# The 12 Healthy Virtues: Guts are at the core of everything



## Jeffrey Roberts (Apr 15, 1987)

*The 12 Healthy Virtues: Guts are at the core of everything*03:28 PM CDT on Monday, October 29, 2007







We're just gonna toss this month's Healthy Virtue in your hand and step out of the way. Take it and run with it. Fight with it. Right wrongs with it. Jump out of an airplane with it. It's guts, baby. Guts: The fire in your belly, the spirit in your psyche. Guts: literal and physical, pure and unadulterated. Guts are what carry soldiers on missions. What spill from the shy kid's vocal cords when he asks the popular girl to dance. What the non-exerciser delves deep to find before stepping through the health-club door. Guts keep our bodies in line, our innards active, our pride intact. They let us know whether what we're doing is right or wrong, though external signs may say otherwise.Guts is courage with a swagger, an edge, a bit of an attitude. If courage were the polish, guts would be the wood. If courage were prime rib, guts would be a juicy burger. If courage were the Bowflex, guts would be the barbells. Gritty and primal, we count on our guts for a reaction. If we feel it in our gut, it means something, and we need to pay attention. Guts are part of our vernacular. No guts, no glory sound familiar? And what's worse than saying we hate someone's guts? Or better than saying we bust a gut laughing together? *You gotta have guts* Guts isn't exactly a medical term. But Dr. Jeff Hurley, a colorectal surgeon at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas and Baylor Medical Center at Irving, doesn't let semantics get in the way of their importance: "You can't live without them," he says.Basically the digestive system - from stomach to small intestine to large intestine - guts process our food and turn it into energy. That energy keeps us functioning, keeps us alive. "Almost anybody can relate at one time to having extreme nausea or cramping abdominal pain," Dr. Hurley says. "You can't stand up and work or function. It definitely affects everything you do. Maybe there's something about being in the middle of your body, right in the center of who you are." Although our core muscles are not technically our guts, we feel better and we stand taller when they are strong. "They surround your guts," says Dr. Hurley, who practices and advocates yoga to strengthen the core. "If it is strong, so are your back and abdominal muscles." He treats many patients who suffer from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Tests may show everything to be normal, but people still have "crippling abdominal pain," he says. "We'll try different things, but, in the end, it's just a functional problem, a problem without a root medical cause," Dr. Hurley says. "Somewhere, there's a link between the brain and gut that causes these symptoms." A lot of times, people think of guts as courage, he says. But he has his own synonyms: fortitude and stamina. "I think back to those IBS patients who live their lives with this pain. I think of them. Guts for them is having to suffer this abdominal pain, but still having the stamina and fortitude to get through it." *Gutsy moves*Ten years ago, when Southwest Transplant Alliance needed an advertising campaign, it sought help from schools. Kids came up with the question that is on billboards to this day: "Do You Have the Guts to Be an Organ Donor?" "We had tremendous response," says Pam Silvestri, community education director for the organ-donation agency. "Some people thought it was over the line, but it got them talking. "It takes guts to think about your own death. It takes guts when someone you love passes away, to consider helping someone you don't know and whom you may never know." Guts comes in many forms. For some, it's a life-changing, life-affirming, moment. For others, it's periodic bursts of bravado. And, for still others, guts is day-to-day living. *No guts no story* When you watch TV, listen to the radio or leaf through a magazine, you're bombarded by ads. Some don't even need a brand name; you just know what they are. You react to them in a way Patty Alvey calls visceral. "When you feel something immediate and undeniable, it seems to come from the viscera, from the center of yourself," says Dr. Alvey, director of the Temerlin Advertising Institute at SMU. So what's in the center of yourself? Your guts, of course. Which is what advertisers want to grab. "When we're talking to a consumer, we're hoping to answer some need or want they have," she says. "That is best done when we have a message that resonates with them at a basic level." *A gut level, if you will.* Take Target, for example. The retailer's zippy ads, easily identifiable by the red-and-white targets if not the company's name, answer consumers' need at a basic level. "We're delightfully happy about shopping there. It's not, 'Oh, dang, I have to buy detergent,' " she says. "It's, 'I can get that cute new shirt and take care of that other stuff, too.' " Our gut knowledge expands into other aspects of our lives, Dr. Alvey says. "Sometimes, you know what you need to do," she says. "You need to get off the sofa. You know you need to get off the sofa. You can intellectualize all you want, but you know what you have to do." *In guts we trust* Sometimes, we know something without knowing how, says clinical psychologist Scott Thornton, whose office is in Medical City Dallas Hospital. "Intuition is one of the major ways we have of perceiving or knowing. In an evolutionary sense, it probably predates our verbal reasoning abilities." The phrase "gut feeling" is an important linguistic reality, he says. "We have feelings in that part of our body during emotional times, times of choice." Sometimes, we go against our gut. It tells us one thing; we do another. About 15 years ago, for example, Dr. Thornton wanted to practice psychology in Santa Fe. He obtained his New Mexico license to do so. He found a practice to buy. Yet, he had doubts when he was close to signing the papers. "I had the worst gut feeling that this was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong," he says. "I told myself I was being silly, being nervous. This is what I had dreamed of." He signed the papers and stayed two years. In some ways, it was a disaster. Although he doesn't regret the experience, he thinks his gut was telling him something. But he didn't want to hear it. "There is a human tendency to project what we desire onto what we perceive," Dr. Thornton says. "In the Santa Fe era of my life, I'd be at a railroad crossing and here comes a train that says 'Santa Fe' on every car. I'd think, 'I'm supposed to do this!' " *What's his advice to others?* "At least listen to your gut," he says. "When we want something or think we need something, we tend to want to shut out other information. The gut is a channel of information; intellect is another. Sometimes, they conflict. "That's the difficulty in being human: The dialogue between your head and your heart. If you can get to know yourself and your strong suit, you can work on the weak suit." http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dw...1.15e160f.html#© 2007, The Dallas Morning News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


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