Kymber Maulden
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

Hey Karen,

It’s interesting because I have not had the above experience with the Paleo community which you describe…. and disorderly eating is something that I struggled with for many years in my teens and early twenties.

Although I can relate to much of the content you covered in regards to how disorderly eating patterns develop and what they can look like, I experienced this in the vegan/raw food community when I was younger and it was only exasperated by my own serious metabolic imbalances.

When my health hit rock bottom and I was required to eat meat again, I did take some level of extremism into my omnivorous healing journal as well. This led me to see how fad dieting is often just a cultural extension of more severe eating disorders, and there is often an underlying biochemical issue such as gut and/or hormone imbalance and severe glucose instability. These issues will largely be there regardless of what dogmatic approach you take and if you’re someone who is not as susceptible to dogma — paleo could potentially be the healthiest template for healing autoimmunity, etc.

Perhaps part of the reason that I’d never attribute my experience with paleo to involve any psychological lack or obsession….is that I’d already completed that struggle earlier in life with dietary dogma and so was strong enough in myself when I found paleo/ancestral health that it only enhanced my healing by offering a larger evolutionary lens to look through. Also, I have to note that when we have serious limitations placed on our lives from chronic illness, a restrictive diet can actually be quite liberating if it gives us our health back. If we’re ABLE to experience it this way.

I know that there are definitely “paleo” extremists out there, yet there are also a lot of wise people in the extended community whom would not advocate diet shaming in the ways which you describe above. As a nutritionist and health coach myself, I’m interested in the intersection of culturally-endorsed unhealthy behaviors and the underlying biochemical components which go along with these. Fad dieting, in general, tends to be a bad idea — for psychological reasons as much as for reasons relating to bio-individuality. However, “paleo” for a lot of people (myself included) is not a fad diet — it’s an evolutionary lens through which to create a personalized protocol which works for each of us individually.

From reading your above article, I’m convinced that paleo didn’t create your eating disorder, fad dieting created your eating disorder because there was fertile ground from which it could grow anyway. It could have been just as easily created through veganism if you’d combined the same perfect mixture of serious chronic health vulnerabilities with an extremist approach to healing said vulnerabilities.

I respect your experience and would not wish an eating disorder upon anyone. However, I disagree with your perspective that paleo is to blame. In it’s essence, paleo is nothing but a bunch of anthropological observations regarding the diseases of civilization. What one makes out of it and takes away from it is quite relative.

Kymber Maulden

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Nutrition Consultant. Fledgling Science Nerd. Exploring ideas that dont always look pretty https://www.kymbermaulden.com/