Book Icon Links
Find links to additional information on specific book topics GO » The Reference Manual to You

"Body of Knowledge" will help you gain the knowledge, motivation, and inspiration to get your personal machine back in tune to the world around you.

Download
Chapter 1, for Free »
Learn more
about the book »
Buy the book now »

5 Places to Start
Pick the plan that best applies to your present physical situation or desired goals and use it as a kick-off point to designing your own program.

Learn More »

"Welcome to the Machine" Animation

The human body is the ultimate machine on planet earth.Learn how it works.

Watch Now »

Try Out
My BOK - FREE

Use it in tandem with your book to track and maintain your progress.

Sign-up Now »

Home : BOK System Overview : Mind Over Matter

If you have issues with your weight, health, or eating habits, you must address your controlling internal thought processes to reach and maintain your goals. That means discovering and then finding the proper solution to the problems that continue to sabotage your weight management efforts. And you must do so on a continuing basis.

Realize that you can overcome the obstacles that occur on the road to successful dieting and exercise. Your mind has the ability to correct its errors. It's the very place where misperceptions and misunderstandings start and it is the only place to end them, so put it to work. Learn how to turn your thoughts and decisions into the healthy actions and results you want.

Ammunition for Success
The key to winning the health and fitness game is planning a good defense and not to focus only on your eating and exercise offense. We all know about the wonderful advantages a healthy diet and exercise offer, but they won't help if you let obstacles confound you. People drop out of diet and exercise programs because of the common intrusions of daily life. Muscles hurt. There is no time. It's too hard to find healthy food at work. Personal problems come up.

There is an endless supply of excuses. And since obstacles will always occur, your only recourse is to be able to recognize the most common pitfalls and know how to handle them.
Success is all about knowing the answers to questions like: What's going on with my body? Why do I feel like this? and How do I deal with it?

Overcoming the Obstacles

The most common physical difficulties-soreness, stiffness, burning, fatigue, cramping, and plateaus-are a direct result of, or a combination of, poor stretching habits, metabolic imbalances, temporary microscopic injury, tissue regeneration, or muscle recovery. Other pitfalls such as slow progress or a slowing metabolism are also the result of simple biological phenomena. But there are simple ways to prepare for and deal with these obstacles once and for all.

Mental obstacles are not as straight forward as their physical counterparts although there is a connection between the two. Studies have shown that depression and anxiety are linked to poor eating and exercise habits and vice versa. Here too there are simple steps to correct and disconnect this common cycle.

Managing Time

It's true, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and time is a convenient excuse because there are only twenty-four hours in a day. We can't create more time or change it-or can we?

Think of time management as a recipe for success with the key ingredients consisting of your priorities. Identify the most effective and important ones and success will come easier. And learn to use Stop-loss priorities to minimize set backs and maximize your progress. Both good and poor results are important to identify your personal stop-loss priorities. If it's maintaining your BOK Journal or using software programs like Microsoft Outlook, you can make your time spent on management more efficient because your information is easy to access when you need it or if you temporarily forget.

Surviving the Cerebral Jungle
Have you ever felt out of control, like your body does what it wants even though your mind intends otherwise? Do you ever get a sudden and overwhelming feeling of stress, excitement, or unhappiness and crave comfort food?

So what sets off these cravings? How do our emotions get involved in the first place? When we're down or stressed, we want comfort, and many times food fills that void-anything that tastes good and makes us "feel better." When we're feeling high we celebrate with alcoholic beverages, extravagant feasts, and decadent desserts. Food and emotion just go hand in hand in our culture.

Dysfunctional Eating Habits
Somewhere between "normal" eating habits and medical conditions like eating disorders is a grey zone of dysfunctional eating habits. Although a psychological description called the "double bind" may not be a common discussion at the family dinner table, but that's exactly where it happens. Adults and children both exposed to the classic "finish everything on your plate" situation can produce a common cycle of love association:

Full = Love.

If it's punishment and reward, pressures away from home and during the holidays, or "speed eating" for success, food and emotions are a volatile mixture. Learn how to help your children and yourself stop these habits and family traditions before they do permanent damage to your health.

Eating Disorders
The diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders have come a long way and are now more commonly recognized and treated in mainstream medicine. Research has even found a link between these disorders and other health problems, such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, cystic fibrosis, inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, thyroid problems, and various forms of cancer.

It is promising that eating disorders have been receiving more attention in America and other countries lately. Although most of you will not have all of the symptoms and signs of any particular eating disorder, at least be able to recognize them to protect yourself from heading down that path.

There are many varieties of eating disorders, but most are related in some way to two primary disorders: anorexia nervosa (characterized by the absence or near absence of eating) and bulimia nervosa (characterized by an eat-and-purge cycle).

Click here to enlarge image

Solutions and Support
If you are truly ready and have made the decision to tackle your particular problems with eating, you've already taken the first and biggest step forward. The second step is understanding how family and other people affect your diet and exercise lifestyle. You may already recognize that the people in your life may be part of the problem, but you have to go further to better understand the complexities of the connections you have to those people if you want to permanently break the cycle.

Well, if you want to stop the cycle, all you have to do is pick something in the cycle to stop, right? But what? The addiction? The need for control? Or the discomfort itself? Surprisingly the answer is none of the above. This cycle lives in your head and believe it or not, a current of thought exists that has a lot to do with it.

Click on image to enlarge

You can' just flip anther switch or quickly fix this either. Correcting this problem requires a rewiring or "bypassing" of your current of thought to the more advanced areas of the brain, the only area capable of making logical-that is, healthy-decisions. To do this, you must first, and most importantly, accept the fact that you can't completely disconnect from your old memories.

The truth behind mind over matter is that simply recognizing the unhealthy cycle is a very important part of ending its powerful and emotional affects. We will go over three steps that involve identification of and connection to the past and present cues that shut down your healthy current of thought. Identifying and connecting these cues give you that ability to bypass your old unhealthy reactions and habits to remove their influence for life.