If you listen carefully, your heart will tell you what you really need

By David McElroy · January 28, 2018

By the time I finished showing houses late Sunday afternoon, I was exhausted and starving. It had been a busy weekend and I suddenly realized I hadn’t eaten all day. But what did I want?

I felt a gnawing craving inside. It was a familiar craving, but what was it for? Was it for steak? Pizza? Chicken? I genuinely felt confused.

I’ve gone through this odd process a thousand times before. I’m hungry but everything I think of feels wrong. I stopped at a couple of restaurants, thinking they might be what I needed, but each time I stopped, I felt a cold emptiness — because I realized what I needed wasn’t inside.

I started feeling more agitated. It wasn’t sugar I was craving, was it? I haven’t had anything sugary for about the last five weeks — since the gallbladder pain started — so that was out of my system, but I was so frustrated with my inability to name what I was craving that I considered maybe something sweet would calm the storm inside.

Then as I sat silently in the parking lot of the third restaurant I considered — with the dull realization that the food there wouldn’t fill my craving — a wave of emotion suddenly swept over me.

Yes, I was hungry, but that wasn’t what I was craving.

This wasn’t about food. It was about her. My emotions and craving and physical needs were all confused.

I didn’t need any special food. I didn’t need to give myself a treat. I didn’t need all the things that my agitated mind had been offering.

With blinding emotion, I realized that I simply wanted to talk with her.

I wanted to see her.

I wanted to touch her.

I wanted to sit down with her and eat … well … something. It didn’t matter what. It was her that mattered, not the food.

My rational brain kept giving me food choices, but it was leading me astray. It was pushing me to fill my craving with the only things it knew to give. Yes, I was hungry, so that approach seemed rational.

But it wasn’t until I told my brain, “No,” over and over again that the emotions surfaced clearly. It wasn’t until then that my chattering monkey mind was quiet enough that I could hear that voice from my heart:

This isn’t about food. It’s about her.

I picked a place to eat, almost randomly. It didn’t matter what I ate. I knew that after I started listening.

The food was OK. The music was too loud. The people were too noisy and intrusive. When you can’t have what you need, almost anything can feel alienating. I just wanted to go home and be away from these people.

My brain constantly misleads me. That’s why I’ve spent so many years using food to try to fill unfulfilled needs. My brain offers me what it has available — and it tries to silence the voice in my heart that attempts to point out what I really need.

I can’t have what I need today, so my brain thinks it’s best to push those feelings aside and fill the need with something — almost anything — that’s available. There’s a certain cold logic to that, but it leads to somewhere I don’t need to be.

We like to count on our brains. We like to do what seems logical and reasonable. That’s what we tell ourselves.

But the truth is that our hearts know what we need. Sometimes we need to be less attentive to that constantly chattering monkey mind inside our heads. Sometimes we need to stop the chatter and the rational options.

Sometimes we just need to listen to the voice in our hearts. It knows what we need — and it will tell us clearly when we have the courage to listen to the truth.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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