Psychosomatics and nutrition: how emotions become a symptom — and how food heals it
The series "Psychiatry of One Life" · Andris Saulitis, M.D.
On the source of this material. All the source, original material of this book is exclusively my own. This is easy to verify: for years it has been laid out publicly in my streams and videos on social media, above all on YouTube — more than 1,000 streams and over 3,000 videos. This book is not a retelling of someone else's work and not a compilation from the internet: it is the same authorial material, arranged for the reader's convenience into a digestible, readable form. This is the more honest way — and this way it can be checked.
Introduction. The body speaks — learn to listen to it
Your body is talking to you. Constantly. It speaks in the language of tension in the shoulders, a lump in the throat, a spasm in the belly, insomnia, unexplained pain, a fatigue that no amount of sleep will lift. And most often it says what the psyche could not, or did not dare, to put into words. A symptom is a message. This whole book is about learning to read that language and to answer it.
I will say it plainly and without false modesty, because science is science: I have the right to teach this reading. I am a psychiatrist, M.D., with 40 years of practice, more than 20,000 clinical examinations, and thousands of cases of therapy carried through. For forty years I have watched how psychic pain speaks in the language of the body, and bodily pain in the language of the soul — and how a person recovers when he stops being split into "the psyche over here, the body over there" and starts being treated as a whole.
Right away — two safety catches, so no harm is done
The word "psychosomatics" has been worn out and twisted, so I set two safety catches right here on the threshold, and both are a matter of your safety.
First: this is not mysticism and not "it's your own fault." Psychosomatics is not "you drew the illness to yourself with bad thoughts" and not "cancer comes from resentment." That is charlatanism, which I despise (you saw it in Above the Clouds): it is false, and it hangs a monstrous guilt on the sick. Real psychosomatics is neuroendocrinology — the rigorous science of how chronic stress, through real hormones and mechanisms, strikes at the real body. No magic — only physiology.
Second, and vital: the body comes first. "Psychosomatics" is never put in place of examination, only after it. Before deeming a symptom "nervous," a competent doctor rules out a genuine bodily illness (remember Bonhoeffer from The Brain and "rule out the body first" from Above the Clouds). To write off a real illness as "it's just your nerves" is a dangerous mistake that costs lives. The body speaks — but first it must be truly examined, not waved away.
Write to me personally. Through the vitamodo.store system you can write to me directly — with your bodily symptom, your question, your condition. I am a doctor, and I answer. The door is open all through this book, and I remind you of it wherever I explain something.
My intention, and to whom this is addressed
Like the whole series, this book is my contribution: an attempt to explain the unity of body and psyche in a way that lets more precise decisions be built on it — in medicine, in nutrition, in education, and in artificial intelligence. And here the address to the creators of AI is especially concrete: I think a great deal about 24/7 health monitoring with the help of AI — about systems that would help a person hear the signals of his own body in time. To those who build AI and education, including the creators of systems like Claude, I extend my hand: forty years of clinical observation of how psyche and body speak to each other — here is the material for such solutions.
Write to me personally. Are you building AI or education in the field of health and the body? Write through vitamodo.store, directly to the author.
The foundation of mental hygiene
To listen to the body and care for it is mental hygiene in the most bodily sense: a daily, brick-by-brick dialogue with your own organism. Health is built not "someday" but with every choice — what to eat, how to sleep, where to stop, when to heed the signal that says "enough." The body speaks early and quietly; illness screams late and loud. This book is so that you hear it while it is still speaking in a whisper.
How to read this book
The book follows the unity of body and psyche: Part I — the body speaks (the language of psychosomatics, the mechanism of stress, the body's signals); Part II — food as code for the brain (nutrition as medicine, why diets do not work, the biochemistry); Part III — restoring homeostasis (the chain "trigger → thought → action," the eight steps, the daily choice). Read it in order — body and food are bound here into one.
Write to me personally. Any question on the introduction — through vitamodo.store. I am a psychiatrist, 40 years of practice, and this is in earnest.
Part I. The body speaks: the language of psychosomatics
Chapter 1. A symptom is a message
I begin with the central thesis of the book, and it overturns the way we relate to our ailments: a symptom is not an enemy but a message. The body does not "break down out of spite" — it signals that something is wrong, and often it speaks of what the psyche never put into words.
Let us take the logic apart. Psyche and body are not two neighbors but a single system (we established this back in The Brain: "psyche" and "body" are a conditional division of one whole). When there is something unlived, unspoken, an unbearable tension in a person's life, and it finds no way out through words and decisions — it seeks a way out through the body. Not because "thoughts are material," but because psychic tension is a real physiological process (hormones, muscle tone, nervous regulation), and it does not vanish just because you did not become aware of it — it comes out sideways: as a spasm, a pain, insomnia, high blood pressure. The body finishes saying what the soul swallowed.