be experienced consciously to be believed. But it is a fact – if you take a moderate amount of food and then “wait a while” before “finishing” your meal, you will discover that you don’t actually need or want any more food right now, after all.
Chapter III
You’re Eating the Wrong Foods.
OK, here is what most people would consider the heart of the diet – what do you actually Eat, anyway? You are what you eat, so you might as well select your diet very consciously.
The diet I recommend has the following advantages –
1. You will lose weight.
2. You will enjoy better health.
3. You will feel great.
4. You will look great.
5. You will save money on food.
6. Meals will taste better to you.
7. You sex life will be improved. (I’m not kidding. I’m not just trying to sell books here.)
I could almost make this Chapter really short – nothing here is going to be news to anyone who has read any of the most obvious dietary recommendations of the last twenty years.
OK – low fat, high fiber, fresh fruits and vegetables, less salt, less sugar, fewer processed foods – is any of this news, yet? Let’s get specific – Low Fat. Just completely trash all deep fried foods from your diet. No more French Fries, potato chips, tempura, bacon, fried clams, fish and chips – just scratch all that off the list as bad juju.
Next to go is processed foods. Processed foods are the biggest scam going. You may pay the highest possible prices for the flimsiest food-stuffs imaginable. Half the time they even advertise their products as Low Calorie, which simply means that all the nutritional value is long gone, and you are just paying for expensively packaged fluff and chemicals, from which all nutritionally valuable components have been systematically removed, to be used in other food products. Disgusting. Criminal. (Clever? One man’s cleverness is another man’s stupidity.)
Now eliminate all coffee, tea, and “soft drinks.” By “soft drinks” is usually meant carbonated beverages. Here is a bit of a digression, but all those funny little bubbles are carbon dioxide, which only encourage and support all the anti-life aspects of your bodily organism. Carbon dioxide supports viruses, AIDS, cancer, and all manner of diseases. What you want in your body and your lungs is fresh air from the mountains, full of fresh Oxygen, not carbon dioxide. For the same reason, you have to give up Smoking. If you think that all you need to do is take enough ginseng, or whatever, and you will live forever, you are dreaming. Before you even bother to take anything good into your life, you must first give up all the harmful substances, activities, and practices. (“Do no harm.”) Smoking is the dumbest practice known to medical science, short of bungee jumping without a bungee cord. Filling your lungs with smoke on a regular basis is about the dumbest thing you can do to your health. The function of your lungs is to transpire oxygen into your bloodstream, to be carried throughout your body. To coat your lungs with a foul layer of smoke and tar is just way beyond stupid. If you can’t quit smoking, you might as well sniff glue, or drink some turpentine, and be done with it quickly. (Drinking turpentine will kill you very quickly.)
So there are some of the negatives – clear out all that junk from your diet. It is more important to eliminate the toxins than it is to introduce good healthy food into your system. But, if you give up your doughnuts, your bacon, and your French Fries, what are you supposed to eat, anyway?
Well, here I run into the problem that I know most of my readers just are not up to the level of eating good food. For me, it is the most natural thing in the world to have a $350 flour mill in my kitchen, with stone wheels, and a motor that carefully grinds slowly so as not to over-heat the flour. I buy 50 pound bags of fresh, organic wheat berries, that are still alive – in fact, I frequently sprout them, whether I am making wheat grass, sprouted wheat bread, or just salad sprouts. These wheat berries I grind up fresh daily, on the spot, whenever I want to bake bread or make fresh pancakes or pastries. Why is everyone content to eat dead white flour that has been milled up months ago, and been sitting on shelves in a warehouse in Kansas until the pasty junk is completely worthless? You know why they take all of the nutritional components out of flour, right? Shelf life. If the wheat germ were to be retained in flour, it would go rancid within a matter of hours. There is just no way to retain the living virtues of flour beyond a matter of a few hours. So they nuke the stuff, wiping out all nutritional value, and then they add a chemical blend of “fortifiers” which are intended to restore a certain amount of nutritional value back to the flour. Why? Why on earth are people content to eat this stuff? If your life and health is important to you in any way, go out and buy one of those really nice flour mills and then buy your wheat berries by the 50 pound bag – fresh, living, and organic. It is actually much cheaper that way. You can order full bags of organic wheat berries from your local health food store, and the purchase of the flour mill will be the best purchase you ever made, as far as your health is concerned.
OK, go ahead and buy a bread machine – but don’t think that a bread machine is of any value without that flour mill. It all starts with the fresh flour. With fresh flour, you can make the best pancakes you ever had. You don’t need to buy a package mix. Can’t you add an egg on your own? You can buy an egg beater for $10 anywhere, so what’s the big deal? A little baking powder (or baking soda and yogurt), a little olive oil, or hemp seed oil (no cholesterol, no saturated fats), you don’t need the salt. – and you are ready to make better pancakes, at a fraction of the price of any package mix of stale white flour and chemicals.
Next, lay in a supply of other bulk foods – brown sesame seeds (please don’t get those blanched, dead old things that are all white, with all the nutritional value long gone), sunflower seeds, flax seeds, soy beans, brown rice, rolled oats – all of this stuff can be obtained through your health food store by the big bag – it doesn’t cost much more to insist on all organic food, and it is much better tasting and much better for your health.
Next, you need to get a selection of fresh fruits and vegetables (ideally, of course, you will simply go out into your organic garden and select what you need for the day), and you are in business, ready to cook up highly nutritious and good tasting foods, at a fraction of the price of prepared foods.
Then there is the issue of meat – I eat lots of tofu (with nutritional yeast – a really wonderful substance – wonderfully nutritious and delicious – the poor man’s cheese, yet it is healthy and wonderful in every respect – why is it only known to health food faddists and old hippies? Look for it – big yellow flakes of “nutritional yeast” available at most health food stores. It is high in B vitamins, tastes great, and will keep you healthy.) I am not a complete vegetarian, but whether you eat small amounts of meat or none at all, at least scale back from the steak and sausage breakfasts every morning. Bacon is something I eliminated from my diet many, many years ago.
I still eat cheese, but I am not proud of it, or recommending it – I just love cheese, and have a hard time giving it up. I know that, on a theoretical basis, there is not much to choose from over meat, so I would have to recommend limiting your cheese consumption, if you want to live forever. Eggs, on the other hand, I think are good food – true, there seems to be a cholesterol issue, but there is also the lecithin in the eggs which moderates the effect of it, so if you are able to get farm fresh eggs (you do keep your own chickens, right?) you should be OK with eggs.
As to the issue of butter or margarine or dry bread, I choose butter. Margarine is just worse than butter (go do the research), and I just can’t handle dry bread, so I think a moderate amount of butter is just one of life’s little luxuries. Actually, you might try substituting hemp seed oil for butter, for the premium solution.
As to other nutritional ideas – steamed vegetables are always better than boiled or fried, and a fast sauté is not a bad compromise once in a while. Fresh ginger is a miracle food – cheap, delicious, and medically active – the poor man’s ginseng. I use fresh chopped ginger in everything I cook, along with fresh, organic sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds. Instead of trying to buy flax seed oil in expensive brown refrigerated bottles, in which they desperately try to keep the flax seed oil fresh and useful (instead of rancid and actually toxic instead of health-promoting), there is no better way of obtaining the freshest flax seed oil than by getting it fresh from the living seed. Add the fresh, organic, living seed directly to your stir-fries or anything else you care to cook, or add a spoonful of flax seed (and/or sesame seed) directly to the wheat berries you are grinding up for fresh breads or pastries. In that way you will get the benefit of the freshest source of the seed oils, and, incidentally, it will be at the lowest possible price. What a combination.
Another miracle food is fresh, raw garlic. It purifies the blood, which is a pretty good deal. If you can’t quite handle raw garlic, at least add the garlic very close to the end of cooking your food, so it will still have some virtue left.
Do you see the drift? All the best food ideas also end up being the cheapest. When you get the freshest, living bulk foods, you pay a tiny fraction of what you would pay for dead, lifeless, artificial alternatives made into processed “convenience” foods. It is so simple to steam up a batch of fresh, organic vegetables and tofu which you serve over brown rice – the best and healthiest food you can eat, at a tiny fraction of the price of a prepared pizza – and, lest we forget, eating this way will give you radiant health without any tendency at all to gain weight.
Drink plenty of water (or perhaps green tea), and study pranayama yoga, to fill your lungs with lots of fresh oxygen.
You will look better, feel better, live longer – and just wait ’til you see what it does to your sex life! If you eat good food and nothing but good food (including, especially, lots of sunflower seeds – raw, not cooked in oil and salt), you won’t need the assistance of any pharmaceutical drugs.
Chapter IV
I Don’t Eat Too Much – I Just Have A Medical Condition.
OK, I said I was going to address the issue of those people who think they just have some “medical excuse” for being overweight.
Right away I have to make a disclaimer. I don’t know what your medical issues are. I am going to make some arm chair pronouncements (ex cathedra), but I am going to have to issue this disclaimer – since I don’t know your particular medical condition, I have to advise you to consult a “qualified medical doctor” (if you can find any) before acting upon any of my suggestions here. You might discuss my suggestions with your doctor, and if you don’t like what you hear, seek a second opinion. I don’t have a lot of faith in medical doctors anyway – mostly they just prescribe pharmaceutical drugs (the ones that are advertised to them by the chemical industry – it’s easy to be a doctor: once you get that Medical Degree, every morning’s mail will be full of instructions from the pharmaceutical drug companies about what you should be prescribing to your patients), and most of those drugs are deadly. It is pretty much common knowledge that you are better off avoiding any and all pharmaceutical drugs – and don’t go to a hospital unless you are going there to die. If you must see a “doctor” I would recommend seeing a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) doctor before trusting your life to the chemical potions of the typical allopathic medical doctor.
Here is my take on the medical profession –
Typical Western medicine just treats symptoms, whereas at least some of the Eastern medical efforts are directed at the root causes of disease, rather than just the symptoms. It doesn’t make any sense to me that, when you find yourself bothered by some unwelcome symptom, you simply attempt to bludgeon your system into meek submission through the use of pharmaceutical drugs, no matter how profitable it may be to the medical community. (OK, the grammatical logic there was a bit “literary,” but perhaps you get the drift.)
So, to bring the discussion back to your weight problem, I think there is an element of bovine mud going on here. If your body is all out of whack so that you are gaining weight, never mind taking all those expensive chemical drugs that are only hastening your slide into the grave, while making the pharmaceutical companies rich. They really don’t care about your health – they just want to take your money.
There is a class of Chinese herbs that are called major tonic herbs. The principle is the same for all of them – all of these “tonic herbs” tend to normalize all of your bodily functions, and restore your system to balance in every way. By contrast, the pharmaceutical drugs simply throw your body even further out of whack than it was before you began assaulting your body with all of those drugs.
I have experimented with a recipe for an herbal tea that I call “Tono Bungay” after the book by H.G. Wells about a man who invents a tonic health drink and makes a fortune marketing it. I used a very simple concept, against which any Chinese doctor would surely react in horror. The Chinese doctor, like his Western counterpart, wants to earn his living, after all, so when you go to him for a Consultation, he needs to mystify you with his occult knowledge, and prescribe a particular mix of special herbs that will be specifically directed to your particular collection of complaints and needs. He may be forgiven this approach, since it is understood that, like a lawyer, his stock in trade is mystification and confusion, and he is just trying to feed his children.
I simply studied the list of “tonic herbs” and found that most of them tended to the same end – that of restoring the entire system to balance and harmony. I carefully distinguish the “tonic herbs” from the others – the simple difference is that the “tonic herbs” are all good – they all bring the body closer to that center of balance and harmony that is the hallmark of perfect health. In contrast to this, the other herbs all have side effects – they may accomplish some particular medical objective, but they do so in a heavy handed way, usually with side effects, if the treatment be continued for very long. An example of this is the poison which you take to kill the parasites in your stomach. The poison may kill the parasites, and then perhaps your body can recover from the assault of the poison, but the treatment is essentially a toxic one. The tonic herbs, on the other hand, are “all good.” You can take them continuously with no harmful side effects. They are more of a food than a medicine.
So I had the bright idea of simply mixing up a tea of all of the best herbs. Here is my list – Ginseng, Astragalus, Chinese Licorice, Fo-ti, Lycium Chinensis, Schizandra, Jujube, Gingko, Ginger, Cinnamon, Orange and Lemon peel. I purchase all these herbs from Chinatown in San Francisco, and then mix up a portion of each of them in a pot and simmer them into a tea. Here is my report – first of all, the tea tastes wonderful. It is so rich in flavor that I can hardly believe it. I love it. I want to set up a tea house somewhere just to offer this tea concoction of mine (along with red hibiscus tea – “Roselle,” and also black tea flavored with fragrant roses – I have a particular variety of fragrant rose in mind, which I don’t reveal, since it is worth a fortune to someone some day). Secondly, I always felt a very definite beneficial effect from this tea. This effect was not subtle, but a very powerful jolt. Of course, when I would brew this tea, I would usually drink a lot of it, and strongly brewed – and I like strong flavors and strong effects. I would drink this tea every day for about a week. I always felt powerfully rejuvenated from drinking this tea. So, if an erudite Chinese medical doctor is going to react with horror, as if to suggest that it is “way too simple” to just mix up all the best tonic herbs and drink the tea, well, he is welcome to his professional position – if it were that simple, then who needs the services of the doctor, anyway? And who will buy all of the other obscure herbs in the pharmacopoeia, anyway?
So, I’m writing this book because I have ideas of my own which I want to introduce, and here I am doing it, and any horrified doctors, Eastern or Western, be damned – but remember my disclaimer, and please consult your choice of titled and credentialed medical doctor before taking any “medical” advice of mine.
So, what was I talking about, anyway? I was talking about those persons who feel they have a “right” to be overweight because they have some obscure medical condition that allows them to be so. My position is that anyone who really wants to can heal himself. Your own body has very powerful healing capabilities, and all you have to do is change the mind-set – no, you don’t need to feel that you have any “right” to be overweight because of your obscure medical condition. Heal yourself – and by this I mean not only a program of my Chinese tonic herbs, but also good food, exercise, a healthy and positive attitude, yoga, breathing exercises, absolutely no caffeine tea, coffee, tobacco, or other poisons, and plenty of good love and sex in your life. All of these activities are directed to the same end as the Chinese tonic herbs – the centering of your life force back to a place of balance, clarity, and harmony, at which point you will enjoy radiant health, long life, and good looks – and your body weight will normalize with the rest of it.
By the way – if you have some really serious diseases ravaging your body, do not go to the medical doctors. Most serious diseases (cancer, HIV, hepatitis, etc.) can be more effectively cured with oxygen therapy than with pharmaceutical drugs. Just remember that the medical industry has no interest in curing anyone – “a patient cured is a customer lost.”
Conclusion
It's all in your head
Most of my ideas here follow the same general pattern – there is a concept of health which is not piecemeal, but all of a piece – a unified Whole. Holistic medicine is all about dealing with the entire organism all at once, and not as the accumulation of your separate parts. So, if there is any aspect of your being that is out of balance, it will be reflected in other aspects of your being, both physical as well as mental or energetic. Being overweight is just one of those indications that your body, your life, is not in perfect balance. You can correct an imbalance by treating the fundamental imbalance wherever it manifests.
What this means is that if your body is overweight, you can deal with it by a carefully restricted dietary regimen, or you could take a course of yoga meditation or breathing exercises, or you could find a new lover, or climb a mountain, or manipulate your psychic energies with colors and flowers. The theory is that any or all of these approaches will tend to accomplish the same end to the degree that they are effective at all – that of bringing your whole body, life, and soul into harmony and balance. The closer you get to this point, the better everything will become in your life – you will be happier, more successful, less stressed; your personal affairs will prosper; your skin will achieve a radiant and healthy glow; your sex life will be rejuvenated; and your body weight will normalize to an appropriate level for your size.
Or, you could just eat less.
