Becoming Paleo, Part 5: Transforming The Projections of Anxiety

In order to be able to choose to eat the orange, instead of being driven to eat the cookies, I had to learn to listen to my health instinct.Post by John Michael

Addressing the problems of health when they appeared was all that it took to begin shutting down the projections of anxiety. So, for the original problem, “I will be alone tonight,” all that I had to do to prevent its repression was to commit myself to addressing it, thereby rousing myself from my ignorance, and expressing a willingness to know. This could have taken the form of seeking out a friend, or of merely appraising my situation in the light of my lack of friends; what was important was the perspective that I took, one that was oriented toward the problem’s solution – and when action was necessary, then I would have to act.

Although the transformation of anxiety was rather simple, it took me two months to learn how to do it, because I was dealing with poor eating habits that had been entrenched over several years, and, while it’s easy to realize that eating healthfully is good for you, it’s another thing entirely to reprogram your bad habits. But that’s what I was doing.

Shifting my perspective with regards to my health instinct from one of willful ignorance to one of cooperative curiosity did not mean that I had to be constantly on my toes; just like the ignorance that activated the projections of anxiety, after a while the willingness to know became habitual. But at first I had to pay close attention to myself, because the logic of this transformation is broad, and has different applications in various situations, though the underlying principle remains the same, which is that this instinct is concerned with my health and the health of those around me.

The logic of the transformation is quite simple: I can either take responsibility for my health, or I can ignore this responsibility. When I take responsibility, I observe the psychic contents arriving in my mind from the health instinct, and, noting their trajectory, I decide whether or not to act on them, and then how best to do so – though I have to be careful, because by not acting on them, I might repress them, and so activate the projections of anxiety. Which is to say that something has to be done with this energy, because if I ignore it, then I repress it, and it returns to my consciousness in the form of a compelling force, anxiety, which coerces my ego into doing what it presents.

Examination of my eating problem had led me to this, the fruit of my investigation, the realization that, if I allow myself to be ignorant of my health instinct, I get pushed around by it, and bullied into doing what it wants, but if I listen to it, then I can take control of my health, and nothing regarding it will happen without my consent, allowing me to guide the course of action proposed by this instinct, instead of falling under the merciless sway of the projections of anxiety.

Stay tuned for Becoming Paleo, Part 6: Implementing the Transformation 

Related Posts
Becoming Paleo, Part 1: The Yale Food Addiction Scale
Becoming Paleo, Part 2: The Anxiety Barrier 
Becoming Paleo, Part 3: Breaking the Anxiety Barrier 
Becoming Paleo, Part 4: The Projections of Anxiety 

John Michael is a traveling writer and a teacher with a deep interest in humankind’s connection to the natural world. Learn more.

Becoming Paleo, Part 4: The Projections of Anxiety

The projections presented junk food as the only way to escape the anxiety that was growing within me.”Post by John Michael

For the next two months after my day of fasting, I studied my eating problem. I had a basic understanding of the mechanism that underlie it: my mind would recognize a dilemma, which I would choose to ignore instead of resolving, thereby repressing the dilemma, which would then return to my consciousness as an image of food that I would be driven to attain to soothe a growing anxiety. But in order to solve this problem, I would need a deeper understanding of it.

The projections were images of food, generally calorie-rich industrial foods, composed of a mix of flour, sugar, milk, or fat, if not all four of these ingredients. These images always had a will-violating quality: no matter how hard I tried to resist them, their power, in the form of anxiety, would only grow, until my will was overcome, and I found myself seeking out the food that they presented. I decided to begin my investigation at the root of this problem, with the issues that I was repressing by ignoring them when they appeared in my mind.

Under examination, all of these issues appeared related to one another by a theme of health. When the statement, “I am going to be alone tonight,” emerged in my consciousness, it was propelled there by a concern for my health, because, to my own mind at least, human contact is necessary for a healthy life. I repressed this thought by ignoring it as a nuisance, and so, because I hadn’t recognized the legitimacy of its concern, I unwittingly activated the projections of anxiety. It appears then that my mind contains an instinctual concern for my overall health, and that when I ignore my responsibility to both recognize this instinct and act in accordance with its concern, its frustrated psychic energy returns to my unconscious mind, where it animates the mechanism that transmits the projections of anxiety into my consciousness.

Though aware that the following is purely speculation, I would like to suggest an evolutionary rationale for this mechanism. A human being who ignores his instinctual concern for his health and the health of others predisposes himself to be less connected to his social group, because, by not caring for himself attentively, in accordance with his instinct, he can probably contribute less to the group, and because, by not caring for the members of his group as his instinct suggests, he probably reduces the group’s cohesion, at the very least with regards to his own social position. Basically, if you don’t pay attention to both your own health and that of others, you can offer less both to yourself and to your society, and will likely enjoy less of the survival advantages conferred by cooperation, in both its intra- and interpersonal forms. Without cooperation, the chances that I will go hungry in a hunter-gatherer milieu, like the one in which our ancestors evolved this instinct, increase, so the projections of anxiety activate, driving me to eat calorie-rich foods in an attempt to compensate for my reduced chances of survival.

This instinctual process, over which I should have had control, but which my willful ignorance had repressed, forcing it back into my unconscious, where it became automatized in its negative aspect, was living my life for me, but in a way that was contrary to my plans, by forcing me to act in accordance with it. Because I was content to ignore my health instinct, swatting it from my consciousness when it first appeared, as if it were an annoying house fly, it returned to my consciousness with a vengeance, and without regard for my volition, because, by ignoring it when it originally appeared, I had proven that my ego was ignorant of its responsibility to the other parts of my mind, and unaware of its position as conductor in the great mental orchestra of my thought. In its second appearance, the psychic energy of the health instinct had shed its cooperative aspect, and had become implacably coercive. It would be listened to, whether I wanted to hear it or not.

Stay tuned for Becoming Paleo, Part 5: Transforming the Projections of Anxiety.

Related Posts
Becoming Paleo, Part 1: The Yale Food Addiction Scale
Becoming Paleo, Part 2: The Anxiety Barrier 
Becoming Paleo, Part 3: Breaking the Anxiety Barrier 

Becoming Paleo, Part 3: Breaking the Anxiety Barrier

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.

Related Posts
Becoming Paleo, Part 1: The Yale Food Addiction Scale
Becoming Paleo, Part 2: The Anxiety Barrier 
Becoming Paleo, Part 4: The Projections of Anxiety 

The Standard or Average American Diet

Post by Dr. John

John Durant over at Hunter-Gatherer raises concern about the use of the term "Standard American Diet". He writes: "I hate when people use the phrase the "Standard American Diet", or SAD, to exemplify what's wrong with our food system.  It's so contemptuous."

Instead, he proposes the use of "industrial diets" or "industrial foods." I agree we should not use the moniker with contempt. However, even our modern-Paleolithic vegetables and fruits usually don't come from our own backyard but are produced and delivered by the food industry.  The term "Average American Diet" would be more accurate and would avoid the use of the SAD acronym. Regardless of the terminology, the key issue is knowing, on average, where dietary calories come from so we can determine where the nutritional challenges lie and whether we are making progress. 

According to Civil Eats and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, these are the average daily calories per capita consumed in the U.S. in 1970 and 2008. The proportion of vegetables and fruits remains pitifully small. Grains have ballooned by almost 200 calories, added fat by about 230 calories, and added sugar by over 50 calories. The challenge for the Paleo community is increasing.

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Becoming Paleo, Part 2: The Anxiety Barrier

Post by John Michael

If taking control of my eating habits were something easy to accomplish, then I would have stopped consuming cheeseburgers and brownies years ago. But the truth is that gaining control of our diets is often a difficult thing to do, requiring a measure of self-will and discipline that nowadays might be called out of the ordinary, if not simply extraordinary. Taking this into account, my transition from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to the Paleo Diet was not an overnight affair, but instead the culmination of several small efforts that I enacted over the course of two years.

If I had to point to where this transformation started, then I would say that it all began with my yoga practice. I had practiced yoga for several years, trying various styles, from sauna-like sessions of Bikram Yoga, to methodical and in-depth Iyengar classes, but it wasn’t until I began attending Abhyasa Yoga Center in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that I found the style of yoga which most suited me. The owner of this studio, J. Brown, had a simple philosophy, “Do what feels right,” which allowed me to strengthen my connection to both my mind and body, and so opened to me the possibility of real personal change.

J.’s philosophy, which he shared with me in a clear and accessible manner, while illustrating points with examples from his personal experience, was composed of variations on the yogic principle of ahimsa, or, non-injury. It doesn’t matter how you look in a pose, J. would tell me; what matters is how you feel. He once shared with me the story of how he had discovered this philosophy: he was an avid practitioner, who could do amazing poses and was often asked to demonstrate them for other students, but who found himself suffering from chronic pain that only increased. One day, he traveled to India to deepen his knowledge of yoga, where he met a swami with whom he decided to study. The swami, after asking him to narrate what he was doing in a certain pose, cut short J.’s long-winded description of his body’s anatomical positioning, and asked him, “Yes, but how do you feel?” The moment was an epiphany for J. From then on, the basis of his practice would not be meeting a pose’s requirements, but the extent that his body could comfortably enter the pose, which he gauged by paying close attention to how he felt.

Using measured breathing to calm myself, I gently entered each pose, directing my attention to both the exterior position of my body, and to the interior disposition of my feelings. As happens with all new habits, the emotional sensibility that I developed within the yoga studio began to appear in my daily life. Yoga, as J. had said, can happen anywhere, at any time. I soon found myself paying close attention to the emotional responses that I had to everyday situations, like waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store, or dealing with an unruly student in the classroom. My yoga practice at Abhyasa had started me down the path of addressing the severe self-awareness deficit that I had developed by watching television, playing video games, and performing other sedentary, and, in my case at least, stupefying activities. 

I began to do an inventory of my feelings, for the first time ever getting concrete definitions for emotions like fear, anger, and shame. As my knowledge of these lower emotions grew, I began to experiment with changing them into their higher transformations: fear became courage, anger peace, and shame compassion. After about a year of self-study, I managed to quit smoking and limit my drinking. Things were going well, and I was pleased with my progress. But when I tried to control my eating habits, which were rather bad, often taking me off of my normal route to work in search of just the right chocolate bar, or causing me to eat a pint of frozen yogurt (sometimes two) per night for weeks on end, I failed miserably.

Each time I’d try to alter my eating habits, the same thing would happen: as the duration of my resistance to the cravings increased, I would feel anxiety building within me, a kind of jittery, unpleasant energy, that would grow until it cracked my will power, at which point I’d find myself driven out of my apartment in search of whatever junk food my mind presented to me as the best way of soothing myself. No matter how many times I attempted to stop my poor eating, I encountered this same emotional reaction, which I came to call the anxiety barrier.

Stay tuned for Becoming Paleo, Part 3: Breaking the Anxiety Barrier.

Related Posts
Becoming Paleo, Part 1: The Yale Food Addiction Scale
Becoming Paleo, Part 3: Breaking the Anxiety Barrier 
Becoming Paleo, Part 4: The Projections of Anxiety

Becoming Paleo, Part 1: The Yale Food Addiction Scale

Posted by John Michael

Society’s strong motivation to lose weight combined with the tremendous amount of energy and resources spent on the “obesity epidemic” suggests that the problem of obesity is not driven by a lack of motivation or effort.

Preliminary Validation of the Yale Food Addiction Scale

I’ve known about the Paleo Diet for several years, ever since my dad started altering his eating habits to match those set out in Dr. Loren Cordain’s book The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat. “The fact is,” Dr. Cordain writes on his website, “that virtually our entire physiologies operate exquisitely when they are functioning in the native human ecological niche in which they evolved – employing both the diet and exercise level of a hunter-gatherer.” I’d always had problems with diet and exercise (like many Americans, according to the statistics), so when my father told me about the Paleo Diet, I was interested, but acquiring it didn’t seem feasible, because, while I recognized that this diet was probably my best option, I couldn’t control my eating habits, which were driven by cravings that appeared out of my control, and the Paleo Diet is all about restricting what we eat to the foods that our hunter-gatherer ancestors enjoyed. The diet remained in my head, a seeming impossibility until recently, when Yale University published the Yale Food Addiction Scale, and I decided to take control of my eating habits. 

The Yale Food Addiction Scale is a survey designed to detect and measure the severity of food addiction. While food addiction’s not fully recognized by the medical establishment as a disorder, several studies have been conducted to explore the possibility of its existence. Although some of these studies seem strange, like the one which found that rats preferred high doses of sugar to comparable doses of cocaine, or the one which studied the fierce sweet tooth that former alcoholics can develop, others are serious attempts to define what food addiction is and to create tools that measure it. (Interestingly, all of these studies suggest that food addiction is caused by the exorbitant excitation of reward circuits that evolved in our brains during the times of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This leads me to speculate that perhaps food addiction is due to an excessive stimulation of these reward circuits, which evolved in the absence of “high fat and high sugar foods,” and which were perhaps never meant to be as stimulated as they are today.)

After reading about the release of the Yale Food Addiction Scale, I decided to take it myself, because I had recognized my own eating problem in the articles that I had read about it. The survey, composed of twenty-seven items, is based on the American Psychiatric Association’s substance dependence criteria, as well as other scales “used to assess behavioral addictions, such as gambling, exercise, and sex.” As I took this survey, my eating problem began to take shape in my mind. It was most revealed by the items that I scored highly on. The first sixteen items are statements, like, “I find that when I start eating certain foods, I end up eating more than planned,” that the participant scores from 0 to 4, with 0 being “never,” 1 being “once a month,” 2 “2-4 times a month,” 3 “2-3 times a week,” and 4 “4 or more times daily.” Among the statements that I marked 4 on were, “I find myself continuing to consume certain foods even though I am no longer hungry,” “I have consumed certain foods to prevent feelings of anxiety, agitation, or other physical symptoms that were developing,” and, “My behavior with respect to food and eating causes significant distress.” The second to last item asks participants to check foods that they “have problems with.” Which foods did I mark? Ice cream, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, soda pop, chocolate, doughnuts, and cookies.

Like I’ve told students in the classroom, the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that you have one. I had known for years that I had a problem with eating, and now, with the Yale Food Addiction Scale, I had begun to take the second step in problem-solving: observing the problem that you have, so that you can figure out a way to solve it. 

Stay tuned for Becoming Paleo, Part 2: The Anxiety Barrier.

Related Posts
Becoming Paleo, Part 2: The Anxiety Barrier 
Becoming Paleo, Part 3: Breaking the Anxiety Barrier 
Becoming Paleo, Part 4: The Projections of Anxiety 

John Michael is a traveling writer and a teacher with a deep interest in humankind’s connection to the natural world. Learn more.

Probiotics for Travelers

Guest Post by Gerard Guillory, M.D.

If you’ve had a vacation or business trip ruined by diarrhea and indigestion, you might want to
bring a probiotic supplement on your next trip. A good supplement will help your body protect
itself against the bacteria that typically cause “traveler’s diarrhea” and enable you to spend your
trip seeing the sights instead of the bathrooms.

Probiotics are a combination of living, beneficial bacteria that occur naturally in the human
intestinal tract. They are essential for maintaining healthy digestion. A growing body of
evidence suggests that the use of probiotics can help treat and prevent a wide array of intestinaltract
disorders, including traveler’s diarrhea.

Probiotics have been examined for their effectiveness in the prevention and treatment of such
gastrointestinal disorders as antibiotic-associated diarrhea, various forms of bacterial and viral
diarrhea, inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease), irritable bowel
syndrome, small-bowel bacterial overgrowth, and lactose intolerance. Probiotics may also help
prevent the development of colon cancer.

Click to read more ...

Lecture - Paleolithic Nutrition: What is the Evidence?

Dr. John will be giving a lecture on Paleolithic Nutrition at The Medical Center of Aurora, South Campus at noon on Monday, April 25 and at the TMCA North Campus at noon on Friday, May 6.

Beginning with the origin of farming in the Neolithic, the presentation will move to a review of modern diseases and the benefits of the Paleolithic diet. The lecture will close with a response to some of the critiques of this dietary approach and some final observations.

Portions of the lecture will periodically be presented in written form on PaleoTerran.

Paleo Fast Food in the Developing World

Guest Post by John Michael

Tired and stressed from work, low on money, and pressed for time, the other day I walked into a fast-food restaurant in Bogotá called Carnitas, which in English might best be translated as either “Little Meats” or “Meaties.” Expecting to find within the standard selection of American fast-food items, like hamburgers, pizzas, and hot dogs, all made from unknown ingredients of a dubious origin, I was surprised to find, alongside these items, a variety of steaks.

Both intrigued and enticed by this discovery, I ordered a churrasco combo, which consisted of a rump-steak filet atop a cornmeal tortilla, a side salad, a bowl of steamed Andean potatoes, and a bottle of water. I sat looking at the food arrayed before me, and realized that if I’d held the tortilla and the potatoes, and perhaps requested a bit more salad in exchange, then this meal would actually have been quite Paleo.

If you’re like me, then you know that fast food is generally bad for you. Whenever I walk into a fast-food restaurant, I have to make an effort not to be driven back out of the restaurant’s front doors by the horror stories that I’ve heard. Whether it’s the story of the factories in New Jersey where the scents for hamburger meat and French fries are manufactured, or the story of the meat that’s not really meat, but instead an amalgam of non-meat ingredients concocted by some mad food scientist, American fast-food restaurants have gained a notoriety of mythical proportions in recent years.

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Are mainstream nutritionists beginning to recognize the value of Paleolithic nutrition?

Steer clear. Image: KobakoYesterday the Los Angeles Times published an article by Marni Jameson that may nudge the mainstream a tiny step forward to primal nutrition. The article - A reversal on carbs: Fat was once the devil. Now more nutritionists are pointing accusingly at sugar and refined grains - begins thus:

Most people can count calories. Many have a clue about where fat lurks in their diets. However, fewer give carbohydrates much thought, or know why they should.

But a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat — for America's ills. They say cutting carbohydrates is the key to reversing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension.

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Are tilapia inflammatory?

Image: Michael Rupert HayesSo, you started eating Paleo? You’re browsing the blogs trying to figure out just what the Paleo diet is. But one thing you know for sure, fish is Paleo. Indeed, 70 to 80 thousand years ago our ancestors living  in Blombos Cave, South Africa were catching fish in the Indian Ocean. They also created the first clear symbolic image, a block of ochre engraved with cross-hatched lines bordered above and below by parallel lines. This stunning find suggests the importance of fish to the development of the human mind. After all, seafood has plenty of omega-3 fatty acids, right?  

At the fish counter of your grocery store you pick up a couple of tilapia. The fish are small, bland, and can easily be incorporated into a variety of meals. They are just the right size to serve as the main course. Only one problem - well, probably more than one - tilapia have minimal, if any, omega-3 fatty acids (n-fatty acids) and are high in omega-6 fatty acids: a recipe for inflammation. (We need both omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids; what is important is the ratio of the two.) As a primarily vegetarian fish, tilapia, even wild-caught as in the image above, are very low in omega-3. Unfortunately,

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