Things Cats Do
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Effortless Change

The Secret of Effortless Change
         by Michael Neill, author of Inside Out

Over the years I've received emails from numerous people reporting spontaneous and surprising (to them) changes in their habitual behavior. One person described giving up alcohol after nearly 30 years of dependency; another stopped smoking without any particular effort after numerous failed attempts; a third noted a sudden interruption in their use of illicit substances.

Despite the dramatic changes each one of them were experiencing, there was something almost anti-climactic about the way the changes came about. For each of them, the long-awaited behavior change happened simply because "they didn't fancy it anymore."

And this is the reality behind all human behavior:

We do what we do because it seems like a good idea at the time; when we see things differently, we do different things.

This also points to the futility of attempting to change our behavior without first having something new occur to us about what it is we want to change. Even if we succeed in the short term, giving up our bad habits or willing our way into new ones, the moment our focus shifts and our effort dips, we'll slip right back into doing things the way they've made sense to us all along.

And it raises an interesting question:

If a lasting change in behavior is inevitably the result of an insightful change in seeing, can we reverse engineer the process and change our behavior by deliberately chasing insights into the thinking behind it?

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), it doesn't seem to work that way. When we look for insights into our own behavior, we inevitably wind up with "explanations" - very good reasons that explain to us why we behave the way we do. It's because of our parents, or our lack of parents, or the neighborhood we grew up in, or the way people like us are treated in society. Or perhaps it's our brain chemistry - our depressive/anxious nature, or our physical limitations, or a personal history that "if you only knew what I'd been through in the past you wouldn't make light of what I'm going through now".

The problem with all these explanations is that while they may be real, they're not true. Or to put it another way, they're accurate but not causal.

This is why insights that are truly transformative are almost never about your life - they're about the nature of life itself.

When we try to get insights into our own lives, we inevitably get caught up in a web of our own psychology, beating ourselves up for our behavior on the one hand while desperately attempting to justify it on the other. But when we swim upstream and take a look at the the principles behind life itself, we can see beyond our own psychology.

What people see when they look into this direction is unique to them but remarkably consistent in nature:

1. They sense a larger energy that they are a part of but not in charge of. Whether they call this energy God, or spirit, or the life force, or Universal Mind, there's something about connecting with this deeper power that both humbles us and gives us hope.

2. They catch a glimpse of what it is that allows us to see. Whether they call this capacity awareness, or mindfulness, or realization, or Universal Consciousness, gaining insight into the nature of it is like looking into the inside of your skull from the backs of your eyeballs - impossible to describe but incredible to experience.

3. They intuit something about separate realities -- what it is that creates our moment to moment experience of life. Whether they think of this differentiating force as creative potential, the divine (hidden) storyteller, or the power of Universal Thought, when people turn away from attempting to control the content of their thoughts and begin to grasp the miracle of the fact that we think, life becomes far more fluid and we tap into a deeper compassion for ourselves and others.

And when we return to our lives with this new depth of understanding, we find that while our circumstances haven't changed, the person experiencing those circumstances fundamentally (and effortlessly) has.

Here's a seven minute cartoon adapted from my radio show that points out how this works though the metaphor of a world filled with scary dragons. If you're wrestling with a habit of your own right now, you might want to click play, relax, and see what comes to mind...

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Why being 'overweight' means you live longer: The way scientists twist the facts.
             by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, M.D.

I have been studying medical research for many years, and the single most outstanding thing I have learned is that many medical "facts" are simply not true. Let's take as an example the health risks of drinking alcohol. If you are a man, it has virtually become gospel that drinking more than 21 units of alcohol a week is damaging to your health. But where did the evidence to support this well-known "fact" come from?

The answer may surprise you. According to Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, the level for safe drinking was "plucked out of the air". He was on a Royal College of Physicians team that helped produce the guidelines in 1987. He told The Times newspaper that the committee's epidemiologist had conceded that there was no data about safe limits available and that "it's impossible to say what's safe and what isn't". Smith said the drinking limits were "not based on any firm evidence at all", but were an "intelligent guess".

In time, the intelligent guess becomes an undisputed fact. On much the same lines, we have the inarguable "fact" that being overweight is bad for your health. I should say that, by definition, being "overweight" must be bad for your health – or we wouldn't call it overweight. But we do not define overweight as being the weight above which you are damaging your health; it has an exact definition.

To be overweight means having a BMI of between 25 and 30. Not as bad for you as obesity, but still damaging. Why else would all hospitals and doctors surgeries have BMI charts plastered on the wall with little green squares, orange squares and red squares? Green is normal weight, orange is overweight and red is obese. Even Wikipedia confirms this: "The generally accepted view is that being overweight causes similar health problems to obesity, but to a lesser degree. Adams et al estimated that the risk of death increases by 20 to 40 per cent among overweight people, and the Framingham heart study found that being overweight at age 40 reduced life expectancy by three years."

You can also find papers in prestigious medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) with the following headline: "Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight and obesity." That certainly suggests that overweight is bad for you. However, if you look more closely at the paper in Jama, we can find these words: "Overweight was not associated with excess mortality." (My italics). Perhaps more extraordinarily, what the researchers actually found was that those who were overweight lived the longest; they lived longer than those of "normal" weight.
 
You may be surprised to find that you can have a paper in one of the world's leading medical journals entitled "Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight and obesity", which found that overweight people lived the longest. After studying medical research for as long as I have, I am far from surprised. I regularly find that the title of a paper, the abstract, and even the conclusions often bear very little relationship to what the study actually found.

Perhaps you think I am being selective and only choosing one misleading paper. Well, here are the conclusions of another study done in Canada in 2010: "Our results are similar to those from other recent studies, confirming that underweight and obesity class II+ (BMI > 35) are clear risk factors for mortality, and showing that when compared to the acceptable BMI category, overweight appears to be protective against mortality." I love the way they couldn't bring themselves to say "normal" BMI. They had to call it "the acceptable BMI category". This, I suppose, helps to fend off the inevitable question. If people of normal weight have shorter lifespans than those who are overweight, why do we call them normal? Surely we should call them "mildly underweight", at which point we would have to call people who are now considered overweight "normal".

You can see a further example of the weird strangulation of the language occurring a year earlier. In 2009, a German group did a painstaking meta-analysis of all studies on overweight and obesity that they could find. As with most other researchers, they found that being overweight was good for you. Of course, they didn't phrase it in this way. They said: "The prevailing notion that overweight increases morbidity and mortality, as compared to so-called normal weight, is in need of further specification."

In need of further specification? An interesting phrase, but one that hints at the terrible problems researchers have when their findings fail to match prevailing dogma; if the prevailing consensus is "if your BMI is between 25 and 29, it is damaging your health and you should lose weight", then you challenge this at your peril. The end result of this is that the titles of scientific papers can end up twisted through 180 degrees, while in others, the prose becomes ever more tortured.

Despite the fact that study after study has demonstrated quite clearly that "overweight" people live the longest, no one can bring themselves to say: "Sorry, we were wrong. A BMI between 25 and 29 is the healthiest weight of all. For those of you between 20 and 25, I say, eat more, become healthier." Who would dare say such a thing? Not anyone with tenure at a leading university, that's for sure.

In truth, this discussion should not quite stop here. For even when we get into those with a BMI greater than 30, those who truly are defined as "obese", the health dangers are greatly overestimated, mainly because of the widespread use of what I call the statistical "clumping game". Obesity researchers are world-leading experts at the clumping game. In most studies, the entire population is divided ("clumped") into four groups: underweight, normal weight, overweight and obese – obese being defined as a BMI of 30 and above. That means those with a BMI of 31 are clumped together as part of a group which includes those with a BMI of 50 – and above. What does this tell us about the health problems of having a BMI of 31? Well, absolutely nothing.

There is no doubt that becoming heavier and heavier must, at some point, damage your health and reduce your life expectancy. Where is this point? Well, it is certainly not anywhere between 25 and 30, and it could be even higher. Indeed, I have seen research on Italian women showing that a BMI of 33 was associated with the longest life expectancy. In other studies, where obesity was actually further sub-divided, those with a BMI between 30 and 35 lived longer than those of so-called "normal" weight.

So, while I cannot tell you when "obesity" becomes a major health problem, I can definitely tell you that being "overweight" is the healthiest and most "normal" weight of all.



Malcolm Kendrick is a Scottish medical doctor, author of Doctoring Data (2015), and The Great Cholesterol Con (2008).