Stress Management

Losing That Extra Weight

Strategies for Successful Slimming

BITs for Weight Loss

Chopra recommends that you follow the BITs instead of or in conjunction with a calorie-cutting diet. Your excess weight is caused not just by what you've been eating but by how you've been eating it-carelessly or compulsively, on the run instead of sitting down, between meals instead of at regular hours. These are simple things, of course, but they make a big difference. 

Leaving aside the very small minority who actually have a hormone or metabolic problem, most overweight people, according to Chopra, are the victims of conditioning-bad habits that have been unconsciously built into their bodies over time. Everyone's body has the intelligence to know the right amount to eat; nature gave us the hunger reflex to tell us when our bodies want food and its opposite, the satiation reflex, to tell us when our stomachs are satisfied. People who have lost these instincts have surrendered an important aspect of their body's intelligence. They eat like machines, switched on by automatic cues-the sight and smell of food, or just the thought of it. But by following the BITS they can return to "conscious eating," guided by the body's inner intelligence. 

Besides overeating, other abuses at the table can suppress our healthy instincts for eating. If you consume a meal while feeling angry, according to Ayurveda, you are producing mental ama from your food. (A Western physician would say that a stress reaction is throwing off your endocrine balance.) The end result is the same, a damaging chemical message going straight to your cells. So, pay attention to what you eat, how you eat it and when and where you eat it. That is the wisdom from the mind-body connection and is a powerful technique to control your weight.

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