You aren't what you eat

According to my wife, Stacey, Marc David (See interview, page 20) pegs it when he says, “The typical highly educated, fascinated-with-nutrition, 25- to 50-year-old woman’s eating and her exercise program is often driven by poor body image, by the viral cultural belief that you have to be skinny and look like a 17-year-old.” She knows lots of women who do this (she’s not disclosing her own strategies). They are concerned with gaining (or losing) weight, she says. They are concerned with how attractive or sexy they look, how their clothes fit, and all this translates into a BIG FEELING that sets their emotional baseline for the whole day, affecting practically everything.

One element of this predicament is nutritional. We all know that diet and exercise are the most potent contributors to our health. We report in every issue of Nexus on new research (Health Bites, page 10). Lisa Turner writes our Healing Plate column (page 17) with nutritional advice coupled with recipes and cooking tips. Many times in the past we’ve interviewed nutritional experts of varied persuasions.

You, too, know a lot, I am sure, about what foods are good for you and which are bad. And I am sure you know that eating while sitting calmly at your kitchen table is preferable to dragging a bag of chips with you to the car. But don’t you wonder what effect feeling anxious about food has on you, or on others?

Marc David has focused on this side of nutrition for most of his career. He says one consequence of anxiety, “stress physiology,” he calls it, is elevated levels of cortisol and insulin. “Those two hormones alone, when they’re elevated day in and day out, signal the body to store fat, not build muscle,” he says.

Another consequence of stress physiology, when coupled with chronic preoccupation with eating, is self-absorption, according to David. And with this theory, I think, David takes nutritional wisdom to a new level. Self-absorption, and its vicious circle of anxiety, robs us of our capacity to give our gifts to the world. David points out, and I agree, that when I am excessively focused on me – my looks, my weight, my contentment, even, my health – I am acting like a teenager. (They are appropriately self-preoccupied.) The “princess” (or “prince”) state, as he calls this, diminishes one’s altruism and one’s empathy. I think this self-repair-as-lifelong-focus extends beyond food issues. We see it in the worlds of holistic healing, spiritual growth, self-actualization, and athletic accomplishment. We could use our creativity and passion to improve the lives of others, to fix problems we collectively confront, to contribute to our communities. But we can't if all our energy is used up growing a better “me.”

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