by Dana James
As the meal plans in this book are designed specifically to help women lose weight and lose fat from the areas that bother them the most, I’ve provided strict guidelines on portion size and serving frequency for each archetype. For instance, a Nurturer will benefit from limiting her intake of carbohydrates to decrease her insulin levels, thereby shrinking fat cells from all over her body. On the other hand, the naturally thin Ethereal can eat more unrefined carbohydrates than any of the other archetypes because these carbs help to free up more estrogen, which Ethereals tend to have too little of. A Wonder Woman with excess cortisol should avoid common food sensitivities, like gluten and dairy, since these act as physical stressors on the body and add to her already high stress load.
As you adjust to the new eating behaviors you will naturally adopt as you follow your archetype’s meal plan and change your relationship with food, you may find that you can eat more without gaining weight. The goal here is not just to get you to a particular dress size, it’s also to reexamine your approach to food so you come to see it as a source of nourishment instead of a source of fear, reward, comfort, or distraction.
One other side note: if you continue to have problems losing weight or find yourself suffering from some other physical ailment, consult with a functional medicine practitioner who can run tests to see what else might be going on in your body. While the archetype-specific meal plans are designed to take into consideration all parts of the body that can affect weight gain—thyroid, adrenals, gut microbiome, inflammation, hormones, and so on—you might have a specific condition that requires a more customized treatment. I trust that this book will help you no matter your physiology, but sometimes a one-to-one consultation is needed to make some small, subtle adjustments. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Now that you’ve identified your dominant archetype, it’s time to learn more about the personality traits and behavioral patterns associated with her so you can better understand how your sense of self-worth is influencing your behaviors. You’ll discover how these thoughts and patterns affect your body shape as well as what foods you can eat to rebalance your hormones and decrease body fat.
Beyond that, when you read the other archetype chapters, you’ll also come away with a greater understanding of the women in your life. When you know your mother’s and daughter’s archetypes, you’ll know how best to respond to them because you’re aware of what motivates them and what makes them vulnerable. Personalities clash and we get annoyed with people, particularly those close to us; but by understanding them, we won’t take it personally and thus won’t get so upset by the situation. By offering kindness instead of judgment, you create more cohesion and solidarity among women and strengthen the power of all women.
CHAPTER 2
The Nurturer
Paige is vivacious, warm, and caring. She loves to be there for everyone—and she is! She’s an event planner who gives her all to her clients—even the difficult, demanding ones whom she never seems able to please. She wants everyone to be happy, but her constant people-pleasing is taking its toll. She feels exhausted, bloated, and constipated. She’s also carrying an extra thirty pounds of body fat and can’t seem to get rid of it no matter how healthy she eats. (Though, if she’s honest, she’s been mindlessly eating sweets to comfort herself.) Her friends tell her to take time for herself, but how is she supposed to say no to someone who needs something from her? Paige is the quintessential Nurturer.
THE NURTURER AT HER CROWN: EMPATHETIC AND DEPENDABLE
The Nurturer derives her sense of power from her ability to care for others. She is known for her dependability, loyalty, and thoughtfulness and will drop whatever she is doing to be there for family and friends. She’ll take a three a.m. phone call from a bereft girlfriend because she wants to be there for her. She’ll bake her partner’s favorite lemon and olive oil cake just because. She’ll surprise you with little gifts simply because they “made her think of you.” Nurturers instinctively know what makes people happy, and they have a unique ability to make those around them feel special and supported.
Nurturers are empathetic and kind in a way that would be draining for any other archetype. A Nurturer doesn’t need a reason to be generous; it’s in her DNA—and her upbringing. The Nurturer is not a pushover, however. She’s fiercely loyal, and if you upset those close to her, she will unfailingly protect them and you will feel her fury! The Nurturer is like the mother hen protecting her chicks, swooping in to guard her loved ones from harm.
When Nurturers are at their crown, they inspire others to be more loving, peaceful, and generous. We want Nurturers to be our mother figures—or mothers. We want them to hold us, care for us, and protect us. We want to nestle into the safety of their embrace and be warmed by their unconditional love and acceptance. Nurturers are nourishment. Nurturers are comforting.
Notable Nurturers include Oprah, Christina Hendricks, Adele, Jessica Alba, Amma “the hugging saint,” Mother Teresa, Melanie Hamilton from Gone With the Wind, and your best friend, who is always there for you no matter what is going on in her life.
THE BELIEF SYSTEM: “I AM WORTHY BECAUSE OF HOW I CARE FOR YOU”
Caring for others is how the Nurturer sources her self-worth. She will often choose to become a healer, social worker, nurse, teacher, or personal assistant, as these careers offer the most opportunity to care for people. Not disappointing others is so fundamental for the Nurturer that she can feel sick to her stomach if she thinks she has upset someone. She can ruminate and ruminate.
This belief system can show up in very subtle ways. My client Alicia found herself bewildered one day after ordering a bagel at a deli instead of the omelet she’d planned on. When she told me the ordering line was long, I knew what had happened; the omelet would take longer to make than the bagel, and she couldn’t stand the thought of holding others up—even strangers—so she unconsciously sabotaged her diet without even realizing why. Her Nurturer had hijacked her conscious mind.
As much as the Nurturer prides herself on giving, she can find it extremely challenging to receive help, compliments, or just about anything that suggests she is herself in need of nurturing. I suspected my friend Natalie was a Nurturer. When we were away at a yoga retreat together, which she helped organize, I asked her if she had booked herself a massage. “Oh no,” she said. “I want to make sure that everyone who wants a massage has one first, and then if there’s still space, I’ll take that spot.” Natalie wasn’t being grand or selfless but rather displaying the Nurturer’s core belief: “You before me. I’m happy when you’re happy.” But Nurturers, like all of us, need to be cared for, too.
While being a parent necessitates nurturing, the state of motherhood doesn’t define a woman as a Nurturer. To be the Nurturer, she must value her entire being on how she cares for people. If taking time out for herself feels self-indulgent, then she’s likely a Nurturer, and an out-of-balance one at that.
CHILDHOOD PATTERNS: NEGLECTED OR CODEPENDENT
A Nurturer may have been raised by a nurturing mother who instilled these feminine qualities in her daughter. If this was done in a healthy, non-codependent way, the young girl will have grown up to be a Nurturer whose crown is placed firmly on her head. This woman likes to see people happy and it makes her feel good to know she had a hand in that happiness. Her nurturing nature comes from a place of love rather than a sense of guilt or a need to be accepted by others.
All too often, however, the Nurturer was raised in an environment where her own mother’s nourishment was absent due to work, a sick family member, a troubled marriage, an illness, drug use, alcoholism, or simply a lack of warmth. Because she was deprived of the maternal attention young girls need, she learned to fill this void by protecting and nurturing others, essentially taking on the role of the mother she lacked. Although the recipients of her nurturing could not make up for the failings of her own mother, she depended on them to give her the acceptance she so cra
ved. By showing love to others, she hoped to get it in return.
Alexandria grew up with an alcoholic father and distraught mother who unintentionally deprived her daughter of love and affection. Alexandria responded by tending to her mother’s needs and protecting her from her father’s angry outbursts. Alexandria came to view her mother’s attention as the reward she got for caring for and protecting her. Her self-worth became tied to pleasing others. Alexandria became a Nurturer.
Kerry’s story is similar. She grew up in a single-parent household with two younger siblings. Her mother worked as a substitute teacher so she could support the children but was emotionally distant and felt uncomfortable expressing affection. Kerry wanted motherly love and thus felt betrayed. She sought solace in nurturing her siblings, which created a subconscious imprint that nurturing equals worthiness. Kerry, too, became a Nurturer.
If the Nurturer becomes a mother, she may overcompensate for the lack of maternal affection she experienced as a child by putting her children’s needs before her own to the point of burnout. Or she might inadvertently develop codependent relationships with them, smothering them to the point that they feel pressured and constricted. This can cause her children to retreat from the Nurturer in order to escape the cloying affection and guilt cycle she has unintentionally created. In her misguided efforts to earn affection, the Nurturer may end up alienating those closest to her.
OUT OF BALANCE: “I DON’T WANT TO BE A BURDEN”
While a Nurturer derives pleasure and intimacy from giving attention to others, her positive traits of compassion and giving can become perverted when they are used as a tool for attention and self-worth. As with all archetypes, the coping strategy is either an amplification of or a withdrawal from these traits, and she can swing between these two extremes depending on the situation.
In the amplification, an out-of-balance Nurturer puts everyone else’s needs before her own. She can give and give to others until she’s depleted and broken. Saying “no” can feel like a betrayal of who she is, and she would rather exhaust herself than give someone a reason to think she was selfish. She can’t prioritize where to spend her time, energy, and care, and the slightest flicker of upset in someone’s eye will send her into healer mode. Her unconditional generosity becomes a kind of armor; “If I give and give, you’ll see how loving I am and it will be impossible for you to reject me.” This is not a conscious thought but one lodged deep in the Nurturer’s psyche.
In the withdrawal, the Nurturer learns to hide. “If I just stay out of the way and don’t make my presence felt, I won’t be noticed, and I won’t be a burden.” These thoughts permeated her childhood and still show up today. The care the Nurturer desired as a child is still missing from her life. Where is the love for her? Where is the tenderness that she needs? Where is her nourishment? The Nurturer has deflected it and unconsciously set up patterns to make sure she is needed and missed when she’s not around.
THE NURTURER ARCHETYPE: FIRST CHAKRA
The first chakra (root chakra) connects us to the earth. It makes us feel that we’re part of the tribe. The first chakra is located near the rectum and is associated with the elimination of waste, negative thinking, and feeling isolated. It represents survival and physical and emotional security. When the Nurturer creates codependent relationships or stays in them for the sake of not disrupting the status quo, she’s operating out of a destabilized first chakra. Her safety and survival are at stake. We can all feel a first chakra imbalance, but the Nurturer feels it more keenly.
Red is the color of the first chakra, so as a Nurturer you can use this color spectrum to rebalance yourself. Eat vibrant red foods such as organic watermelon, tomatoes, red bell peppers, guava, rhubarb, and beets to help free yourself from negative and self-doubting thoughts. Wear a bright red lipstick or paint your toenails lobster red when you want to feel more connected. Wear a red dress on a date to assert yourself. (There’s a reason why red stilettos are associated with power: they connect the wearer to the first chakra and help stake your claim!) You can also wear red jewels to give yourself the strength to say no yet still feel part of the tribe.
EATING BEHAVIOR: “I’M AFRAID TO BE EMPTY”
Because the Nurturer can de-prioritize her own needs for the sake of others’, she can neglect herself—including her health. She can feel that she doesn’t have the time to cook herself a nutritious meal, particularly if it means a different meal from the rest of the family, let alone exercise, meditate, or get a proper night’s sleep. The longer this goes on, the more she disconnects from her body. She learns to ignore her own hunger and physical symptoms. She gains weight but is too overwhelmed with the needs of her family, friends, and work colleagues to be concerned enough to change her eating. An out-of-balance Nurturer may only notice there’s a problem after she experiences a health scare—being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, a prediabetic warning from her physician, or seeing the scale hit the two-hundred-pound mark. However, unless she addresses how she values herself, any change she makes will be short-lived as she reverts to her protective patterns of being needed.
Since feeding others is a universal form of caring, it’s not surprising that food becomes the Nurturer’s solace when she needs to be comforted. If she hasn’t taken the time to understand the motivations behind her behaviors, she can feel empty and unconsciously seek to fill the void left by the absence of unconditional love she perceived in her childhood, through food. More than any other archetype, how a Nurturer eats is reflective of her emotional state. She will comfort-eat, binge-eat, get caught in addictive food patterns, and struggle in social situations. At shared meals, she can pile her plate high, fearful that she may not get enough. She’ll prepare dinner for her children or partner but forget about herself. When she’s left to her own devices, she’ll eat cereal, yogurt, or whatever her children left behind on their dinner plates rather than devote time to cooking for herself.
A Nurturer may also be a secret eater. Sometimes it’s so secret, she won’t even admit it to herself. My client Angie would buy cookies “for the kids” and hide them on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet so she couldn’t see them or reach them without a stool. One day her daughter discovered her standing on the stool eating cookies and said, “Mommy, if you don’t want to eat them, why don’t you store them even higher so you really can’t reach them?” The innocence of her daughter’s observation snapped Angie out of her bizarre (but not uncommon) behavior.
A Nurturer can struggle with a diet. When her comfort foods are removed, her emotions will surface and, if she doesn’t have skills to process those emotions, she can feel overwhelmed and go back to eating because it calms her. The Nurturer is the archetype most likely to complain that she feels addicted to certain foods. However, it’s more likely that she’s addicted to the act of eating. Eating is her pacifier.
If you are a Nurturer, you must be willing to recognize the emotions you’re trying to hide in order to find success on a diet. You need to learn to sit with the discomfort of these feelings and not use food to console yourself. It’s not the food, per se, that’s the issue; it’s the unwillingness to examine the uncomfortable emotions. Once you no longer use food to block the emotion, you’ll gain insight into why you’ve been viscerally pulled toward certain foods.
My client Beverly ran a swimming pool company and felt financially responsible for the forty employees, most of whom were family. She didn’t trust anyone to assist her and worked until ten p.m. most nights and weekends, although she resented the long hours. Hard as she tried to swallow the anger, her physical body let it show. When we first met, Beverly weighed four hundred pounds. When I asked her to remove certain foods from her house, she did so reluctantly. One morning she discovered a trail of bread crumbs leading from her kitchen out to her car, and although she had no recollection of doing so, she realized that sometime during the night she’d eaten a dozen rolls meant for an office p
arty that she’d left in the backseat.
Simply telling Beverly what not to eat was not enough to help her lose weight. She needed to come to terms with the frustration and resentment she was feeling and trust that asking for help wasn’t a burden on someone else. She needed to learn how to honestly express herself. If you are a Nurturer who has been programmed to believe, “I need to take care of everyone,” this can be a profound shift in your thinking.
THE CHALLENGE FOR NURTURER: IT’S SAFE TO SAY NO
As the Nurturer fears offending people, saying no doesn’t always feel safe. Since she may have grown up in a household with absent or troubled parents, saying yes to chores—doing the laundry, making dinner, watching siblings—was how she earned attention. She believes, erroneously, that if she doesn’t do something, it won’t get done. As there were rarely people she could rely upon as a child, she doesn’t trust others to be there for her today. This belief has become so ingrained into her subconscious that she still says yes to almost any favor or task asked of her.