Carnie Wilson has gained back about 57 pounds after having gotten down to a fairly healthy 148 pounds 16 months after gastric by-pass surgery. Today she says she weighs 205 pounds. The Wilson Phillips singer says the biggest lessons she’s learned over the past nine years is that she is trying to heal from the inside out. However, when she’s exercising on the treadmill, she’s obsessing about lunch. Her goal is to be healthy, to lose about 30 – 40 pounds. Her mottoes are “Progress not perfection,” “Thin doesn’t mean healthy,” “Help yourself and others.” Carnie says, “I am committed to my health.” Carnie Wilson is a paid spokesperson for a bariatric surgery website, however, so some of her income may be on the line if she doesn’t continue to put a good face on her weight gain. As she points out, she is still 100 pounds lighter than before the gastric by-pass surgery, and much healthier. But is gastric by-pass surgery really good for you? How effective is it really? If the practical application boils down to you severely limiting what you eat, drinking lots of water, and exercising vigorously frequently, how different is that from what you would be doing without the surgery. Effectively, gastric by-pass surgery makes you throw up if you eat more than a very small amount at a time. But by Carnie’s own admission, you can gain weight even after bariatric surgery if you snack all day long and don’t exercise enough. Why take the risk of surgery, during which some people die? One of the tricks to healing serious illness is to address the underlying psychological and spiritual causes. Otherwise, your body and mind will continue to find ways of expressing the pain and imbalance you feel. And not infrequently, those who gain massive amounts of weight have “addictive personalities.” They use some type of substance or activity to push something out of their awareness that is deeply troubling to them. The challenge for people who have gastric by-pass is to address those issues so that they don’t either gain the weight back or switch to a different unhealthy coping method. Swapping compulsive overeating for another compulsive behavior is called “addiction transfer.”
“An estimated 30% will struggle with new addictions like alcoholism, gambling, compulsive shopping and sex addiction.” –Denise Martinez, Tufts University School of Medicine
Here are some alternative medicine healthy ways of healing addiction:
- energy medicine, like Reiki or Shamballa
- acupuncture or acupuressure
- hypnosis
- guided meditation
- careful nutrition
- shamanic journeying and healing
- prayer
- yoga
- exercise that is rhythmic, like walking or swimming (active meditation)
- exercise in which you can let out aggression, like racquet ball, tennis, basketball, kick boxing
- Tai Chi or QiGong, which combine active meditation with energy movement and balancing
- reflexology
It’s good to use many of these holistic healing techniques at the same time. Just remember that when you do any major healing, whether that is losing weight, rebuilding your self esteem, or choosing healthy relationship patterns, you will go through many “hidden” changes. You may cry unexpectedly, your nose may be runny for no apparent reason, you may be really thirsty, you may go to the bathroom more often. These are all ways of releasing the hormones, chemicals and toxins that were associated with the unbalance that you had within you. Also expect that people around you, whether they are consciously aware of what you are doing or not, will respond differently to you. Some positively, some negatively. Remember that their reactions are all about them, not about you. As you shift, they will have to also, and some people aren’t happy about that. Stay focused on what you need to do for you, and enjoy the new healthy relationships that come to you. For more information, search through the blog at Peacock And Paisley. Namaste.