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is a physical projection of your story.
    •  Your story consists of your experiences and how you process them, physically and mentally.
    •  If you are overweight, your story probably reflects negative themes about food, eating, and body image.
    •  Before you change your story, you should know some facts about the mind-body connection. Knowledge is power.
    •  To activate the mind-body connection, state your conscious goals to yourself. This is the most powerful message you can send to your body.
    At this moment you and I, even though we’re complete strangers, are doing the same thing. We are living out our life stories. The biggest part of everyone’s story could be titled “How I Make Myself Happy.” Every story contains the same goal, because even if person A is playing professional football in order toreach the Super Bowl, person B is commuting to work every day, and person C is raising two small children at home, those differences disappear before the overriding aim to be happy as best we can.
    You can change your story so that one chapter will read, “How I Lost All the Weight I Wanted To (and Kept It Off, Thank You).” Now, every story has themes that run through it, and presently your themes around food and eating are probably negative. When I talk to overweight patients, the same themes repeat themselves, often for decades. Any of this sound familiar?
    •  “I’ve tried everything and read all kinds of diet books, but nothing has worked. I might as well give up.”
    •  “I must be genetically programmed to be overweight.”
    •  “I’m unattractive anyway. My appearance makes me miserable.”
    •  “I’m too old to start all over again.”
    •  “This is my body, and I have to live with it.”
    •  “I know I should exercise, but I can’t stay motivated.”
    •  “I know the right foods to eat, but I give in to temptations and cravings.”
    •  “It’s all just too hard.”
    When most doctors hear such remarks, they aren’t paying attention to the psychological implications—the doctor is trying to isolate a physical complaint. Beyond that, most physicians, including myself, received no training in nutrition when they were in medical school, only the most basic training about weight (covered in lectures on endocrinology), and spent almost zero hours studying the effects of dieting. As for emotions, those require a psychiatrist or other therapist. They aren’t part of a typical physician’s job description.
    It’s incomplete medicine when the mind-body connection is being ignored. In anyone’s story, the main themes aren’t incidental or irrelevant.When you feed negative input into the brain, it changes, shaping itself to conform to the messages it receives. The brain has no mind of its own. It cannot choose which instructions to obey and which to ignore. You are the one who possesses a mind, and you are the author writing your story. Which means that you have the most control. You can feed negative messages to your brain or positive messages—the choice is yours.
    I realize that neuroscience treats the brain and the mind as one and the same. That’s because the mind is invisible, while the brain is a semisolid object that can be touched and measured. My position is different and I think closer to real life. The brain is like a radio receiving what the mind has to say. When you hear a concert broadcast, you don’t mistake the radio for Mozart. If someone whispers “I love you” into your ear, you are the one who falls in love, not your limbic system. The mind comes first because the person comes first.
    Your body is the physical record of your life story as you’ve lived it until today. Every pound represents a choice to eat a certain way, and each bite is silently influenced by a set of habits, a list of likes and dislikes, and how others around you are eating. If you are unhappy with your weight, those extra pounds are likely to represent some