Story of a Food Addict

It always happens eventually. I’ll be sitting across from a friend in a restaurant after months of eating healthy and getting fit. I may have even lost noticeable amount of weight, which is impressive for me. Sometimes I’ll start it, sometimes they will, but suddenly my friend will turn into a pusher.

“I’m getting the chicken tenders.”
“They’re good, I used to love them, but I can’t eat them anymore.”
“Oh common, you should go ahead and order them. You’ve doing so well and you look great. One serving of chicken tenders isn’t going to hurt.”
“I guess you’re right, yeah I’ll order the chicken tenders (or have a slice of pizza, or have a chocolate).”

Here lies the secret of my failure. The backbone of my yo-yo dieting. The incident that begins a horrible guilt-ridden downward spiral back to where I started.

I am a binge eater and a food addict. A lot of people laugh when I tell them I’m a food addict. Society has not wrapped their heads around the concept of food addiction. Many people discredit this because we need food to survive; how can you be addicted to something like that?

Honestly I’m not 100% sure, and I’m the one affected by it. My best guess is in this society filled with foods that are dense and rich and easy to come by; people like me stopped using food to survive and started using it to medicate themselves. Eventually those people began to rely on the food to get them through life. If this comes with weight gain, like it did for me, the social isolation becomes a whole other reason to use food to fill the void.

My personal struggle with food addiction was joined (as it often is for people) with binge eating. I didn’t just want to medicate, I needed to eat as much of this food as I could. When this behavior made me feel bad, I would just do it again and feel worse. This cycle would continue until I’d hit a bottom of sorts (usually frequent stomach aches or chest pains) and I would start getting healthy and staying away from those bad foods. I’d meet with some success until I ate what I call a “trigger food” and eventually, like a house of cards tumbling down, I would be right where I started again and feeling more like a failure.

To me an addiction is a behavior or behaviors that you have no control over that affect your life and your health negatively and if left unchecked could even lead to your death. Yet I think the word “control” is where the debate comes up with food. People who don’t share my problem can not understand why I can’t just dig in and practice self control. Why can’t I just eat one slice of pizza without my whole world falling apart?

After my last big burn out, I started reframing my thinking. I used other addictions as a framework for understanding and dealing with mine. Just like an alcoholic cannot have one beer, no matter how “good” he’s been, I cannot have certain foods, no matter how long I’ve been healthy.

I started by making a list of trigger foods. Trigger foods are those foods that I cannot eat under any circumstances because I cannot control how I take them in. For instance, I can’t have one piece of cake, because even if it doesn’t happen right there and then, (I don’t binge in front of people) I will eat an entire cake in one sitting. I noticed by the way, almost all the foods on the list are high in fats, salts and sugars, usually all three.

Next, I thought of other ways to reward myself that do not include food. I could buy a new shirt, or download a new song for my IPod, or take myself out to a movie. Or get my nails done.

Next, I told those people who spend the most time with me what I was doing and asked that they not encourage me to eat these foods, even on holidays and other special occasions. My sister even asked for the list of my trigger foods, so that she doesn’t serve any of them when I’m at her house. I can’t stress this enough, because success comes from the support of those closest to you.

Finally, I’ve come up with ways to deal with temptations. Most of mine are exercise oriented. I find if I dance for a few minutes or play and interactive game, the craving is gone by the time I’m done. Also, don’t let yourself get really hungry. Hunger leads to bad decisions.

I know eventually I’ll be starving at the mall, or I’ll find myself in the restaurant again. But this time when I’m told “You have to indulge sometimes,” or,
“Just once won’t hurt.” I’ll be armed and let them know that I do reward myself, just not with food.