paleoterran - Journal

The object of my cravings was often dictated by what was available. In Argentina, they took the form of local pastries, the eating of which could accurately be called a national pastime in that country.Post by John Michael

Cardboard pint boxes of frozen yogurt piling up in my bedside dust bin, alongside gummy bear and chocolate bar wrappers: this was only one of the many manifestations of my eating problem. (Yes, I would often eat my comfort food in bed.) Aside from this, there were the odd situations that I found myself in on account of it, like listening to the gripping, if still horrific, story of a recent drive-by shooting in my neighborhood, as I waited for a double cheeseburger in the 24-hour corner store below my apartment at midnight. And then there were the effects that it had on my body. With regards to my weight, the only certainty was that it would fluctuate. Because my stomach was often distended, my posture suffered, and I found it easier to develop lower back pain. One day, I was looking in the mirror at my love handles, and I asked myself, “What is this anxiety that I allow it to ruin my physique like this?”

One thing I’d learned was that the more refined my self-awareness was, the more complex were the issues that I could address. All of my earlier approaches to solving this problem had followed a rather crude strategy: I would try to change my eating habits by force of will alone, attempting to simply resist my cravings when they awoke within me. I had failed each time because this problem was far more complex than I gave it credit for.

In March of 2011, I decided that I would try a new approach. Instead of using brute force of will, I would study my eating problem, in the hope of divining its underlying mechanism. The best method that I could think of for intensifying its symptoms to the point where I could clearly observe them was to fast. As I knew from experience, resisting the symptoms would heighten them; the idea was to let them do so, until they grew to the point where I would be able to discern their finer parts, and perhaps understand how they worked together.

Fasting for me was nothing like what you read about on hunter-gatherer.com or Mark’s Daily Apple; this was no thirty-six hour fast. In fact, it wasn’t even a six-hour fast. Instead, my fasting consisted of eating only when I was hungry, and of eating only until my hunger was sated. But even this was a challenge for me. On the first morning of my fast, I found myself light-headed as I walked through my neighborhood, even though I had just eaten. (Interestingly, one of the first things that I had to do during my fast was to learn to distinguish between my cravings and genuine hunger because I had been operating for so long according to the input of the former that I had forgotten what the latter felt like.) I had switched to Paleo foods in order to provide a contrast between what I was eating to diminish my hunger and what I craved. As the day progressed, I found myself rediscovering my connection to my stomach.

With my attention directed towards my gut, my curiosity began to generate questions. “What is hunger?” I asked myself, and immediately my mind went in pursuit of the answer. “What is thirst?” More questions followed, growing in complexity and refinement as I answered their simpler precursors. “How much food do I really need?” and, “If I eat slowly and attentively, will this reduce my later cravings?” Tentative answers began to accumulate, like, “An empty stomach is not necessarily a hungry one.” Slowly I managed to relearn the simple system of signals that my digestive tract uses to communicate with me, which allowed me to turn my concentration to the study of my cravings.

The first thing that I realized was that my cravings did not originate in my stomach; they had nothing to do with hunger or thirst. Instead, they originated in my mind, and had to do with an entirely different need. But what was it? Mustering all of the mental subtlety that I could, I set myself to observing the thought patterns that culminated in my cravings, and what I saw surprised me. The cravings often hit hardest in the evening, usually a few hours before I fell asleep, and on this particular night I watched in fascination as they activated, revealing to me their inner workings.

A craving would begin as a problem that presented itself to my consciousness – in this case, it was the statement, “I’m going to be alone tonight.” (At this time, I was living in Bogotá, having moved there from Santa Marta, where I had left behind many good friends.) I would ignore it – in this case perhaps under the influence of the belief that I could live without companions for a little while – and this would repress the problem, which would then return to my consciousness as an image of junk food. The image would remain in my mind, slowly charging with anxiety, until I went and sought out the food that was pictured within it. Once I had attained the object of my craving, there was little time spent savoring it, as a friend had once pointed out. I would eat it quickly, because I wasn’t interested in its flavor; it had only one use: the reduction of my anxiety. It achieved this reduction by filling my stomach, and so dulling my awareness, which hid the problem that had initiated all of this, until it receded from my consciousness, and I could sleep.

The following morning, my will to fast buckled, and I found myself indulging my cravings again. But I wasn’t worried, because the previous day’s efforts had yielded great knowledge, within which I knew resided the key to breaking the anxiety barrier.

Stay tuned for Becoming Paleo, Part 4: The Projections of Anxiety.