Skyler Madison and the Nirvana Diet™ by Dr. Lewis Mehl Madrona
Skyler Madison has been hard at work on the Nirvana diet for 10 years. Within her office in Manhattan, New York City, she has worked consistently with clients to reduce weight. In her search for “what works”, she consistently refined her approach with each successive client. What is this approach and why is it unique?
First, Skyler focuses upon eating real food. At first this seems trivial, but no on closer inspection, it’s quite a concept. So much of America’s obesity epidemic and its food industry is built upon foods that have many calories but little nutrition. Michael Moore’s popular movie, Supersize Me, brought this home to many Americans. Trans-fats promote inflammation and are associated with heart disease and other adverse health conditions. Yet, trans-fats fill the fast foods of America. Skyler’s insistence upon real food eliminates empty calories, which is her first step toward managing eating.
Within the concept of real food, Skyler moves forward to integrate eating patterns that are similar to indigenous diets. These include focusing upon greens, fruits, and protein over carbohydrates and fats. She increases intake of carbohydrates with increasing amounts of exercise. This simple idea is not unique, but Skyler’s ways of helping people to manage their appetite and cravings are.
Skyler discovered that a combination of breathing exercises, hypnosis, and assisting people to change their relationship to food and their beliefs about food. She teaches people meditation techniques to use to recognize when they’re full. She uses affirmations to help people break old habits of eating and build new patterns. People learn to examine their hunger to determine if it is for food or some other need that we can confuse with food.
Skyler’s approach is supported by contemporary neuroscience, which speaks about brain maps that interpret and locate sensations. The best example of this comes from phantom limb pain in which the part of the brain previously assigned to the missing limb is recruited by a neighboring brain area to join its map. In a classic example, a person experienced an intense itch in a missing limb. He learned that he cough scratch an area on his face and it would relieve the itch. In a similar way, the area of the brain assigned to register and interpret hunger can be recruited by neighboring brain regions to misinterpret other feelings as hunger.
Some of us interpret sadness as hunger; others, anger. The range of possibilities is as large as the range of emotions. That person now registers sadness or anger as hungry. Their brain has been rewired and remains rewired through force of habit. Only by interrupting this habit, such as Skyler does with affirmations, can we build new habits, which is much of what I see Skyler doing.
Skyler uses cognitive therapy like techniques to help people face food triggers, fears, and cravings. She allows them to internalize a change not only about how they eat but also how they feel about themselves, seeing self-evaluation and the accompanying emotions as important in how people regulate their appetite. Tracking caloric intake helps people to learn about appropriate portion size.
The Nirvana Diet™ helps people think and behave as a thinner, “lighter” person and make peace with the internal voices that lead people to overeat. Skyler uses the familiar Hindu word nirvana to mean freedom from, or extinction of attachment to, desires – in this case, food. Through her work, for Skyler, where weight loss is concerned, nirvana means the state of peaceful freedom that is achieved when people reduce their attachment to the non-nutritive associations with food including the gnawing feeling of wanting more than is needed. Nirvana also refers to the peacefulness that comes from learning “mind training” techniques to reduce or eliminate the desire to eat non-nutritive food or consume more food than the body requires.
This feeling of nirvana increases as one becomes more self-contented and self-regulating without feeling deprived. The sense of nirvana increases as the destructive, self-deprecating internal dialogue that harms the self-esteem stops. It increases when we acknowledge that increasing the capacity to forego immediate gratification—without feeling deprived, which is possible and is an essential quality to living a more fulfilling life. It increases when we are satisfied with what we have as opposed to being driven by what we think we need and want.
The Nirvana Diet™ helps people to cultivate an awareness that allows then to be mindful about their eating. It helps people to find freedom from emotional and physical attachment to excessive consumption of food and ultimately to their attachment to other excess desires. Skyler mentions the Buddha who said that wanting reality to be as we think it should be, rather than how it is, creates unhappiness. Unhappiness can lead to an inappropriate relationship to food, which is a vicious cycle that Skyler helps people break.
The Nirvana Diet™ also takes into account recent scientific awareness about diet and food, including managing the “weight loss zone,” eliminating grains in cases of sensitivity, food allergies, or celiac disease, counteracting metabolic syndrome by consuming lower glycemic index foods, and managing caloric intake. Skyler’s discussions of these areas are up to date and useful.
In summary, I strongly recommend The Nirvana Diet™ as a sound approach to nutrition, exercise, lifestyle management, and learning how to be happy, that breaks people from their slavery to excessive consumption and helps them to life in a sustainable, reasonable manner, for their health and wellbeing as well as that of the larger society.
Dr. Lewis Mehl Madrona M.D., PhD