I wasn’t quite sure where to make this post. None of the other forums seemed appropriate, so I’m defaulting to MPSIMS. But I don’t normally read or post here, so I don’t really know people or the culture. But I wanted to think this one through and discuss it, so here I am.
I have had very little drug use in my life. I’ll occasionally have a few drinks, and that’s about it. I started vaping weed about 8 months ago. There were various reasons I didn’t try it until then, but that’s outside the scope of what I want to say. It wasn’t heavy use - a few times a week I’d have a modest amount of it 2 or 3 hours before bedtime, get a little goofy, enjoy watching TV and music more, and fall asleep easier. Once or twice a week with I’d get goofy high with my girlfriend and watch funny TV shows or movies.
Last week I was having a particularly bad day. Now, in general, I don’t respond to bad days by trying to medicate myself with drugs. I know that’s a dangerous path to go down.
But I decided what the hell, and ate about twice as much weed edibles than I’ve ever tried before, and vaped a bunch on top of that. Well - not edibles exactly, what they’d call AVB - already vaped bud. You run cannabis flower through a dry herb vaporizer, so that the hot air vaporizes the THC right off the flower. But there’s still plant material left behind after you’re done. That plant material has THC inside of it - since it wasn’t on the surface, it didn’t get vaporized by the hot air. But it does get cooked by the hot air, and decarboxylated, which means it’s activated into a biologically usable form, similar to edibles. And then you just eat it. Mix it in a toasted PBJ - the texture of the toasted bread and peanut butter hide it effectively, and the peanut butter gives it a fat to bind to in order to be taken into your system. It’s nice, it’s a “free” edible out of material that would normally go to waste by combustion.
Now, as I said, I think taking drugs to handle a bad day is generally a bad idea, but I was having a really bad day, and I figure weed is fairly innocuous and not as dangerous as alcohol, so I just went ahead with it. I figured I’d just become dumb and goofy, watch some family guy, and fall asleep.
You’ve all probably heard or read a story that someone has told about how they took psilocybin mushrooms or LSD and had a “trip” that changed the way their consciousness works, and how they look at their lives and the world. There are often common themes, often people will say that they felt a great connection between all things and some hidden love or beauty that permeates all things, something like that. I didn’t think weed could produce effects like that. But apparently it can in the right doses (and maybe the right strain and the right ingestion method), because I had one of those grand psychedelic experiences for the first time.
People who’ve used psychadelics will often caution you against bad trips. Go into it with the right attitude, have someone experienced and supportive with you, etc. I had none of that. I was in a very bad place that day, and I had no support with me. I had no idea that I would, or could, have this experience from cannabis.
I had an awful, terrifying experience that lasted 8+ hours before I could get to sleep. It actually lasted a lot longer than that - I slept for 12 straight hours and was still a little high for a few hours after that. Almost everything about it was deeply unsettling and very unpleasant. One of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in my life. That’s a different story.
However, the experience seemed to flip some switches or rewire my brain to some degree, and a lot of the effects that came 24-48 hours after the trip were positive. There are a lot of realizations I had about my life and the nature of reality and all that stuff, but that’s hard to explain and it’s hard to tell how much of that was true insight, discovering true things because your state of mind let you see things from a perspective you’ve never seen before, and how much was just the drug-induced illusion of insight, where the thing you think you understood isn’t real. I’m not going to go into all that stuff in this post, I’m still working through it. But what I feel like I can confidently share is the most concrete of the changes I’ve experienced - I psychologically and physiologically react differently to food.
I’ve been fat most of my life, from when I was a kid. There were a few periods where I lost a lot of weight, but it came from a lot of effort, constant struggle, denial, and just being uncomfortable most of the time. The main issue was not that I got excited or happy from eating, and therefore ate as much as I could - the issue was more that hunger is an extremely intense feeling for me. It’'s an itch that would come up frequently, and it would be so intense that I would have a very difficult time stopping myself from scratching it by eating. I would be intensely uncomfortable if I ignored the feeling of hunger.
The intensity of hunger was also such that I tended to eat very quickly. I often eat a whole meal twice as fast as the person I’m eating with. This probably compounded the problem, because it didn’t give my body the time to process the incoming food and give me a feeling of satiety, so I would eat more during that window between eating and feeling satisfied/hunger disappearing. I recognize this, and yet it was still very difficult to slow down my eating when I was hungry, even though it seems so simple.
So what happened after the psychedelic experience? Hunger doesn’t bother me that much. That’s all it took. Instantly my caloric intake is down by about a third, maybe more. I didn’t anticipate this experience, so I didn’t document the before/after calorie intake, I’m just estimating.
I can feel that I’m hungry, and that my body could use some food, but it’s a much more distant thought. It doesn’t have the urgency to it. I’m not deeply uncomfortable when I begin to feel hunger. And so I eat less frequently. And because the intensity of hunger isn’t there, I eat much more slowly too. Meals often take me 2-3x as long to eat as they used to. I’ll take a bite, relax, watch some TV, check something on my phone, talk to the person I’m eating with, whatever, then go back to take another bite. This is completely different from the way I’ve always eaten food previous to this, with much more ravenous hunger.
And in fact, the incentive around foods changed around slightly in the other direction. The other day I had some pizza (I’m not eating any better, just less) - four pieces. Normally if I was hungry I could easily it 5 or 6, but this time I stuck with 4, and a while after that my stomach started to feel a bit off. I actually felt a bit bloated and uncomfortable as though I ate too much - sort of how you feel after overindulging at a buffet, except that I didn’t get the stomach-stretching feeling because that wasn’t a large amount of food compared to my norm. I actually felt bad about eating too much after eating less than I’d normally eat.
I see a psychotherapist whose specialty is addiction treatment. That’s just a coincidence - I didn’t see her for that expertise, she just happened to be the person that was available when I was referred for treatment. But of course she’s a general therapist too - that’s just her specialty - so I did normal psychotherapy stuff with her. I stopped seeing her about a year ago, when she switched jobs unexpectedly and I didn’t make the effort to keep up with her because I don’t think psychotherapy was doing me much good at the time, so it felt like I was wasting her time anyway.
But I looked her up again after this experience. I brought these experiences to her. She has been really cool about it and excited at what appears to be the chance for me to establish new perspectives and habits and change my life for the better.
She had once told me that she didn’t think that light weed usage would become a problem for me because I didn’t have the sort of personality traits and brain responses that she’d seen in problem drug users, but she added in an offhand way that I may have an addiction to food. I sort of brushed it off at the time as not seeming like a real thing, or not that important, but I remembered it. We didn’t go deeply into the idea.
So I explained everything that happened last week, during and after the trip, at least the stuff I was comfortable telling her about. I reminded her about the time that she sort of offhandedly mentioned that I may have a food addiction. And I asked her if people who had these psychedelic experiences could have addictions lessened or erased.
And she said that yes, it definitely did happen sometimes. It wasn’t reliable, everyone responds to psychedelic experiences differently, and that we’re only beginning to really study it, but that it was definitely within the range of normal reactions that addictions could change or go away as a result of that experience.
Now this isn’t what she told me exactly, I’m putting my own interpretation on some of what she told me. So I’m not relaying raw medical advice. Physiologically, addictions can be complex. It’s easy to explain how heroin makes you an addict, but people can become addicted to all sorts of things that you wouldn’t normally think of as addictive. The brain reward pathways can respond to a variety of things that can vary from person to person, and the brain can physiologically rewire itself in a way that you don’t even consciously perceive, but that mirrors the way the brain responds to what we think of as typically addictive things (nicotine, opioids, etc.) to non-drug activities.
So it would indeed appear that I may have had an addiction to food that I wasn’t aware of. The intensity of the feeling of hunger I experienced wasn’t that different from the urge to smoke is to a nicotine addict that has gone all day without a cigarette.
I didn’t even think addiction to food was a possibility. Our society has a stigma against drug addiction (often treating it as a failure of character rather than a physiological condition of the brain that affects us on a deeper level than what we can consciously perceive), a stigma against being fat, and a stigma against “making excuses” for being fat. There’s no thought given in the public consciousness that people can have a different relationship with food, with different incentives and difficulties. It’s always assumed that we all have the same relationship with food, fat people are just gluttonous and irresponsible and lazy and lack willpower. Character flaws are the only thing that make them fat.
Let me make an analogy. I used to think this way about alcoholics, the way society generally thinks about fat people who “make excuses”. I would think - it would be relatively easy for me never to drink again. I’d prefer not to do that, because I enjoy a drink now and then, but I could definitely do that without using a huge amount of willpower or effort. So I’d look at alcoholics and say “what the fuck is wrong with you? Just stop drinking. It’s simple. It’s not that hard”
But as I got older and matured and understood more about the brain, and developed more empathy for people with addictions, I realized that it’s not that simple. Quitting alcohol is relatively easy for me because I’m not an alcoholic. My brain hasn’t rewired itself to be deeply uncomfortable without alcohol, and to give me the constant urge to drink. So obviously I would have an easier time quitting than someone whose brain made it an almost impossible struggle for them. My journey is in quitting alcohol would only be 1 percent as hard as theirs.
Lacking that understanding and that empathy, I made a poor and simplistic judgement that these people were simply weak and their characters were flawed. Just as everyone has always assumed that because I was fat, it must be only due to character flaws. After all, they have to eat too, and they aren’t fat, so why couldn’t I do the same? It had to be a personal failure that made me less than them.
Addiction to food is actually even trickier. The best way to quit abusing alcohol is to go cold turkey. It takes a lot of willpower, but it’s a very simple solution: just stop. Find a way to find the strength or the support systems to quit drinking, work at it, and you’ll start to get better. It’s hard, and there’s a danger of relapse, but if you could maintain the will to go cold turkey, you solved the problem.
Food, on the other hand, is not something that you can stop cold turkey. You have to eat, several times a day, and yet not succumb to the incentives your brain gives you to get out of control with it. Imagine if you were an alcoholic that had to drink 3 beers a day, but only 3 beers. How much harder would it be to stop abusing alcohol when the thing your brain has a problematic relationship with is a necessary part of your daily life?
I think this is a big part of the reason that something like IIRC 97%+ of the people who lose a significant amount of weight will gain it back in a few years. They can muster up enough energy to force themselves to fight the incentives their brain has given them even though it’s tremendously difficult. But they manage it, through force of will and good habits, for a while. Enough to lose a lot of weight. But you’re constantly subjected to the substance you’re addicted to, and eventually that willpower to ignore how your brain responds to it begins to waver, and you go back to indulging that addiction because it’s too hard to keep fighting it all your life.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t people who have conquered it. There are absolutely people whose brain makes it difficult for them to stay at a healthy weight, and through effort and force of will and self denial, they manage to stay at a low weight despite their brain incentives lining up otherwise. I admire these people, I’m not trying to downplay the work they put into that.
But we know that food manufacturers hire people - chemists, medical researchers, etc. to deliberately make their foods more addictive. They try to find just the right mix of fat and sugar and salt and whatever else to trigger the reward center of the brain. To make food as much like an addictive drug as they can. I think the rise in obesity is a multi-pronged problem, but I believe that the deliberate addictification of food - which is a word I’m pretty sure I just made up - is a big component in it.
If this change in my brain is permanent, and my relationship with food is different now, and it doesn’t wear off, I will lose weight long term, even without any deliberate effort on my part. My calorie intake is low enough “naturally” now that I’ll start trending downwards. It won’t be because I fixed a character flaw that made me fat, or because I’m trying harder now than I was before, or anything like that. It will simply be because my brain, in some way, adapted or rewired itself to break the addictive cycle with food. I won’t have overcome a great struggle, but rather, the struggle just vanished for me as a result of a unique, mind-altering experience.
Which means that if my brain were like this my whole life, I wouldn’t have ever become fat. And I wouldn’t have been treated like shit by everyone. At one point in my life, I had actually become pretty fit, so I know the difference in the way that people treat you. When you go from very fat to fit, people treat you like a real person with value and feelings, and not just an emotional punching bag that they can abuse with no guilt at all because they think you deserve your fate because fatness is caused by weakness of character anyway. That you were a bad person for being fat and deserved the abuse and hatred you receive for it.
I don’t have any specific purpose in sharing this. I’m not saying that you should have your own psychedelic experiences to change your brain, although I’m not not saying that either. There’s no way to know what having that experience will lead to. Yours may be totally different from mine.
I guess there is one piece of advice people would take from this. I’ve become far more empathetic over the years towards people with addictions than I used to be, understanding that a struggle to control some aspect of their lives is not necessarily rooted in a character flaw or a moral failing. It doesn’t automatically make them a bad person.
As someone who has had a lifetime of depression and self esteem issues and social isolation because of what appears to be an addictive relationship with food, I would ask that along with other types of addictions, that people could try to be more empathetic and less judgemental towards people who are failing a struggle with an issue that the people doing the judging aren’t struggling with. Your assumption that everyone has the same incentives and difficulties, and therefore you’re automatically better than someone who is struggling with something that you don’t struggle with, is wrong.
Our brains are complex, and the reason we do things and respond to things are often not even something that we can consciously recognize and control. Everyone has their own struggle. The lack of empathy and the rush to judgement makes the world a worse place. Recognizing that everyone has different struggles leads to more empathy and kindness. And you should be the change you want to see in the world, you should try to take small steps towards making the world a better place.
Or … maybe a refurbishment. I’m still me, but newer and shinier. Maybe with a few new parts/perspectives to change things up.