| In a world where nutrition consists
of numbers, measurements and the voices of experts, Marc David
is on a mission to help you change your relationship with food.
He approaches nutrition not by counting calories or grams of fat,
but by exploring how our psyches drive our eating behaviors.
“I studied nutrition in college,” says David, “and
I was shocked by how little difference nutritional science was
making to my clients. It stunned me that well-educated people
would say ‘I know what to eat,’ but they just wouldn’t
or couldn’t do it. It made me realize that my knowledge
of nutrition was useless unless I understood the psyche, what
was driving my clients’ food behaviors.” Unable to
find a program that married the studies of psychology and nutrition,
he created his own course work at Sonoma State University, graduating
with an MA in the Psychology of Eating. He has also trained at
the Harvard Mind Body Medical Institute and SUNY Upstate Medical
School.
A long-time presenter at Canyon Ranch Resorts and the Kripalu
Center for Yoga and Health, and a speaker at numerous professional
settings including Harvard, The National Institute for the Clinical
Application of Behavioral Medicine and The Institute for Integrative
Nutrition, David is the author of two books: Nourishing Wisdom:
A mind-body approach to nutrition and well-being (Bell Tower,
1992) and The Slow-Down Diet: Eating for pleasure, energy and
weight loss (Healing Arts Press, 2005).
In 2008, David founded the Institute for the Psychology of Eating
in Boulder, a visionary school that combines the science of nutrition
with the spiritual and emotional components of eating. Here, he
explains the intimate relationship between our culture, our psyches
and our food choices.
RD: You have an unusual approach to food and nutrition;
tell me more about it.
MD: The collective conversation around nutrition
tends to focus on rules, standardization and a painstaking analysis
of food. It looks like this: experts say, “Eat this, don’t
eat that. We’re going to dissect the food we’re telling
you about and explain everything that’s in it, and what
each of those components does in a human body. Then we’ll
homogenize all bodies, create one standard, and say ‘Here’s
what all human bodies need when it comes to nutrition. Here’s
a list of what you should and shouldn’t eat. Here’s
what’s good. Here’s what’s bad.’ ”
At best, that’s only about half the story. The other half
of the story is who you are as an eater: what you think, what
you feel, what you believe, what you bring to the table.
So there’s a fascinating human dimension to eating and nutrition
that has remained largely unaddressed. Currently, if you want
to talk about people’s motivations and inner universe around
food, the only place to do that is in the realm of recognized
eating disorders, and eating disorders make up about .1 percent
of the population. But what about the other 99.9 percent?
We all eat, and we all have a relationship with food. That’s
what I focus on. Most people know about nutrition; they’re
suffering from what I call a “high fact diet.” A typical
bookstore may have a hundred different books written by a hundred
different experts – MDs, PhDs, dieticians, nutritionists
– that all say something different, and each has scientific
proof of why their different system works.
My approach is different. I focus on the psychology of eating,
or what I call “dynamic eating psychology.” It encompasses
all your attitudes, beliefs and behaviors toward food. All of
these have a very real impact on how food works in your body.
RD: There is a lot of information out there, from bookstores
and internet sites to government programs geared toward educating
people about nutrition. But it seems that, except for among the
most educated and wealthy segment of the population, the nutrition
of our nation hasn’t improved significantly over my lifetime.
In fact, with the current epidemic of obesity, one could argue
it has degenerated. Why is that?
MD: The nutrition conversation in this country
is driven in large part by corporate economics. Profit is a powerful
motivating force in the food system. Produce as much as you can,
sell it as cheaply as you can, and make as much money as you can
– that’s it. That’s how the food system operates.
In that system’s eyes, it doesn’t matter what’s
happening to the earth, or people’s bodies. That system
isn’t interested in health, it’s interested in money.
And that system drives scientific nutrition research. Research
is mostly for hire, and most of it is paid for by industry –
the sugar industry, the corn syrup people, big agriculture, and
so on.
The other piece of the picture is that our culture teaches us
not to be in our bodies. We don’t ask ourselves, “What
would serve me in this moment? Do I really need to be eating?
Do I need to be in action? Or do I need to be resting, or sleeping?”
Our nine-to-five work schedules certainly don’t support
embodiment. Between the hours of approximately 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.,
humans experience an energy drop; it’s a physiological occurrence
that’s partly a function of hormones, partly of body temperature.
Other cultures recognize this ebb in energy; businesses shut down,
people rest or take naps. But in our culture, when 2 p.m. comes
around and you’re tired, you tank up with caffeine and sugar;
you push through your work and multi-task. We leave the body,
instead of attending to it.
Then we get into these fascinating conversations about what’s
good or bad for you, broccoli versus white bread. But can’t
you feel it in your body? This is an innate ability that we’ve
lost over time. We override body wisdom through advertising, or
the huge quantity of food that’s served in restaurants and
movie theaters. We focus on big, and we focus on fast.
Your nervous system, which is highly articulate, figures a lot
of interesting things out about what works for your body and what
doesn’t. But it needs time; it takes your body approximately
20 minutes to realize it’s full. Your body needs that much
time to ask itself, “What did I eat? How did that feel?
Did I have enough fat, carbohydrates?”
Eventually your body figures out what’s happening, and then
it will give signals accordingly: “Need more food, need
less food. Hmmm, need more protein, need something a little sweet
and tasty.” But our culture asks us to move fast. And when
we’re moving fast, and eating fast, we don’t notice.
RD: And eating rapidly isn’t good for digestion,
either, I understand.
MD: That’s right: besides closing off
the communication between the body, the gut and the brain, rushing
also creates stress, which shuts down your digestion. Over the
long term, that kind of chronic, low-grade stress has even greater
impacts on metabolism. When you’re creating “stress
physiology,” among many other things you’re elevating
cortisol and insulin. Those two hormones alone, when elevated
day in and day out, signal the body to store fat, not build muscle
– which is the opposite of what most people want.
RD: Please explain cortisol.
MD: It’s a fascinating hormone. Let’s
say we’re sitting here, and you’re completely calm
and relaxed. Then I take a hypodermic needle filled with cortisol,
and inject it in your arm. In a few minutes, you’ll start
to get antsy. You’ll look at your watch. You’ll start
thinking “I’ve got things to do. There’s stuff
happening. There’s so much to do today!” Cortisol
causes the brain to alter time perception. It produces a sense
of urgency, and it seems to speed up time. This is a physiological
response from more primitive times; when a lion is chasing you,
you have to make quick decisions based on survival, and time seems
more compressed.
In our normal waking day, if we’re over-secreting cortisol,
it’s signaling the brain to think time is running out, and
shifting us into survival mode. What do people always complain
about? “I don’t have enough time,” “There’s
not enough time to cook nourishing meals.” That’s
because we’re in a state of low-grade stress.
And we keep giving each other those messages through the media.
We do what the media tells us, and eat what the experts say to
eat, but we don’t slow down and reflect, “Is this
even working?” Or on a bigger scale, “Does our system
work? Does our way of eating or our way of living work?”
RD: How does the way we nourish ourselves ultimately
change? Do the first seeds of ideas come from research and studies
from leading universities?
MD: Innovation in the field of nutrition has
never come from the hallowed halls of universities; it always
comes from the outside. For example, from guys like Michio Kushi.
Walk into any supermarket, and you’ll find tofu, or miso.
These are both macrobiotic foods that started out as strange,
bizarre 1960s nutrition cult experiences.
Look at the organic foods movement. It started in the 1960s with
a bunch of hippies, and now every grocery store you go into has
a good selection of organic foods. Or supplements: the idea of
vitamins and other nutritional supplements didn’t come from
researchers at Harvard or Tufts, but from people like Adele Davis
and Gaylord Perry.
Another example was Dr. Robert Atkins, who developed the Atkins
diet. He was ridiculed, ostracized, looked upon as a blithering
fool. But he stuck to his guns, and the truth was he had some
powerful insights. Does it mean his system is right for everybody?
No. But he introduced an important concept: if you’re eating
way too many carbs (which most Americans were), not enough fat
and not enough protein, you’re going to have some issues.
That slowly crept into the mainstream, and now it's widely accepted.
RD: But you say that what’s causing obesity in
this country is not bad food.
MD: To me, bad food is a symptom, not a cause. It’s a symptom
because someone is creating that food and eating that food. Behind
all that is the human psyche. The people driving industry understand
the research—they're not dumb. They know what they’re
doing. They know they’re selling you a poor quality product,
but that’s not interesting to them. What’s interesting
to them is money. So you have the money-driven politics, and a
dumbed-down population that’s not taught to embody.
RD: And then we have an economic situation where, if
you don't have enough money, you can't buy the higher-quality
foods. You're buying pasta, and processed cheese and muffins.
You’re basically living in survival mode.
MD: That's right. And you’re not worried
about going to the gym – you don’t have enough money
for a gym membership. And that gets back to how we structure our
politics, how we structure our world. Food is just a reflection
of that, of us. It's a snapshot of our inner world and all the
boogiemen and demons that we’re dealing with.
Look at any one person, in terms of their economic standing, their
gender, their demographic, and then look at their diet and their
relationship to food and body. Most of the time, you'll see that
it makes sense. You can tell some people “Don’t eat
at McDonald’s” all day long, and they're not interested
in hearing it. Because guess what? You can get a dollar meal!
What idiot wouldn’t eat at McDonald’s? A meal for
a dollar is mind-boggling if you’re only making a handful
of dollars a day. That’s a wonderful thing.
RD: That's right—at least you get food. Whereas
how much wild Alaskan salmon would you get for a dollar, or organic
Swiss chard, especially after you’ve cut the stem off?
MD: That's right. Then on the other side of
that economic divide, let’s take the typical highly educated,
fascinated-with-nutrition, 25- to 50-year-old woman in this country.
Her 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.
RD: Are you saying that women generally have a different
relationship with food than the typical man does?
MD: Yes – most do. That's because women
have a different relationship with the body, because the culture
asks them something different. Our culture is not saying to you,
as a man, “We need you to have the perfect body and the
perfect weight in order for you to be lovable and get everything
you want.” What we tell you, the man, is “Make a whole
bunch of money and be powerful, then you can have whatever you
want.” Now if you’re handsome, or fit, that helps.
But if you’re rich, it doesn’t matter what you look
like, says the message; you can get what you want. For women,
the message is “Just look a certain way, and then you can
get the guy you want.”
Many women have what I call a “false-positive diet”
and a “false-positive body.” They’re eating
the right foods and doing the right exercises, they have the body
they want, and internally they’re miserable. They’re
doing exercise they can’t stand, eating a diet that requires
constant pressure, willpower and thought, constantly bracing against
the fear that if they don’t keep doing all this exercise,
dieting and denial of pleasure, they'll gain weight, which then
means they're screwed. If internally what’s going on is
fear and hating the body, I don’t care how much a person
weighs, or how fit they are. It’s all an illusion of the
ego.
And if you hate how you’re exercising, it can even have
opposite results from helping you lose weight.
RD: Can you give us an example?
MD: I can. One of my early clients who really
taught me a lot about this came to me when she was 30 pounds overweight.
She was supposedly on a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet and running marathons,
yet she couldn’t lose an ounce. Her doctor sent her to me,
saying “I don’t believe she’s running marathons
and I don’t believe she’s eating 1,000 calories, because
I’ve done all the tests and there’s nothing wrong
with her. She should be losing weight.”
I interviewed this woman, and I believed her: she really was eating
that amount of calories and running marathons. But she was arguably
the most stressed-out client I have ever met in my life, and she
was absolutely beside herself that she wasn’t losing weight.
She was a high-powered lawyer, a partner in a big Wall Street
firm. This is a person who is used to setting her mind to something,
doing it and getting a result. And here she is setting her mind
to run marathons and control her food intake with willpower, to
no avail.
I looked at her diet and saw that she was deficient in both fat
and protein, which can cause weight gain or inability to lose
weight. Her body thought it was starving, and when the body thinks
it’s starving, it hangs on to weight. If you were on a desert
island right now, and you looked around and you saw there was
no food, from that moment forward, the brain would change your
physiology, and you would hang on to fat.
RD: To survive the perceived famine?
MD: Exactly. So I tell her “You need more
fat and protein." She thinks I’m insane; she’s
convinced she’s going to gain weight if she eats more fat
and protein. I tell her, “No, this is going to help you.
You’re going to feel better. You’re going to calm
down.” She's convinced this isn't going to work, but she
agrees to try it and she pays me for eight sessions in advance.
Two weeks later, I get a letter from her law firm. She’s
gained four pounds, and she’s going to sue me if I don’t
give her the money back. I was so scared. I sent the money back
and apologized profusely. But I couldn’t understand why
she gained weight.
Fast forward to a handful of years later. What feels like the
same person comes into my office: a woman who's running marathons,
eating a low-calorie diet, and can’t lose weight. I’m
thinking, “Oh, no. What do I do now?” I end up putting
this woman on the same diet. But I’m so nervous. And sure
enough, in a couple of weeks, eating more fat and more protein,
she gains weight, and I’m thinking she’s going to
sue me. But she says, “You know, I trust that you’re
going to figure this out.”
That gave me an inspiration. I started calling all the weight
loss and physiology experts I know, and after about a dozen phone
calls, I spoke to an exercise physiologist, who said something
that changed my life. He said “Exercise mimics the stress
response, and when you over-exercise, you’re really in a
chronic stress response. It makes the body think you're being
chased by a lion, every day, every day, every day—so the
body slows down metabolism to avoid starving."
RD: So it's like the Huns are chasing you across the
steppes for the next month.
MD: Exactly. So I tell my client "You're
running six or seven miles a day, 15 on the weekend. Do you really
like running?” And she said, “Oh, I love running.”
I said, “You did not convince me when you just said ‘I
love running.’ It doesn’t sound like you even like
running.” And all of a sudden she bursts into tears. She
tells me she can’t stand it, she hates it, but she’s
doing it to lose weight.
I said, “Do me a favor: for the next two months, let’s
just give up the running. If any kind of movement you wanted to
do would burn the same calories, what would you do? What makes
you feel good?" She said, “I just want to dance.”
“Great,” I said. “Anything else?” She
said, “I like to walk. I want to take a yoga class.”
I said, “Great! Just do whatever you want to do movement-wise.
Take a dance class, do some yoga, do some walking.” I kept
her on the same diet—about 1800 calories, with more protein
and fat, way up from the 1000 calories she was eating. Within
two months, she lost 20 pounds.
RD: Wow! So exercising heavily to burn calories is counter-productive
if it produces a stress response. Is that the message?
MD: Well, here’s the thing. We think of
calorie burning as a function of calories in, calories out, and
how much work the body is doing. That’s true to a great
degree, but that’s only about 80 percent of the story. The
other 20 percent that profoundly influences calorie burning has
to do with your level of stress or relaxation, and your nutrition
– not only what you’re eating, but when you eat what
you eat.
You burn calories at different rates during the day. From about
2 to 4 a.m., your body's calorie-burning capacity is at its lowest.
From noon to 1:30 p.m., your calorie-burning capacity is at its
highest. The most slender populations around the globe eat their
biggest meals at lunch-time, which is when the calorie-burning
metabolism is naturally at its highest.
But in our culture, instead of eating a big lunch, people work
during the noon hour and skip lunch, thinking, "This will
help me lose weight." But then they’re missing their
peak calorie-burning hours. Then around 3 or 4 p.m., they're low
energy and cranky, because the body is starving and in a stress
response. So they eat a junky snack, maybe drink a cup of coffee.
So then these same people eat a ton at dinner, and then eat even
more after their evening meal, because the body is in a nutritional
deficit. It’s still trying to catch up. They’re eating
the bulk of their calories during the body’s lowest calorie-burning
time. And this is the rhythm of many Americans.
RD: You mentioned that the calories-in, calories-out
model is only part of the picture. Are there other factors besides
these biocircadian considerations?
MD: Yes, there are. People who can afford to
choose their food and can ask, “What’s best for my
body,” need to also ask "Which of my beliefs regarding
food and nutrition are holding me back or causing me stress and
anxiety?" Some of us have this sense of separation: that
I have to do something outside myself, that I have to change my
body, so my inner experience can be good.
It’s shocking how much energy gets wasted on worries about
what you're eating and what you look like. Women are being chronically
pulled into this conversation. They’re stuck in the washing
machine on a constant spin cycle called “my weight, my body,
my food, my weight, my body, my food,” and we lose their
wisdom. We lose our queens, and we just have a lot of princesses
walking around.
RD: What do you mean, queens and princesses?
MD: The princess part in a woman is about “me.”
“How do I look? Do you love me? Am I okay?” It’s
a necessary archetypal stage young women go through. They need
to be the princess, they need to have it be about “me.”
But sometime around 30 years old, that starts to shift, as women
step into a different level of adulthood and a different stage
of emotional and psychic development. They need to be evoking
the queen. The same goes for men: we need to be evoking the king.
But what happens in our culture is that women in their 40s, 50s,
even 60s are still trying to be princesses. They’re focused
on “me and my body.” All that powerful queen energy
just keeps going toward the idea of food, diet, weight and body
image.
And here’s the thing: you go on the right diet, you lose
the weight you want to lose, and then what? You have a healthy
body, now what are you going to do? You’re going to just
live forever? That’s not interesting. What are you going
to do with your time?
Now, if I had my way, the world would be eating organic and all
the food would be grown wonderfully and it wouldn’t be about
the hyper-profit system that we’re stuck in. But given what
the world is, if you’re going to focus on health and nutrition,
let there be a higher purpose behind it. So who are you, why are
you here, what are you meant to do? Let your healthy body and
good nutrition support that higher cause. Get a strong, healthy
body, then go and give your gift. Love and serve, do whatever
you’re here to do.
But we make the diet, nutrition and exercise, the final goal,
not the means to an end, and I think we end-up looking selfish
and a little silly, and we end up more separated and isolated
from each other. We’re taking ourselves way too seriously.
RD: Most of our readers are women, and most of them are
35 to 60. Unless they’re genetically thin, they’re
probably concerned about their weight and are caught up in this
issue. How do you advise someone like that to change? What’s
step 1, 2, 3, 4?
MD: That’s a great question. I’ll
give some steps, not necessarily in any particular order. First,
if a woman is weighing herself, particularly every day, I will
ask her to get rid of the scale. I prefer they crush it or destroy
it before they get rid of it, but get it out of the house. No
more scale. I’m shocked at how many people use that small
instrument to tell them how they feel about themselves, how they
should act, how they should go about their day.
Another related step is to get out of the head and into the body.
We’re these souls, these spirits, in a body. We disembody
when we weigh ourselves, or when we lose the conversation about
“How do I feel? What do I want to eat? What nourishes me?”
Throw out the nutrition books. Throw out any controlled diet that
you think you’re supposed to be on, and engage your body
instead. Listen to your body. What do you want? Do you need to
move? Do you need to rest? Do you need something sweet? Do you
need something more fatty? Do you really need a salad? Okay, how
much? What are you in the mood for? What’s your body calling
for?
The body will talk to you, but you need to be willing to be in
dialogue. You and I can’t talk with each other unless we
agree “Let’s have a conversation.” The body’s
not going to talk to you unless you agree to actually listen.
And with the body, we have to listen on the body’s terms.
It can’t be, “I just want the body to tell me everything
in the next five seconds.” That’s not gonna work.
The body likes slow. The body likes attention and details, and
for us to notice the nuances. From that perspective, I would ask
any person to go on a no-diet diet for two months. Throw-out every
rule, listen to your body, engage in that dialogue and see what
happens. You can always go back to a controlled diet later. But
in a dialogue with the body, can you let go of how you’re
“supposed” to eat and how you “should”
eat?
Another point: get rid of the good foods/bad foods lists. What
happens when you inevitably eat a food on your bad list? You judge
yourself for being bad, and what do you do to bad people? You
punish them. People punish themselves for eating “bad”
foods by self-rejection, eating more, starving, vomiting the meal,
exercising more.
And about exercise: I submit that many women aren’t doing
intense aerobic exercise because they love intense aerobic exercise.
They’re punishing themselves for eating or for having body
fat. What if you just moved in ways that gave you pleasure, that
made you feel joyous to move? If running makes you feel that way,
great! If being on an exercise gizmo makes you happy, do it! But
create movement that gives you celebration. Eat in a way that
feels connected. Experiment. Explore. And, yeah, you’ll
fall off the wagon. You might make a mistake. You might say, “Oh,
I tuned into my body and my body wanted two pints of Haagen-Dazs
ice cream. Great! Eat the ice cream, but stay embodied with it.
Afterwards, ask yourself, “I just ate two pints of ice cream.
How do I feel? Ouch—that hurts!” Okay. Great feedback.
RD: So it’s actually a necessary part of the journey,
to indulge the appetites you’ve been so terrified of.
MD: Absolutely. The things we fear will always
loom large. Until we face our fears, they’ll pitch a tent
in our backyards. The foods we’re fearing are generally
the ones we’re wanting and craving. So eat them, and see
what happens. Life is an experiment. We’re always making
mistakes, learning from what we did, and then making course corrections.
Food is no different.
Scientists have commented that, overall, the most toxic chemicals
to human kind are the ones we generate inside our own bodies.
When we’re constantly in fear, judgment, anxiety and stress,
we’re creating stress chemistry. And we know that stress
is the most common risk factor in every disease.
So, give up the rules, bad-food lists and dieting. Stop judging
yourself, and go on a self-rejection-free diet. What could you
do to love your body as it is right now? We think we can hate
our body into changing, but all we’re doing is using fear
as a motivation. If fear, stress, anxiety and self-hate is the
road, how could that not be the destination? We think by pushing
ourselves into these intense, pleasureless, loveless ways of eating
and exercising, we’re going to get a result that has me
loving myself and being happy. It never works.
RD: So loving and accepting your body will reduce your
vulnerability to compulsions, which is one of the boogie men?
MD: The compulsion is always a reflection of
the deep sense, that I’m no good, I’m not enough.
The only thing that’s going to free me from compulsive behaviors
is a connection to self, meaning “Self” with a capital
“S,” something big in me and something bigger than
me.
Here’s the bottom line: if eating less and exercising more
worked as a nutritional injunction, it would have worked by now.
But we’re way more complex. And it’s not one single
thing that’s going to fix it. It’s a big, complex
picture that starts with embodiment and self love.
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