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.

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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.

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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.

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