Diet Roulette: Settling on one that works

An Interview with John Douillard, D.C., PhD.

By Ravi Dykema

What to eat? What to avoid? In our diet-obsessed culture, the answers to these questions get more confusing every year. But according to John Douillard, Ayurvedic physician and author of The Three Seasons Diet (Three Rivers Press, 2001), devising a lifelong eating plan is simpler-and more natural-than you may think.

Douillard received his Ayurvedic training in India and holds a Ph.D. in Ayurvedic medicine from the Open International University. He co-directed Deepak Chopra's Ayurvedic center for eight years and has trained more than 2000 Western doctors in Ayurvedic medicine. Douillard has been teaching Ayurvedic medicine, natural health, fitness and nutrition internationally for 17 years. Currently he directs the LifeSpa School of Ayurveda and practices Ayurvedic and chiropractic medicine at LifeSpa in Boulder, Colorado, where he lives with his wife and six children.

In addition to The Three Seasons Diet, he is also the author of Perfect Health for Kids (North Atlantic Books, 2003), Body, Mind and Sport (Three Rivers Press, 2001) and The Encyclopedia of Ayurvedic Massage (North Atlantic Books, 2004). Here, Douillard speaks with Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema about the simple wisdom of the three-meal-a-day diet plan, Ayurvedic principles of food and diet, and allowing the rhythms of nature to guide your eating.

RD: As a nation, we're obsessed with diets and nutrition plans; every few years a new one comes and goes. Please give us your perspective on diet trends over the past 20 years, and how you feel about the whole phenomena of diets and dieting.

JD: In general, if a diet presents you with a list of foods that you should not eat, it's probably not valid; there are no bad foods, and as soon as you take something out of the diet, you're going to start craving it.

This all started in the '70s, when Dr. Atkins first introduced his high-fat, high-protein diet. Everybody started eating hamburgers and cottage cheese, and cutting out carbs. When researchers at MIT took carbs out of the diets of lab mice, they got really skinny; but as soon as they got access to carbs, they started binging and got really, really fat.

The same thing happened 20 years ago. After a few years on Atkins, America was craving carbs like crazy, and the next fad that came along was the Pritikin Diet. Dr. Pritikin said you could eat 80 percent carbohydrates and get the same benefits. You could lose weight, feel good, have more energy. So people went from the high-protein diet that left them craving carbs, to a diet that gave them symptomatic relief for their cravings.

But Americans didn't eat the whole grains Pritikin recommended; they binged on any kind of carbs, so blood sugar got more and more unstable. Meanwhile, our lifestyles started to speed up, so we started getting more and more stressed. The more stress we're under, the more the body has to produce hormones to fight the stress; those hormones are made from cholesterol, so the brain is being told to make excessive cholesterol to fight the stressors, and so now we have high cholesterol.

Then the medical community says “Stop eating butter,” so we started eating margarine. And then we went through that whole low-fat, no-fat diet trend. And as a result, people started eating less protein and more carbs, and then blood sugar became even more unstable. With those blood sugar swings, and the ups and downs of energy levels, comes fatigue, and then exhaustion and unstable moods, anxiety, sleep concerns and, ultimately, depression. When I started practicing, in 1984, we used to treat candida, chronic fatigue, those kinds of things. Now, I treat anxiety and depression every day.

RD: What diet trends arose then?

JD: There was food combining, the Zone, the glycemic index, the blood type diet-all these new, latest, greatest man-made diets to help us mitigate the effects of unstable blood sugar. Now, the latest is the six meals a day diet, the grazing approach to eating, which is really risky.

I worked with the New Jersey Mets for two years, and the captain of the team decided he wanted to be a bodybuilder. A month into the season, I get a call from the owners, saying the captain wants to retire from basketball. He's depressed and he won't play any more. I knew what happened; his second career was now bodybuilding, and bodybuilders graze. They eat little meals all day long; when you graze, you never store anything, and bodybuilders don't want to store anything. They want to burn only what they eat. When you're only going from meal to meal to meal, your body becomes conditioned only to make energy last for a short period of time and blood sugar becomes more fragile. So when this man got out in front of 20,000 people trying to play basketball, his blood sugar was crashing and it was like having anxiety attacks.

Also, when you eat little meals all day long, you never actually burn any of the stored stuff. What's stored in your body is your fat, which also stores toxins that need to be burned. When you graze, you never store anything, never burn anything–you never till the soil. When you eat regular meals–breakfast, lunch and dinner–in between those meals, your body is forced to fill in the gaps with a source of energy, which is stored fat.

If you eat little meals all day long, like rabbits do, you become kind of like rabbits–sort of hyper- and unstable. When you eat meals that last you a long period of time, you force the body to burn fat, to be more calm and stable, and to detoxify.

RD: It sounds like most of these fads and trends are American in origin. How does eating differ in Europe and other cultures?

JD: I think there are some behavioral differences, like eating three meals a day, which people do in Europe, versus grazing. And there are other differences as well; in most other parts of the world, people approach food differently. It's a ritual, more so than in America, and eating is considered almost sacred and is done, for the most part, in a more relaxed fashion.

I was eating a meal in the south of India with some friends, and the mother was serving us. She had to keep getting up and down to serve us, and I was thinking “This culture is so macho; these poor women just have to serve these men.” But later on, about half an hour after dinner was over, I saw the mother, sitting at another table, with a flower in front of her, having a completely relaxing meal in silence all by herself. It was so wise.

In our culture, moms serve the kids, then they're up and down, up and down, grabbing bites, nibbling while they're cooking, and when they finally sit down to the dinner table, the kids are all over the place. It's stressful. This Indian mom was part of the conversation while she was serving, but that wasn't her eating time. When it was quiet and relaxed, she was able to sit and enjoy her food. That quiet time was sacred.

There are three factors to eating. There's how you eat, when you eat and what you eat. And in America, all we think about is the “what.” We've gone so overboard in the what; we've created extreme what: only eat raw food, only eat for your body type, only eat foods combined in a certain way, only eat high protein foods, only eat low glycemic index foods. It's insane. You have to have a manual when you go to a restaurant or pack a lunch.

RD: But if you're not watching what you eat, if you don't have some kind of plan, how do you make sure you're getting all the right nutrients? How do you keep track?

JD: Well, you don't. If you look at nature, the nutritional cycle is an annual cycle. No animal gets its RDA every single day. It's not possible. We get our fats and proteins in the winter, and then comes spring. We get our greens and berries and cherries to detoxify the body, and our lower fat foods come in. And then in the summers we eat high-carb foods, lots of fruits and vegetables, for energy. At the end of that annual nutritional cycle, all the needs are met.

But here we are, worrying about getting some of this and some of that every single day. Vitamin companies make me laugh. They put so many vitamins in pills, it's like they assume you're never going to eat anything. They are packing a whole day's worth of annual nutrition in one pill that no one can digest.

RD: One nutritional craze that we covered recently in Nexus was the low-carb diet. What is your view on that regimen?

JD: It's basically a watered-down version of the high-protein diet. The concept is still to deprive your body of carbs and force it to burn fat for energy. But whenever you force the body to burn fat, you run a fine line of producing a stress that your body is going to remember: “You starved me. And as soon as I get near some real food, I'm going for it. And I'm going to binge like crazy.” That's the risk.

RD: But didn't some studies show that these diets do help people lose weight?

JD: Yes, at first. Say you're overweight, like two-thirds of Americans; if you go on a high-protein diet, you're going to burn excess fat. Even though your body is under duress, even though it's stressful, your body will burn it. But once that fat gets burned, and you're still eating a high protein diet, your body becomes acidic and very toxic. And the more acidic the body becomes, the less capable it is of detoxifying itself.

RD: Is there any time you would advocate a high-protein diet?

JD: I think there's a five- to six-month period where the high-protein diet can be valuable. If you look at nature, if you lived on a farm in the wintertime in Denver a hundred years ago, you would be eating meat for your meals. There wasn't a whole lot of thought about green vegetables; in the wintertime, they weren't available. During that time, you would store proteins. So that high-protein, high-acid diet is okay for a few months. But when you eat that way for a year, that's when you run the risk of creating an imbalance: binging and cravings, and toxicity from that very strong, storing diet.

RD: Some people report that they feel really good when they start the Atkins diet.

JD: Pretty much every diet you go on gives you three or four months of feeling better, because it's brand new; there's almost a sense of euphoria. The acid test for a diet is three or four years down the road.

Let's say you went on a raw food diet. Most people would feel really good on a raw diet, initially. They would detoxify. They would be very alkalized. The body would clean itself out. But if you clean and clean and clean, you can become depleted. Initially, you're going to feel fantastic. Most diets are like that: there's an initial euphoria, during which you lose weight and feel really good. But the acid test is whether you can stay thin and feel wonderful for two or three years in a row.

I met with a woman a month ago, a mom with four kids who was overweight, anxious, unable to stabilize her moods, screaming at her kids, out of control. She was eating six or seven meals a day, because her doctor told her it would stabilize her blood sugar. She said “I'm stressed partly because I have to eat a meal every three hours, and I feel like I can't get anything done, plus I've gotten more and more anxious.” I told her about a study we did a few years ago. We had 18 people eat breakfast, lunch and supper; they could eat as much they wanted at each meal, but no snacking. Initially, they were freaking out; but after the second week, we measured anxiety, depression, cravings, fatigue, exhaustion and insomnia, and found all those emotional indicators were significantly improved, simply by having them get off the blood sugar roller coaster. And when their blood sugar got stable, all of a sudden they felt fantastic. A lot of people said, “You know, I don't even care if I lose the weight now. I feel so much better. It wasn't the weight that I was complaining about. I just felt so lousy. I felt anxious. I was worried. I couldn't sleep. I was depressed. I was yelling at my kids. I was screaming at everybody.”

RD: Do you often see that kind of connection between diet and psychological or emotional issues?

JD: The number one thing I see in my practice is anxiety and depression. That always tracks back to unstable blood sugar in some way, shape or form. Somehow the patient's blood sugar got unstable. We have to take a look at that and address that. When blood sugar is low, you'll feel anxious, depressed, worried, angry; and you're going to want to self-medicate, with cigarettes or coffee or chocolate.

Another thing that's important to realize is that we're connected to the cycles of nature, and we can't swim against the tide forever. We have a connection to the earth's rhythms. There are seasons when the birds are flying south, the whales are migrating, the bees are doing it. But we insulate ourselves from those cycles.

We can get back in rhythm by eating with the season's cycles, eating more protein in the winter and more greens and berries in the spring and summer to detoxify after a long winter of eating meats and grains and soups and stews and heavy, warm winter food. Detoxifying food is what nature gives us then; greens are alkaline to open the lymph system, berries and cherries are high in antioxidants and proanthocyanadins. Then, after you clean house in the spring, you get energy for the long days in the summer with your high-carbohydrate foods.

You go from a high-protein diet in the winter to a low-fat diet in the spring to a high-carb diet in the summer. You go from Atkins to Jenny Craig to Dean Ornish; from winter to spring to summer. The three best-selling diets, high-protein, low-fat and high-carb, actually exist in nature for four months of the year. It's not that you should only eat proteins in the winter or only eat greens and berries in the spring. It's just that you should make sure that when nature does its thing, you get your medicinal share of storing protein and fat in the winter. Get your medicinal share of detoxifying berries and greens and sprouts in the spring. Get your medicinal share of carbs and fruits and vegetables in the summer.

There are daily cycles as well. In the morning, the muscles are stronger. In the middle of the day, the digestion is stronger, which is why all over the world, except for here, everybody eats their biggest meal in the middle of the day.

I had a woman who did the study with us, and she said, “I love this diet. I'll never stop eating this diet, but I haven't lost a pound.” She was a yoga teacher and mom and a 15 to 16 hour per day type going 90 mph all day long, doing everything. Week after week, she would come into my office and say, “John, I love this diet, but I haven't lost weight.” Finally, about nine months later, she said, “John, guess what? I lost 25 pounds.” The only logical explanation I could give to her was at first your body is not going to burn the fat until it's really convinced the war is over, it's convinced that life is not an emergency.
When your body is in an emergency state, when you're exhausted at the end of every day, and life's a struggle and you're craving everything all day long, this is an emergency way of life. Your body is going to respond by saying “Store fat. Give me some sugar. That's emergency stuff. I can burn it quickly, get up a tree and save my life.” This woman's body had to be sure she wasn't going to pull the plug on this diet before it would begin to release that stored fat.

RD: We spend billions of dollars on the diet industry in this country. But a study by the National Institutes of Health in the early ‘90s showed that 99 percent of people who lost weight on a diet gained it all back, which leaves only 1 percent of people who are successful with dieting. This kind of regimen-eating three meals a day-seems more like a lifestyle than a diet.

JD: That's true, and that's the idea. In our culture, we diet. Somehow, we've bypassed optimum eating, lifestyle eating, the ritual of cooking and having a meal. We've really lost our ability to slow down and be with our food. People in our country just eat and go, eat and go. I used to have an Ayurvedic rejuvenation center in Massachusetts, when I was with Deepak Chopra, where I would design programs for people. At the end of their treatment, I would ask them, “What is the most important thing you learned when you came here?” During their time there, they meditated, they did yoga, they did exercise, they learned about diet and nutrition, they received Ayurvedic panchakarma treatments. And the most important thing most of these patients said they had learned was to stop and relax.

RD: That's interesting. You have six children; I wonder how you have time to relax.

JD: It's actually easier in a way. With one child, you can still have a social life. With six, there's not excuse, there's no social life. All we have is a family life, which is actually a salvation in this culture; this culture is so crazy and so fast, but for us, everything revolves around the family. It's just wonderful. I think it keeps us together. It's been a really wonderful blessing.

RD: So some of your kids are teenagers; do they disagree with you about diet and nutrition?

JD: No, not really. They refuse to eat meals sometimes when they're not hungry, and we're always trying to get them to eat better foods. And every one of them has their own unique likes and dislikes and bad habits of eating, so it's always a juggle. For the most part, it's been pretty good. But they're all so different; they all have such unique personalities. I have a two-year-old who's a really strong personality. And what she really wants is to be told what to do; she wants boundaries, she wants to see her limits. And when you give them limits, you begin to create a relationship of trust. As they get older, if that trust has been built up, you can always revert back to that connection.

Now that some of my kids are older, it's really important that we keep that connection. From time to time, we'll have a conversation and touch bases. They deflect me for a while, but we get down to it. And then we're back to that place where we have the relationship, a real, heart-to-heart relationship.

I think that we miss out on that in relationships as adults, too. Somebody gets hurt, they react to a situation, the other person gets hurt by their reaction, and the next thing you know they're fighting, reacting to each other versus communicating heart-to-heart. And that is really what Ayurvedic medicine is about. It's about accessing who we really are, realizing that our heart, which is who we are, employed our minds to create a personality to protect us. And that personality has become our show. It's our presentation, what everybody gets to see. But how much of that presentation is who we really are is a good question.
That presentation creates patterns of behavior and imbalances of energy that can cause problems in the physical body. There are a lot of physical imbalances caused by energetic dysfunction, that is caused by mental patterns, that is caused by the heart trying to protect itself when it was hurt. The whole idea of Ayurveda is to unravel all of that, so who you are can be exposed like a flower. The flower doesn't care if anybody smells it. It doesn't care if it gets five bees or three bees. It just cares about giving out its scent, which is ultimately who we are.

But the mind says, “No, no. I can't give you my scent unless you give me three bees or three people. I need three people or three bees to smell me, but I can't just give my scent for free.” We try to balance our relationships, to get as much as we give. But the heart doesn't care. It says “I love you, but it's no concern of yours. I just love to love you. I don't care if you love me back.” There's no expectation. We've created a world of expectation, because the mind uses our senses to distract us, and fear to keep us from ever penetrating to that authentic place, where we become exposed like a flower.

That's one thing I talk about in my book, Perfect Health For Kids (North Atlantic Books, 2003): how to keep your child's physical body in balance as you raise them, so that when they start to have a spiritual life, they have access to who they really are, and let that part of themselves become exposed, versus creating a mind and a presentation and a personality that's all based on pain and fear and protection, and end up with a life that's based on this distortion, that doesn't have anything to do with who they really are.

It's so important to raise kids who are spiritually balanced and healthy. The more balanced they are, mentally, emotionally and energetically, the more likely they will be to have a successful spiritual life. Without such balance, a kid's spiritual life will be more difficult. We have so many addictions to money, power, fame, drugs, whatever. A lot of that is based on how our physical body is protecting us from getting hurt. If the spiritual energy can't be fulfilled, it can create pressure in the system and cause problems.

RD: How did you get involved in Ayurveda?

JD: In 1986, I had just moved to Boulder and had been practicing for only a couple of months, when I began planning a trip to Tibet. In the middle of the planning process, my sister called me and said her husband at the time, who was the magician Doug Henning, had a dream, kind of a vision. She said, “There was this big avalanche and the roads collapsed and you were paralyzed from the waist down, and he envisioned you in a wheelchair, playing basketball, and please don't go.” I said, “You've got to be kidding. We're trying to get permits and all this stuff is happening, and I can't not go just because you had a bad dream.” She said “Please just think about it.”

A week later, my mother calls me. She is a very spiritual woman, and she said, “John, I had a dream and a vision that you were on this road and you had an accident, and you feel off this cliff and were severely injured. Would you please not go to Tibet?” My mother had the exact same vision as Doug. And so I thought about it and thought about it and decided the last thing I wanted was to be in a wheelchair. So I chose not to go. And Doug and my sister said “Well, we're going to India, and I know you want to study Ayurvedic medicine. Why don't you come? We're going to New Delhi. You can meet us there. You can travel throughout India, learn Ayurveda, do whatever you want to do, but please, don't go to Tibet.” I said okay, fine. So I met them at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Ashram compound outside of New Delhi.

I didn't know that there would be this huge conference going on, with about 100 Ayurvedic doctors from all over India, all living in this compound outside New Delhi. I got to meet the Maharishi and he said “Would you stay here permanently?” I said “No, I'm going to travel around and study Ayurveda.” And he said “I can teach you Ayurveda here. Why don't you just stay for a couple of weeks, and we can see how it goes?”

I agreed, and the next morning a little boy came to my door, took me to a hospital and introduced me to a teacher, who became one of my primary Ayurvedic teachers, one of my mentors and one of my best friends. That was the beginning of my Ayurvedic training. I stayed there for a year and a half. I met my wife there, I met Deepak Chopra there--he was training there as well. We got pregnant with our first child, and Deepak said “Why don't you come back and run the center in Massachusetts? You can travel and lecture and we can do this stuff together.” I worked with him for eight years. We went back and forth to India and opened up Ayurvedic centers, and then eventually he went to San Diego.

Talk about being present, being in the moment, and being willing to follow what's trying to happen in your life! A lot of people are so worried about their next job or their bills or their taxes, that it's hard for them to be spontaneous enough to say “Yes” when nature's trying to roll out the red carpet out for you. You miss the opportunity, because you're holding onto your tax bill, worried about the next paycheck. It's not that I was fearless, I was just present--and very fortunate. It was a good time for me. I just closed my practice here in Boulder over the phone, but I knew I always wanted to come back. So after my work with Deepak stopped, I came back here in '94.

RD: Did you and Deepak lecture together?

JD: We used to lecture together a lot, years ago. So it was the first time we actually spoke together in a long time. He's coming our way, as you probably know. (The Rocky Mountain Chopra Center and Spa opens in Westminster this year.) It's a really good thing. Ayurveda is getting more mainstream and more popular. What we've been talking about here today is mainstream Ayurveda principles, how to move with the harmony of nature's cycles, how to go downstream with your life so that at the end of the day you feel like you're going to the ocean versus paddling upstream, and wanting to just collapse.
We live today as if the current is against us. We struggle, we're exhausted and depleted. If you're exhausted everyday, how are you going to expose that part of yourself that really needs to be exposed? How can you access your passion? How are you going to access your love? How are you going to access who you really are? You're just surviving. You're in an emergency, a fat-storing, sugar-burning emergency, which is disease. So life becomes an endurance event.

RD: It sounds like you really understand how to go downstream.

JD: I feel like I do. Not that I live a perfect life, but I feel great. I'm going to be 50 this year, and when I come home from work, I don't feel depleted and exhausted. I have kids, so after work there's a second part of my day: homework and routines–it's like I'm just starting my day.

I do just a couple of simple things. I make sure I eat regular meals; I stop and I take my time, and it works. You don't have to be rigid in your practices or your diet, because that only creates rigidity. And you don't have to have a life that's without any conflict. Your kids are going to rebel. But it's all about understanding: first understanding the cycles, and then understanding how to work with them, and how to live in harmony, and where downstream is.

Find out more about John Douillard's Life Spa at: www.lifespa.com