Getting a handle on my food addiction

Hi everyone, so I wanted to connect with you all about a frustrating part of my life that I seem to have no control over. For as long as I can remember, I've been addicted to food. I use it for emotional comfort and also just because I like the feeling of feeling "full".

Over the past several years I have taken various steps to get over this addiction, but to no avail. I've had some success: I've fasted for 4 days at a time. Done one week and even two week juice fasts. Last year I was living by myself and got to limit the amount of food I had around, and I lost 60 or so pounds.

But I'm living with people right now and unfortunately I can't control what kind of food is around... which is too much for my willpower. I've struggled this entire year to get a hold of my eating habits... and always failing. I can't seem to make any progress on this problem.

The food I binge on isn't even any good. Usually bread with vegan butter on it or peanut butter sandwiches. I also eat a lot of hot sauce.

My goal: eat two meals a day (vegan), completely cutting out grains and sugar.

I would appreciate any advice you all may have. Has any one gone through this? Any one currently struggling with this? Tips on how to stay on my diet.

Thanks in advance for all your advice, and I wish you all the best on your rebooting journeys!

 

Well hey, I'm struggling to gain weight. (
I've been there at the right weight before, then went down again, but I guess it can be done again, must be done. Wishing you the best Friend balancing things around.

 

You have to start small. If you're not already, start a food journal. Keeping up with your food/calories will help you make better decisions. Log everything you eat--everything. This will give you a good picture of the type# of calories you're eating.

You have to tackle this as any other addiction. You are self medicating through food. When you want to eat, ask yourself, why? Are you really hungry? Or are you angry, lonely, tired, upset or anxious?

I'm a big advocate of fasting. One major reason is that it teaches you to figure out when you're really hungry, vs when you just "want" food. However, i think you have to get what you're eating under control before fasting will truly help. Also, I do a daily fast. No breakfast, lunch at 1pm and no food after 8 pm.

Also you're trying to do a lot at one time: cut caloric intake, eat only two meals a day, cut out grains, cut out sugar and eat vegan. That's a lot of stress on your body and mind and a shitload of willpower needed to do it.

Better to pick just one thing and do it for two months, until it is a habit, then add the next thing.

It will be hard with roommates having tempting food in the house but you have to train yourself to ignore it. The key is getting to the root of your addiction and WHY you eat more than you need to. Maybe you can setup your own private pantry with your food separate? Talk to you roomies. Be open with them. Tell them you don't need them policing you, but you don't want them openly tempting you either.

Also, I don't see anything about exercise in this post. Exercise is good b/c it's a healthy habit that encourages other healthy habits (like eating good food). It also helps your body get the metabolism where it needs to be. So do exercise. Whatever you like and are comfortable doing. Just make sure you sweat and get that hart rate up. If you're trying to lose weight, I'm an advocate of strength training.

Also keep in mind fasting works different for everybody. Some respond some don't. For me it works well and I like the convenience of cutting out an entire meal.

So here's your plan

1. Start food journaling.
2. Exercise 4-5 times per week
3. Start controlling calories better
4. Curb binge eating
5. Cut the grains
6. Cut the sugar
7. Try fasting

And make sure you drink plenty of H2O.

 

One suggestion I can make is to keep busy. Most unhealthy eating comes from boredom. I'm lucky to have a physical job where I'm on the move all day and never actually get a chance to sit down and eat, so I just grab a couple granola bars, an apple and banana on the way out the door in the morning and eat on the fly. Also, try to think of eating as fueling up and not so much as a for pleasure. Just get something healthy into your stomach and get on with the day. I know that can be hard and you're always gonna have cravings for your favorite foods so I would also suggest setting one day a week aside for endulging in whatever you want just to get it out of your system. At the end of the day it all comes down to eating less and moving more. Hope this helps

 

Hardly. But thanks.

 

As someone who's struggled with food addiction for a long time I just want to say that I feel your pain my brother and my thoughts are with you.

There is so much to write and so much to say that this will be difficult to put into words. There isn't just one thing that contributes to this issue. You cant just point and say "it's calories" or "it's a lack of exercise". It's all of those things and so much more; It's physiological, psychological, and spiritual. It encompasses the entire person.

My first step in fighting this addiction was to rid my life of Big Steps, which are the enemy to any good plan of change. Change, as frustrating as it will sound, only happens when we incorporate small steps into our daily life. After all it was small steps which got us to where we are now, and so it will be small steps which get us out. This is a difficult pill to swallow because when we want to change we want it all to change right now, but we have to accept that such a change will not change us if it were to happen. We would just go from food addition to something else. Things like 4 day fasts, juice fasts, and etc do not help fix unhealthy eating habits. They are extremes which are not sustainable long term and so when we look towards them for long term goals but fail to sustain them, we then feel hopeless and depressed and go right back to our old eating habits. Break that cycle. Rid yourself of self-imposed timelines of when you think you should be healthy and start making small changes right now. For me, my first small change was to only eat three meals a day and to ensure only one of those meals was something healthy. That was it. That's where I started and from there I added to it. Once I was eating 1 healthy meal a day I pumped it to two. Even by just eating one meal a day I started to change my tastes. The other thing I did was change my diet. I was vegan for a long time and I had to accept, for me, that it was not helping me. Since I know a lot of people go crazy over diets, I will just say if you want to know what I changed then you can PM me.

The next step I incorporated into my life was tracking and weighing my food. Similar to changing my meals, I started by tracking breakfast first. I would weigh my food and then put it in my tracking app. Once I did this with ease I would then move on to tracking breakfast and lunch. After that I tracked breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I can't stress enough how much this helped me with breaking the emotional side of eating. By tracking and weighing my food I was instilling in myself a mindset to view food as fuel and not a treat. As one of my fitness coaches says "Snacks are for babies and treats are for dogs." And he's right. Food was never meant to be a reward for a job well done. Food is meant to be fuel for the body and if we care about our bodies then we will use it as such. We do not go to the gas station and overfill our gas-tanks. Then why would we do that to our bodies? We also don't put shit into our gas-tanks either, so why do we have a higher concern for our cars than we do for our own bodies? This brought me to the next step.

Why am I eating like I don't care about myself? What has caused me to seek food as my counterfeit counselor in times of stress, anxiety, anger, sadness, and even happiness? Another thing I had to accept was that my relationship to food was suicidal in nature. When I binged I was destroying my health, so why did I want to destroy myself? What did I not like about myself? After much counseling and support from my coach I have been able to find the root cause of my eating habits. I found that I had started using food as my emotional crutch after being sexually abused when I was 11 yrs old. I felt like I couldn't trust anyone and therefor had no one to talk to about what had happened to me. I was too young to have access to drugs or alcohol, so I turned to food. I used food to pacify the shame, guilt, anger, and sadness I had for myself. I had let what happened to me determine my self worth and since I was disgusted with myself for "allowing" the abuse to happen, I looked at myself as being evil, unlovable, and worthless. This is something I still struggle with but not because I believe these things about myself, but because I'm still daily having to reprogram my thought patterns.

After making some progress with my diet and mental issues, I started adding in exercise to my list of healthy choices. I first started by walking up and down the road I live on. After some time of doing that I then increased the distance. Once I had a healthy habit of activity with walking I then started to do strength training. I'm still new to strength training, but I'm very happy with it so far and really enjoy lifting weights. Oddly enough it has really helped me mentally because in strength training you have to be willing to allow yourself to fail if you ever want to make any progress. The idea of pushing ones self to failure in order to progress seems almost counter intuitive. Kind of like how it's counter intuitive to love yourself after a relapse, but it's that very love which will help you get back up sooner and out of the relapse cycle.

While there is so much more I want to say, I will end with the last part and that is the spiritual aspect. As a former atheist/agnostic I know many will disregard this section, which is fine. What I will say though is I have noticed a correlation between my prayer life and my overall emotional health. When I was working on this I had to start with some pretty difficult issues and one of those was brutal honesty with God. I told him I hated Him. I told him I didn't trust Him. I started with being flat out and honest with Him and from there our relationship has grown. Many think prayer has to always be a pious formula, which at times can be helpful, but most of the time you need to tell God everything. Not because He doesn't already know, but because you need to be honest with yourself. This honesty will help you open up and will help you allow yourself to let God love you.

Ugh, there is just so much I want to say and write about this but I know I should just stop. Just know that my heart is with you brother.

 

Ok, so I went plant-based diet (Mostly). I will eat dairy and meat if I am at someone else's house and they prepare food. My heaviest was 308+. I say plus because I stopped looking and that was the last weigh-in I had at the doctors before losing weight. A year later after taking out fast food, I dropped down to 280. Then I started to exercise and dropped to 248. I quit video games got onto nofap and dropped down to 212. Went plant based diet 3 months ago and I'm down to 188. I'm 6'1 and still look fat due to excess skin, but feel much better. I added YRG yoga and running to my exercise. I also do on top of my workouts 100 push-ups, 100 crunches, and 100 bodyweight squats.
Ok so the benefits of a plant-based diet are health and money. I spend less than 50 dollars a week on food. So yes I recommend it. Plus hot vegan girls like to discuss things with me at coffee shops.

 

Hey everyone, thank you so much for all your replies and your encouragement. It is heartwarming to see all the support I have from all of you. I'll try to respond to each of your posts... but unfortunately, I am busy and it may take some time. But I really appreciate the time you took to reply to my questions. Your advice has been extremely helpful.

I wanted to let you know that I've recently made a break-through as far as my diet goes. Since my willpower is so low and regulation doesn't seem to work, I decided to go raw vegan. I was already a vegan.... but eating a lot of junk food. Now, however, I can just tell myself that cooked foods are off limit. That takes care of all my comfort junk food. For some reason, this is a lot easier than just limiting my consumption of my comfort foods. Give it up altogether, instead of trying to regulate it.

I'm currently on day three and doing well. I get the occasional craving for cooked food, but it is nothing I can't handle. I feel similarly to when I first went vegetarian in 2007 and gave up meat. I had similar cravings, but I was able to tell myself, "I just don't eat that anymore." I've been able to do the same thing these last three days.

Some benefits I have noticed:

1. I don't really want food when I am not hungry. This is probably because the food I am eating doesn't give me much of a dopamine hit, so my brain isn't telling me to eat it. Hopefully, it stays this way.... I'm starting to understand what "Eat to live and not live to eat" means.
2. I get a different feeling when I am full. It's more mellow... more comfortable. I am also better able to tell when I am fully and stop eating, as opposed to overeating and feeling bloated afterwards.
3. I eat a lot slower and enjoy the tastes more. My jaw is getting quite the workout.
4. I just generally feel better. Some chronic aches and pains are going away. I also feel more motivated to exercise.

I will keep you all updated, but so far all is looking good!

Oh, and before anyone comments, yes I am aware of the urgency of getting enough nutrients with my new diet and am planning accordingly. I've been a vegan for 7 years... so I'm pretty familiar with the nutritional needs a restricted diet needs to make sure to meet.

 

Oh, I should add that in three days I already lost 4 pounds!

 

Decided that Saturdays would be a cheat day from my new diet. I have heard that having a cheat day actually helps you lose weight faster, as it keeps your fat cells on their toes. Otherwise they acclimate to the lack of fattening nutrients and become better at absorbing them. Still, I feel vaguely guilty when I ate some bread and vegan butter this morning.