Submitted to veg-raw by: Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]>

I'd like to respond again to the debate here concerning whether the
persistence of cravings on a diet is to be attributed to the diet itself or
to warped early psychological development and/or physical nourishment.

There are several things that bother me about the way that blame tends to
be laid at the feet of psychological sabotage due to childhood traumas.
First, when normally invoked, this reason contradicts what the person
giving it usually says they believe as the basis for their efforts with
diet in the first place, and amounts to a convenient flip-flop in
philosophical stance from one moment to the next. As a rule (though there
are exceptions), people into radical diets will say that their diet will
heal just about anything (typical black-and-white thinking) or at least
have the largest effect.

But if they don't get the hoped-for results, it's THEN that you hear them
conveniently resorting to the excuse that "well, you're expecting too much
of diet--psychological factors stemming from damage I received as a child
could be responsible for my cravings." :-O This is the reason given at the
time, at least. But when you talk to them later, they are back focusing
exclusively on their diet :-p under the implicit assumption if they just
get the details right, their cravings will go away, belying that their
actual belief is they put the most faith in diet. A good general rule of
thumb is: If you want to know what people really think, look at what they
DO, not what they SAY.

If they really believed psychological traumas were at the root of their
problems, then you would also hear them yakking about that primal-scream
therapy =:-O they are currently enrolled in and what results they are
getting out of it, or some other mode of serious psychological healing work
they are investing concerted effort towards. But do you hear most of them
talking about applying that to their food problems? No--or so seldom it
hardly registers on the sniffle-boohoo-psychological-catharsis meter. :-)
In my view, then, truth is, most of the time this amounts to nothing more
than convenient compartmentalization of the conflicts in their thinking to
preserve belief in their ideal diet in the face of contrary results
(cravings, etc.). Thus, my feeling is that most don't really believe the
rationalization themselves. :-8

The next thing that bothers me is that as normally presented, the excuse
"my mummy and daddy did it to me" overlooks that while psychological
problems may have begun at some point in one's past, they CONTINUE because
of behavioral patterns that are maintaining and displaying themselves in
the present. The past is the past. Grow up! :-O :-) If we are to overcome
psychological games we are still involved in, we need to focus on what we
are getting out of them NOW. While insights into the past may help us see
and more easily recognize similar patterns we have carried into the
present, we still have to deal with them in the present.

My feeling is that habitually directing attention back to memories of the
past displaces one's attention from the areas of the psyche in which the
problems currently display themselves. To me, this is just another way of
avoiding the problem. The problems wouldn't continue to display themselves
now if they didn't have an ongoing support network of reinforcements now.
If we really think psychological problems are partially responsible for
substandard dietary behavior, then let's focus on THAT now and quit blaming
the past which is over and done with. If we don't look for how the problem
is currently sustaining itself in our current behavioral complexes, then I
am going to maintain we are just making excuses to shift our attention
elsewhere and continue to avoid the real problem, and just another
rationalization.

What is the real psychological problem sabotaging people's dietary
behavior/ results? In my view it is that people are afraid of real change.
=:-o It is their current fears that sabotage their current behavior.
Behavior is tied to identity, and it is in the area of identity that people
are most afraid of change. Because food idealists define so much of their
identity as based in the philosophy of food they follow, they are going to
resist behaving in ways that don't conform to that, even if they are not
getting favorable results, or still experience cravings no matter how long
they have been on the diet. (I would in fact argue the longer the cravings
continue, the more likely it is they are related to the current diet rather
than anything in the past.) They want to define the permissible changes
ahead of time that they are willing to make, which is not true change at
all.

True change is different. It means you are willing to do whatever is
necessary in response to the demands of the situation without defining the
scope of that change in advance. True change is being willing to embrace
any unexpected or unanticipated behavior that may prove valuable even if it
disagrees with preconceptions you may have had. You don't always know ahead
of time what it will be.

Thus my feeling is psychology does indeed have a lot to do with it, but
from a completely different angle. Instead of past traumas having "done"
the most damage, my feeling is it is current hangups continuing to "do" the
damaging on an ongoing basis that have the most effect, and that result in
the most cumulative damage over time.

Granted that damage may have been done in the past, but even if one offers
the belief that it may not be completely reversible in defense of their
failure to succeed, most natural hygienists/ instinctos/ raw-foodists,
etc., would not be engaged in these dietary programs if they did not in
fact strongly believe the opposite: that they will indeed turn most if not
all their physical and even psychological problems around. And if not, most
still quite strongly believe that even if they cannot eliminate all their
problems, they can certainly expect to see them *continue to lessen* over
time. Thus if the problems do not lessen or get any better, to then blame
the past when the cravings still continue (or even increase, as we
sometimes see) when following one's ideal program is to my way of thinking
facetious.

People may say that emotional self-sabotage can short-circuit strong
intellectual intentions to eat right, instead of diet. However, such a
definition of self-sabotage is based on defining "eating right" as
attempting to conform to a preconceived definition of what is right to eat,
and any change from that as "deviant" or self-sabotaging behavior. Maybe
however, what is perceived as "self-sabotage" is just the body's feedback
mechanisms signalling that your definition of "right eating" is in error.

For example, often I see people complaining they have succumbed to cravings
again or gone on an overeating binge, and then you see what it really means
is they have been eating mostly high-roughage low-density raw foods and are
"confessing" to having eaten a whole head of lettuce and two pints of
cherry tomatoes and all this other raw vegetable salad. My response would
be: hell, it's no wonder you're stuffing yourself! Your body's crying out
for more concentrated carbohydrates than what you can get without eating
two washer and dryer loads full of lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers, for
god's sake. So I see quite a bit of the "self-sabotage" talk as often
describing very understandable compensations the body may be trying to
make.

How can we know what is or is not a craving, however, when we bang our
heads against the wall hoping indefinitely for *future* results instead of
trying something different to see if the results will change *now* (or at
least see beginning trends within the reasonable timeframe a month or two
or three)? Let's say that your cravings are now less--but you still have
some--on your "ideal" diet than your old standard junk diet, but the
cravings do not get any better. Are you going to just stop there, and wait
and wait and wait for them to lessen? At what point will you finally decide
to make another change, if they don't? In some cases, I see people waiting
2-3 years or more with little or no change, and continuing to whine :-(```
about all these things without making any real changes.

People may get into ideal diets at first because of the idea the diet will
get them superior results. And for however many--whatever the number
is--they do. But if within a reasonable initial timeframe they don't get
results, they may (in fact, they usually *do*) begin operating from faith
that it *eventually will* even in the face of continued lack of (or merely
stagnant) results. Thus, reasoning based on results is suspended and
eventually the other reasons for continuing with the diet, which have to do
with the way one's identity is fed by it ("I'm a pure earth-based
instinctive natural hygienic raw-food eater living in tune with higher
planes and this is the only right way to eat and I am setting an example
for the rest of the planet" :-) ) predominate, often indefinitely.

Once you begin resorting to faith instead of results, this means your
identity has now become invested in the diet. Once that happens, you
automatically have no choice but to densensitize yourself to, or
rationalize away, results that aren't what you want. This then is what
characterizes psychological self-sabotage in my book: being so heavily
psychologically identified with a system of food approvals and disapprovals
(and the philosophy that ties it all together as the all-important psychic
"glue") as part of "who you are," that the psychological imperative starts
going in the direction of decoupling results from their role as corrective
feedback, instead of in the direction of making results your key arbiter to
enable you to evolve your belief system into better congruence with the
pattern of results you experience. In other words, you use your beliefs to
*reinterpret* the feedback so as not to threaten the belief system. Thus it
becomes insulated from the potential for change that one fears.

One *can* test the idea that past cravings are responsible for one's
failures on a supposedly ideal diet. You just try a different diet than the
one you're currently on (as a "control"), or look at your past junk diet as
an initial "control." (Usually, however, it means you would have to go
ahead and try a different diet than your current "ideal" one, given the
situation we have been discussing here where cravings still remain on one's
current "ideal" diet.) But you have to be *willing* to do this. And my
observation is many people on ideal diets just aren't willing to do so.

In tying this up, I want to say that I am not denying that psychological
problems may contribute to problems/cravings on a diet. They probably do in
some cases. However, I think they are overused as explanations, and unless
one can first rule out the above syndromes which in my observation are
fairly prevalent among people I am in contact with, then it is more likely
they are rationalizations subconsciously designed to protect a belief
system one is heavily identified with psychologically instead.

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]> Wichita, KS