The Archetype Diet
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Dana James, MS, CNS, CDN
Foreword copyright © 2018 by Mark Hyman
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ISBN 9780735213760
Ebook ISBN 9780735213777
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This is for every woman who has felt the pain of not enough—not pretty enough, not skinny enough, not important enough, and not different enough. You are not alone. May this book be a catalyst for deep self-discovery and complete self-acceptance.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
FOREWORD by Mark Hyman, MD
INTRODUCTION How Your Mind Shapes Your Body
PART I
IDENTIFY YOUR ARCHETYPE
CHAPTER 1 Which Archetype Are You?
CHAPTER 2 The Nurturer
CHAPTER 3 The Wonder Woman
CHAPTER 4 The Femme Fatale
CHAPTER 5 The Ethereal
PART II
FEED YOUR BODY WITHOUT FEAR
CHAPTER 6 Food Fundamentals
CHAPTER 7 Eat Your Vegetables
CHAPTER 8 The Protein Paradox
CHAPTER 9 Fat Fears and Fetishes
CHAPTER 10 The Carbohydrate Question
CHAPTER 11 The Seduction of Sugar
CHAPTER 12 Permission for Pleasure
CHAPTER 13 Archetype Meal Plans
CHAPTER 14 Recipes
PART III
THE SIX Rs TO HEAL YOUR MIND
CHAPTER 15 Restore Your Brain
CHAPTER 16 Recognize Your Core Memories
CHAPTER 17 Reinterpret Your Past
CHAPTER 18 Release Your Emotions
CHAPTER 19 Rewire Your Brain
CHAPTER 20 Revive Your Sense of Self
APPENDIX A Food Types
APPENDIX B Kundalini Kriyas for Each Archetype
APPENDIX C Resources
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOREWORD
The human body is one of the most complex systems on the planet, and not all bodies are the same. Anyone who has tried and struggled on a diet knows that what works for one person may not work for you; you have a unique body chemistry that needs to be addressed differently, and, without considering the hidden factors that may be affecting your ability to lose weight, you will continue to struggle. This is what functional medicine is all about: looking beyond the basics to determine what is right for each individual.
This, of course, presents an obvious problem with the vast majority of diets: by prescribing one set of specific recommendations for everyone, they fail to account for the multitude of factors that may be complicating one’s ability to lose weight and rebalance her body. That is what makes Dana James’s The Archetype Diet so revolutionary: by offering four diets designed for four different body types, she gives women the tools they need to first identify their bodies’ specific needs and then follow a program that meets those needs completely.
I have known James for more than a decade, and this book beautifully captures the work she has been doing with her clients since she began her functional medicine practice. She has helped thousands of women reshape their bodies and reclaim their health, and now she offers a road map that anyone can use to do the same.
James also acknowledges that our diets affect more than just the shape of our bodies. Rooted in the principles of functional medicine, The Archetype Diet seeks to rebalance all of the systems that affect our health. Channeling the power of food as medicine, James understands that what we eat not only affects how much we weigh or what our body looks like but also how we feel and function overall. Diet plays a role in everything from digestion and immune response to skin conditions and hormone levels. Getting the balance right can be enormously tricky, but James cuts through the confusing, often conflicting advice that would-be dieters often encounter in favor of sound, pragmatic, and scientific facts about how food affects our health. Debunking the myths surrounding what makes a food “good” or “bad,” she encourages women to let go of their fears around food in order to embrace the power real food has to heal our bodies.
James also goes beyond the physical to explore the very real body-mind connection so often overlooked by traditional diet plans. Although we are still only beginning to understand the connection between our diets and our minds, it’s no secret that what we eat affects how we think and feel. Significant research has demonstrated how eating the right foods can increase our energy, boost the metabolism, combat depression and anxiety, and manage hormone levels, as well as a variety of other things that directly contribute to our overall mental state. As a functional medicine physician, I’ve dedicated my career to helping patients uncover this link within their own bodies so that they can radically improve their physical, mental, and emotional health.
But as James reveals in The Archetype Diet, the mind-body connection works in reverse as well. Just as how we eat affects how we think and feel, how we think and feel affects how we eat. While anyone who has ever struggled with a diet is familiar with the concept of emotional eating, James shows how this cycle goes even deeper, beginning with some of our earliest memories and affecting our eating behaviors in ways we may not even notice.
Recognizing how our deepest, most ingrained thoughts and emotions influence our relationship with food, James developed her Archetype Model through her deep understanding that, just as women’s bodies are different, so, too, are the reasons they eat the way they do. Without taking the time to explore the hidden motivations driving their eating behaviors, even the most motivated dieters will struggle. True, sustainable, lifelong health requires addressing the mind alongside the body and being compassionate with yourself as you seek to make meaningful change.
Ultimately, what makes The Archetype Diet so remarkable is not simply that it will help you lose weight (which it will). It’s that it will help you attain a level of self-awareness and self-acceptance that will make it easier for you to not only stick to your diet, but to live the life you most truly want to live. Releasing yourself of the destructive emotions, habits, and behaviors will give you the freedom to move through the world with vitality in a body that supports your every move.
—Mark Hyman, MD, director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and New York Times bestselling author
INTRODUCTION
How Your Mind Shapes Your Body
I know what I’m supposed to eat, but I just can’t seem to lose weight.”
This is the most common refrain I hear from my female clients. As a board-certified nutritionist and functional medicine practitioner with offices in Manhattan and Los Angeles, I
have worked with more than three thousand women of all ages, sizes, and socioeconomic backgrounds. These clients come to me because, no matter what they do, they can’t seem to change the shape of their bodies and are plagued by physical ailments from lack of energy to breakouts to perpetual bloating. They’ve tried every diet, detox, and exercise program under the sun, and while they might achieve some measure of success, they inevitably plateau or succumb to old habits that caused them to gain weight in the first place.
These are educated women who know that eating pizza and drinking soda won’t help them lose weight, and they haven’t touched these foods in years (okay, maybe a bite or sip or two after a few glasses of wine, but that’s it!). At the same time, they’re ashamed that their appearance matters so much to them. Shouldn’t they, as empowered, twenty-first-century women, be focusing on their careers and their families instead of stressing over a bit of belly fat or the shape of their thighs?
This is where traditional diet plans fail most women. They focus exclusively on the physical—what and how much to eat—without acknowledging the role that your emotions play in helping you stick to a plan. Losing weight (and keeping it off) is only partly a physical process. Yes, what you eat (or don’t eat) matters, but the main reason so many women struggle with food (despite knowing better) is psychological.
In the more than ten years that I’ve been working with women, I have found that the number one factor that determines whether a woman will succeed on her diet—and be able to sustain it over time—is where she sources her self-worth from. Whether she’s a successful woman who rewards herself with a glass of wine (or three) every night after another long day at the office, or a kind and caring woman who finds herself in the kitchen at ten p.m. eating leftovers because she didn’t have time to sit down and eat a real meal since everyone else’s needs came before her own, these women have developed a dysfunctional relationship with food that prevents them from achieving their goals—dietary and otherwise. It may sound like a stretch—how is it possible that our feelings about ourselves can so profoundly affect what our body looks like or how much fat we put on—but time and again I’ve seen this pattern in my clients.
Here’s what I mean. How you feel affects how you behave—including the way you eat—and the results eventually show on your body. You already know this intuitively. When you feel worthy of love and acceptance, you radiate confidence and energy and move through the world with ease. You take pleasure in caring for yourself and are more present and purposeful in the choices you make, dietary and otherwise. When your self-worth takes a nosedive because you think you are not pretty enough or smart enough or simply not good enough, you retreat into patterns that you hope will make you feel better but rarely do. You might skip meals, comfort eat, reward eat, or restrict food to compensate for these feelings—and then beat yourself up for not being more disciplined. Before long, you’ve given up on even the best-laid diet plan.
The way we source our self-worth is determined very early in our lives, typically in childhood, and is therefore so fully integrated into our identities that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to see how it drives our behavior. If you believe that your value as a person depends on some external factor—like good looks, intelligence, making others happy, or being unique—you will always be drawn to behave in ways that you think will increase that value and this will often influence how you approach food.
Through my work with clients, I have found that there are four primary ways that women derive their self-worth, which I have distilled into four essential archetypes. Archetypes, as defined by Carl Jung, are patterns of instinctual behavior. The first archetype is the Nurturer, who values herself on her ability to care for others. While this is a lovely and much-needed trait, if she is not conscious of her behaviors, she can end up prioritizing other people’s needs and feelings to the point where she is depleted and exhausted. The second archetype is the Wonder Woman, who is a powerful female that derives her sense of self from what she has achieved in life. But, in her quest to not be a “nobody,” she can become overwhelmed and emotionally disconnected from others. The third archetype is the sensual and playful Femme Fatale, who sources her self-worth from her physical body. This can make her incredibly alluring—but debilitatingly self-conscious. The fourth archetype is the Ethereal, who is dreamy and creative but highly sensitive to the world, making her feel discombobulated and anxious.
Each of the archetypes embody a particular set of personality traits—positive and negative. The problem occurs when the primary archetype starts to hijack your actions and thoughts to the exclusion of other things that make for a balanced life. The more dominant your archetype is (i.e., the more your sense of self-worth is wrapped up in one particular facet of your life), the more its negative attributes will show up in your behaviors as you seek to validate yourself by acting in a way that supports your self-worth.
In many cases, this behavior will affect your approach to food as well. For example, if you’re a Wonder Woman and measure your value through your accomplishments, you may work through dinner in an effort to meet a deadline or check one more task off your to-do list. When your stomach starts rumbling at nine p.m., you’ll order Thai takeout and then kick yourself ten minutes later for sabotaging your diet. The next day, when the pressure of work starts building yet again, you’ll repeat the cycle; your sense of self-worth and the emotions associated with it have won out, yet again, over your rational mind. This is all part of a cycle that can’t be short-circuited simply by counting calories or skipping dessert:
SOURCE OF SELF WORTH
↓
CHANGE IN BEHAVIORS
↓
CHANGE IN EATING BEHAVIORS
↓
CHANGE IN HORMONES
↓
CHANGE IN BODY SHAPE
Traditional diet programs focus on how your eating behaviors affect your body—change your behavior, change your body shape—but they fail to consider the beginning of the behavior cycle. Yes, if you eat nutrient-dense foods that rebalance your hormones and help your body function properly, you will lose weight. But if you don’t change how you use food (e.g., as a reward, distraction, desensitizer, comfort, or punishment), and more important, why you use food in this way, you will eventually revert to eating the same way you always have, ending up frustrated because you “know better.” You can’t master step three in the cycle until you understand how you got there. You need to start at step one—understanding where you source your self-worth from—if you want to have a balanced relationship with food and yourself.
Although every woman is unique, my work with my female clients has helped me identify certain patterns within each archetype. Specifically, women who source their self-worth from the same place tend to approach food in similar ways. In practical terms this means that, if they are out of balance and using food as a coping mechanism, they tend to suffer from the same physical imbalances and gain weight in the same way.
This discovery—the link between self-worth and body shape—made me realize that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all diet plan. Women need customized programs in order to address their distinct goals and challenges from both a physical and a psychological perspective. That is why I developed the Archetype Model, a road map of what to eat for weight loss, vitality, hormonal balance, and an overall sense of well-being. At its core, this model, which has become the foundation for how I treat all of my female clients, is about understanding why you eat the way you do (by identifying your archetype) and how that behavior affects your body. Then you adopt a food plan designed specifically for your archetype. The model also gives you the tools to examine how you came to source your self-worth in a particular way so you can free yourself from the hold that these beliefs had on you. The Archetype Model addresses the body and the mind, and it’s all backed up by science and psychology.
While I designed the archetype meal plans speci
fically for women who want to lose weight, the ultimate goal of the Archetype Model is to dissolve the negative attributes associated with your archetype and integrate the best traits of all of the archetypes into your life. Every woman has the positive traits of all four archetypes within her, but because her dominant archetype can take over her life, she may not have expressed these positive traits in decades. A highly intellectual Wonder Woman, for example, may not value the intuition of the Ethereal, and therefore not nourish or cultivate her intuitive side. Nonetheless, intuition still exists within this Wonder Woman. As she decouples her sense of self-worth from her accomplishments, she will have the mind space to be able to nourish her intuition and any other traits that may have taken a backseat. It doesn’t matter what your archetype is; when you cultivate your nurturing, playful, spiritual, and assertive side, you will become a more layered and balanced woman. You will stress less and life will flow with more grace and ease.
The Archetype Model draws on my knowledge of functional medicine, nutrition, and cognitive behavioral therapy to address the connections among our emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and physical body. But it is also inspired by my own experience struggling with weight loss. I grew up in one of Australia’s prettiest beachside towns where all of the men and women were tanned, toned, and beautiful. While I was never clinically overweight, my body had curves and I didn’t look like my leggy best friend, who was a swimwear model. Having come to believe that I would never be the prettiest, I decided that I would be smart instead. Over time, I began to view my achievements—academic and otherwise—as the barometer of my success and, consequently, my value as a woman. This behavior carried over into my adult life, and, even after studying nutrition for four years and knowing exactly what to eat, I unconsciously used food as a reward for working so hard. If you’re a Wonder Woman, you will know this feeling all too well: the need to mindlessly eat something as you respond to the flood of emails. The food made me feel better about what I had to do; that is, keep working. It wasn’t until I realized how my desire for success (a.k.a. my source of self-worth) was influencing my relationship with food that I was finally able to break this seemingly innocuous habit and achieve my desired weight and body shape.