Sounds silly, right? But think of it this way…if your doctor says you’ve got hypertension, he figured that out by taking a reading off a blood pressure cuff. If he says you’ve got diabetes, he came to that conclusion from looking at your lab findings which displayed a number in the “Glucose” row of your lab report (among other readings). So, much like these other objective measurements, your bodyweight is more of a sign or symptom of a bodily process which has gotten somewhat out of control DUE TO BEHAVIORS YOU ARE REPEATING.
Granted, there are cases of high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity which are due to causes other than lifestyle and behavior patterns, but these are in the vast minority of all cases and may require dedicated medical attention. In most cases obsessing on the numbers is not an efficient or productive method of achieving results; utilize them as a measuring tool to be checked periodically to assess long-term progress. Rather, the symptom of weight gain is a direct result of a software system (your brain and nervous system) which has been corrupted or even hijacked, and can no longer effectively instruct the hardware (your body) how to implement its instructions.The hacker or virus responsible for the corruption can take several forms, but the software glitch always comes back to the brain.
So what does this mean in real-life terms?
If you are struggling with achieving successful weight management, here are the three basic take-aways from this part of the discussion:
1. It’s not your fault.
2. It’s not your fault.
3. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!!
Why is is not your fault? If you booted up your computer one morning, and found that you had been infected with a virus, who would you blame?
1. Yourself – for pressing the power button?
2. Your computer…which had absolutely no control over the infection process?
3. Your internet service provider, who had absolutely no control over the content of the information received by your computer?
4. How about your security system, who’s job it is to keep out those bits of information which are capable of altering the function of your software and hardware which reduce their performance?
OK, so we’ve concluded that somewhere along the line, your system has been hacked or infected. Those mental processes and physiologocal functions which, in health, so beautifully choreograph the inner relationship between the brain’s signals, and the body’s implementation of those orders have been corrupted. For the purposes of this discussion on weight management, the changes in code mean you now have a difficult time realizing when you are satieted, or what foods you need to reach for in order to fuel your body, and those feedback loops are disrupted. You now follow the new, corrupt instructions and carry out behaviors which are counterproductive to maintaining weight, and health overall.
The two most obvious questions are:
1. What are the viruses or who are the hackers? We need answers to this question in order to cure the virus and/or bring the hacker to justice.
2. What actions will we take to clean out the system and insure it is protected going forward?
The answers to these 2 questions will take us a long way toward starting fresh in a clean system, and insuring the correct code is in place to insure attainment and maintenance of proper weight and optimal health.
Answer #1: Now, just as a computer hacker and the viruses they may transmit have access to your computer system via well-defined portals and pathways, the “viruses” which infect your brain/body systems have their favorite portals as well….and the most common is your gut. Your digestive tract is the conduit across which most invaders get access to the rest of your system – it acts a a filter to allow nutrients and fuels into your system to keep the machine running properly, and to keep out those invaders who would do harm to the operation. In health, this is performed admirably.
However, if processes occur which degrade the integrity of the gut, needed nutrients may not make it across, and worse yet, invaders may be let through. It’s these invaders which are the corrupters of the system, and they take the form of gluten, certain proteins found in dairy and soy, breakdown remnants of bacteria and other pathogens which inhabit the gut, as well as the presence of one or more subclinical infections usually not uncovered by standard testing. Once these make it past the filter, they have the opportunity to express their direct effects on brain processes, the hormonal system, and a myriad of other structures and processes occuring throughout the body. Gluten, for instance, has been shown in research to bind to the very same receptors in the brain which bind to opiates and release endorphins to make you feel good. At this point, after this cascade has been initiated, you have less and less control over your behaviors, including what and how much you eat…which brings us back full circle to my earlier statement – “It’s not your fault!”
Answer #2: Now that we know the mechanisms, how do we fix the faults and reboot the system with new, correct code? This requires the understanding of one more step, without which progess usually stalls, and it involves a hormonal system in your body known as the adrenal system. This can get quite complicated, but in short, the gut can only become compromised and attacked after the adrenal system has been exhausted or at least significantly stressed. So, here’s the plan – we first assess and fix the adrenal system to return to optimal function (complicated again, but this actually resets the adrenal/brain axis, thereby rewriting this portion of the code); once done, we test the gut for guilty pathogens, kill those which we find (usually through natural products and treatment), and finally help heal the GI tract, again with natural protocols.
No…this is definitely not your shake, pill, fad diet, or calorie-counting program. By the way, if you wonder why these types of programs usually fail long-term, or help lose weight which is quickly regained, you should see the reasons by now…you’ve forced your computer to work for a short while in Safe Mode (if you know MS Windows, you’ll know what I mean), but this is not a long-term solution, nor does it do anything to rewrite the needed code. So, if you’re lucky or stong enough to reach your goal weight, your internal mechanisms will sooner or later respond again to the unchanged instructions and cause rebound. It requires you to take responsibility for your actions and credit for your successes, but once you are “rebooted”, you have the tools to maintain lifelong weight and health management, and even “tune yourself up” as needed. Putting this into practice with patients is a simple process, easily followed, and extremely rewarding…for both patient and doctor…and don’t be surprised if some other symptoms you may never have thought about in relation to weight loss improve or disppear entirely as well. While we may currently be focusing on weight loss, we are treating the whole person in the process.
For further information on required testing or the workings of the weight management program, contact Dr. Kusher at the Kusher Functional Medicine Center located in South Windsor, CT at
(860) 644-2437, visit his website at www.drkusher.com, or email him at drkusher@drkusher.com.