Commitment. My Healing Path

Please Note: All posts and articles on this blog are not meant to be medical advice, so please contact your medical doctor or qualified practitioner for diagnosis and advice of all medical conditions. 

My commitment to heal continues.

My second appointment with the food doctor was  three weeks after the first.  I was pleased to be back as I was sure that he would find a way to help ease the severe withdrawal symptoms that I had been experiencing.

He asked me how I had been getting on with the stone age eating plan.  I told him that I had found it difficult and at times very uncomfortable, but I was determined to stick with this way of eating until there was no more craving or withdrawal symptoms.

“How often have you cheated?” he asked.

I was amazed that he asked. “Not at all,” I answered.

“Not once?” he queried more intensely. “I can’t remember any of my patients sticking to the plan 100% especially with the elimination of sugar, as it is highly addictive and that’s what makes it so dangerous to health. It not only effects physical health, but is a great persuader in the mind that it’s harmless, because with some people, it takes years before any symptoms can appear, by which time they would not be convinced that sugar was a problem for them." The addicted mind,” he added, “can use every argument and trick you can think of, to satisfy its craving.”

The Power of Commitment.

“Well, I can’t see  the point of embarking on a coarse of treatment and then cheating”, I said, “But I will tell you I have been having hallucinations of smelling cakes baking!” It is like when one sits in Zen meditation, the mind will hallucinate to try and get you to quit the discipline.

I could really identify with what he was saying about the tricks of the mind, because in my teenage years, I had become addicted to smoking and when I finally quit, thoughts would flood to me that one cigarette won’t hurt, as I could quit again tomorrow.  I was very familiar with the power of the mind and imagination, and used it against such tricks, by visualising the next day, that if I had even one draw on a cigarette, I would be buying a full pack before finally quitting again; perhaps next year or maybe never!  However...

I told myself, “why wait? Quit now! Experience the craving. Let it do its worse, for it will definitely pass or nobody would ever quit”.  I would need to experience the craving, because it would only get stronger if I tried to deny it is there. I quit smoking this way and have never started again. But now, it was about my eating, a little different because I was not about to quit eating! But my commitment was established for the next 6 months.

I continued to talk to him for a while about my Zen practice and the ‘commitment interaction’, a process I used with my own clients on their initial appointment with me. I would say..   “If you are not prepared to commit 100%  to the therapy process, then it is not wise to begin, because  you would be effectively reinforcing the habit of procrastinating and giving up.”  I wouldn’t proceed to make another appointment-session with them, until together we had established this sort of high-level commitment to making it work. 

Commitment can really work miracles in this way, and here I was with my food doctor, committing myself in the same way... 100%. I further explained to him that I was committed to give it 6 months as I totally trusted in his past research, and his experience of the  stone-age eating plan, with both his clients and himself.  I learned that he himself, had suffered from bad digestive issues that he had cured with diet.  After  6 months, if I could see positive results with the eating plan, I would permanently integrate it into my daily life, not as a diet, but as a way of eating.

My doctor’s  instructions were to continue with the stone-age diet and see him again within a month to give chance for all withdrawal symptoms to ease further and then we would be testing various foods and substances, to discover more specifically what single foods/family of foods I was sensitive to.  He reminded me that we all respond differently to exclusion diets that were in effect acting like a detox, and that I may still have some symptoms that we would investigate further at my next appointment.

I drove back home with the feeling that I was at last on the right track.  A chance conversation about my ailments had brought me to an unusual healing path that I would never have considered.