Tales of compulsive and emotional eating

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I didn’t realize how much of my eating habits were based on a chemical component until I tried Optifast. On that program we drank 4 or 5 shakes a day. (It’s been many years so I’ve forgotten.) I think that I had less than 500 calories a day.

They let me stay on the program for six months!

At first all I thought about was food. But after a couple of months, I lost interest in eating altogether. I didn’t think about food anymore. I had to remind myself to drink my shakes. Sometimes I would skip them.

That is the first time in my life that I have not had a compulsion to eat.

I could have stayed on that plan for the rest of my life and just not cared. But the doctor who supervised the program wouldn’t let me. I had to learn to eat regular food. And just as soon as I got carbohydrates inside my system, I started craving food again. Same as ever. I began eating compulsively and regained every pound I had lost – and more, of course.

In 1998 I had a gastric by-pass surgery and lost 150 pounds — half of my weight. I’ve kept it off, but I have had to have help in controlling the compulsive eating because it is based on my body chemistry.

I take topomax (topamax?). I can never remember the spelling. It was originally developed for the treatment of seizures and produced the side–effect of weight loss because it helps to control compulsions. I believe that it is also used in the treatment of depression. It does tend to make some folks sleepy.

I’ve cut way back on shopping and smoking too.

Much of our weight related issues are related to body chemistry – including what happens when we diet. (Stomachs produce a substance that slows down metabolism and increases hunger. Some produce more than others.)

Hey, they’re working on a vaccine!

Whatever you do, stop beating up on yourself. That does no good at all. Begin by centering yourself – making peace with yourself. Solutions seem to be unfolding pretty fast these days.

42

Everyone who’s shared in this thread is incredibly brave. I can relate to every post, from the “happy, sad, bored” eating to the food being a constant, to the comfort of food post abuse. This is long and rambling and lame, so feel free to just scroll to the next post.

I am around 5’10". At my very thinnest, I was around 106 lbs, which I also knew was not healthy (1990). At my heaviest, I was around 225-230. Currently, I am somewhere around 200-210. As a woman, and former amateur model, admitting to the 200+ is devastating. I am the mother of two. My kids are both at healthy weights.

After the birth of my first son, (1995) I got back into a size 5 within 2 months. My mother was dying of cancer. I would take food to her. Fattening stuff, as she was not consuming nearly enough calories. Macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, cheesecake, chocolates. Instead of scraping her plate into the trash… So, I’d put on about 20 pounds. I bought some new clothes. I’m tall, so most people told me I looked great. The Italian guys at work would tell me I looked better with a little more weight on me. Mom died.

Before too long, it became clear that something was “wrong” with my son. He just wasn’t hitting milestones like other kids. So, I quit working to be home with him. I became very adept at cooking. Homemade everything. I put on more pounds, bought more clothes. And then, found myself pregnant again. I was around 190 pounds when I got pregnant, and gained only 14 pounds with the pregnancy. Came out of the delivery room weighing less than my pre-pregnant weight. Loved it. Then, right back home, where I again, cooked and cooked. By now, my first born had been diagnosed. Low-functioning Autism. EVERYTHING I had planned for my life had been snatched away. Nothing would ever be OK again. But food still tasted good. Again with the macaroni and cheese. Put some stewed tomatoes on there, at least it will look like it has nutritional value.

After 6 years of stay-home parenting, I went back to work. It was great. I lost around 40 pounds solely because I couldn’t eat at work, other than lunch breaks. Then, I changed jobs. The job I’m at now is way better. Better pay, better hours, better perks. I like this job a lot. BUT, I now wear scrubs, which is basically like working in pajamas. You gotta put on a lotta damn weight before the scrubs get tight. There are 40 women in the office, most of whom like to show off their cooking skills. And of course we celebrate with…FOOD!!!

I’m a grazer. I like to have food “available” all the time, whether I’m eating it or not. Right now, on my computer desk, there is a large bag of salted cashews, and most of a giant-size bag of Lay’s Cheddar and Sour Cream chips (and NO, not the baked variety, I’d rather eat paper). I’ve tried making changes in my diet. I buy fresh fruits and vegetables, but since I hate cold food, they go bad before I get the chance to eat them. I’ve tried low fat substitutes, but I honestly do not understand how anyone can eat that vile-tasting stuff. Mayonnaise is supposed to taste good, not slimy. Cheese is supposed to be creamy, not waxy. Enjoying food is supposed to include a pleasant texture, and low-fat substitutes eliminate that. I’ve tried sugar-free. I can’t get past the taste of saccharine or splenda, and nutrasweet gives me blinding migraines. My MO is crunchy-salty, then chewy-sweet. I’ll eat those chips on my desk, probably before my husband gets home from work. Then, a chocolate bar. Then, the regrets.

Something that hasn’t been addressed yet in this thread is food as entertainment. When we were first married, we didn’t have a lot of money. You need to eat to survive, so food became entertainment for us. We didn’t have extra money to go to the movies, or concerts, or out on any sort of “dates”. But I make a mean lasagne. We’d plan weekends around how long it took to cook certain foods. If I was making homemade pierogies, we didn’t leave the house all day, because I had to make the dough, roll the dough, cook the potatoes, mash the potatoes. After all that work, you don’t just eat 2 or 3 pierogies. You eat 9, because they’re good, and you worked for them. Then, you really didn’t feel like going out for that walk.

I tell myself I’ve tried. In March, I joined a gym. I was good, going 4 days a week, doing an hour of cardio. I didn’t eat chips or drink soda. I was drinking a gallon of water a day, and replaced my junk food with celery and cucumbers. After a month, I’d lost a grand total of (drumroll please)… ONE POUND. Fuck that I say. I’m not gonna go 15 miles out of my way to do something I hate if it’s not going to help. So, I let my membership lapse.

I’ve also been hiding the smoking and the credit card bills for nearly 5 years now, and he’d be furious if he found out about either of them. But I don’t really care all that much.

mmmmmm…chips.

43

Exactly! It would be much, much easier for me to lose weight if there were a more immediately reward for the hard work. I can eat lightly all day and go to bed tossing and turning with hunger for two days in a row and my weight will be up a pound or two the next morning.

While I can binge at dinner time for a couple of days in a row and mysteriously my weight will be down the next morning.

If I were willing to go to all the effort, I could have some idea how many calories I eat in a day. You’d have to have a few hundred calories margin of error unless everything you eat is prepackaged. But how on earth can you know how many calories you’re burning? Any chart that purports to give you that information is giving just a wild, ballpark figure. My experience with pedometers is that they’re very inaccurate (three miles and eight miles are practically the same thing, right?).

And if there’s too big a deficit in calories, you’re body is going to make it that much harder for you to lose weight. But if you don’t have a big enough deficit you won’t lose any weight.

It’s very frustrating. I’ve lost weight four times so far in my life.

The first time was in high school when I lost thirty pounds. It was fairly fast and easy, since I had a lot of bad habits to break, such as eating big slabs of velveeta and drinking Hawaiian punch. It didn’t last long, though, because I thought I could handle introducing some forbidden foods back into my life. So I gained it all back, plus some.

Then I lost probably about thirty pounds again when I was a waitress because I was on my feet rushing around for hours a day. Then I gained it all back plus some.

Then I went on Nutrisystem and followed their regimen and gradually, painfully lost about twenty pounds, dreaming of eating tasty foods the minute the diet was over. And I gained it all back plus some.

When I joined the Army I lost ten pounds in basic training and the another five when I was allowed to eat normally again. And I kept that off and got in really good shape for a year or two, then gained about ten pounds a year for three and a half years. Yes, you can gain weight while regularly exercising vigorously.

If you notice the pattern: every time I lost less weight than the previous time, and every time I’ve gained it all back plus some.

Now I’m forty and for almost ten years I’ve been trying to lose weight with very little success. It gets harder and harder the more times you’ve done it, the older you are, and the fewer “bad” foods you have to cut out of your diet. And most of my dieting years I have exercised regularly, mostly running.

Regarding going “cold turkey,” I’ve told myself many times that while I can’t give up eating completely I can certainly give up eating sweets. And I throw out the few sweet foods that I have in the house and I avoid eating sweets and then one day I find myself with a paper plate in one hand and plastic fork in the other hand and realize I just ate two pieces of someone’s birthday cake, and when did I start eating sweets again? It happens over and over.

44

I’ve been reading all the posts in this thread – so many things that make me say “Yep, I totally relate to that” and even the experiences that I don’t share still make me say “okay, I don’t do that, but I can completely see how that would happen.” I had to laugh at lorene’s story about the muffins at the meeting – this is me up one side and down the other. I could be in a staff meeting to discuss the theft of nuclear launch codes, fer cryin’ out loud, and if there were muffins present, my primary thought would still be whether or not people would notice if I took another muffin, and which lucky muffin was going to be the object of my affection.

I often marvel at my own compulsive eating because compared to some people, I have no reason at all. It feels like I created bad emotional eating habits out of whole cloth. No emotional trauma that led to it. For the most part, my parents have great eating habits and created pretty much the food environment that experts recommend.

However, junk food became my holy grail. My mom is not a not a fan of pre-packaged junk food. As a kid, our house had plenty of healthy snacks available at all times – think fruit, nuts, etc – and also (get this) things like homemade chocolate chip cookies, because in my mom’s view, homemade cookies are healthy because she knows that all the ingredients are fresh. Things like Oreos or Chips Ahoy were a special treat. McDonald’s was a special treat. But I would go to school and look at other kids eat Chips Ahoy and Oreos, and it became an obsession. I remember going over to play at a little friend’s house, and her mom opened a cabinet and I saw SEVERAL BOXES OF DIFFERENT STORE COOKIES ALL AT THE SAME TIME. She put a (reasonable portion) of Chips Ahoy and Oreos on a plate for us, and for me, it was like a sunbeam came down from heaven and I heard a divine voice boom out HE MAKETH ME TO LIE DOWN IN GREEN PASTURES, HE LEADETH ME TO EAT CHIPS AHOY AND OREO COOKIES AT THE SAME TIME. The bounty!

You would think I was starving at home the way I ate when I could get my hands on this kind of food. With my allowance, I would buy whole packages of cookies, snack cakes, anything you could eat out of the box, and eat the entire contents because I felt I couldn’t bring them home. It’s funny, when I started, the primary driver was that I had to eat everything to hide the evidence, somewhere along the line it turned into eating everything because I wanted to eat everything. As I got older and could actually prepare food, the menu expanded to things you needed to heat up – Kraft mac and cheese, Chef Boy R Dee, all that stuff. And at the same time, I should add.

It was all about reward and entitlement – this is my allowance money, I deserve to spend it on things that make me happy. Everyone deserves a treat, right? Going into adulthood, I work hard, I do a good job, it’s my paycheck, I deserve to spend it on things that make me happy. I’m not buying crack, you know. I kind of had the impression that on average, most people wanted to eat entire boxes of Entenmann’s cookies, but denied themselves for bizarre emotional issues of their own. Hey, that’s okay if you want to deny yourself! Me, I like to enjoy the good things in life. (Yeah, and I also know that this isn’t true, but on some level it feels true.)

I also have the food issues of someone raised in the Great Depression (again, how did this happen? I was never denied food or had food withheld as a punishment). Wasted food makes me burn with anger. Seeing other people leave food on their plate nearly kills me. MY GOD, ARE YOU GOING TO THROW THAT AWAY? I’m weird about sharing food – I like to share and I think I’m a generous person, but that translates to being extra vigilant that there is always plenty of cheesecake available per person, to avoid the living horror of having to have less than a portion of cheesecake.

Okay, so now is the weight loss portion of this post. I know that this thread is about the compulsion behaviors themselves, so I don’t want to be pushing weight loss tips or witnessing about one particular method. But when I lost weight, I noticed some things about the complusiveness that were interesting to me, and I wanted to share.

I’m a short person, and I wore a size 20. My weight loss goal was to lose enough to shop at normal person department stores, and not have to shop at the Fat Woman stores. I didn’t care if I was buying the largest sizes at the normal store, so I think my goal was not too extreme. I lost in the neighborhood of 70 lbs. by following a pretty strict low-carb eating plan. I didn’t weigh myself so I’m not sure exactly, but I went by dress sizes. After losing that weight, there are an additional 20 lbs or so that I have been gaining and losing, about three cycles now. This is not good and it bothers me, etc etc. I’m working on it. That puts me at a loose size 12 at the lowest, and a snug size 14 at the other end.

Having never tried to eat low carb before, I was amazed by the fact that binging on a lot of meat is completely different than binging on a lot of cake. It feels emotionally and physically different. With the cake, I felt icky after eating it, but also good. With meat, it mostly feels weird. Really weird. There’s no satisfaction that comes along with it. There’s nothing about it that makes you look forward to the next time you can eat that much meat. It was almost no effort at all to decrease my portion sizes, because there isn’t any siren call. I thought breaking the habit of sheer volume would be challenging, but it wasn’t – it went away on its own, and pretty quickly, too.

The other thing goes along with zoe’s post. Previously, seeing someone else take THE LAST COOKIE was like an emotional blow. We’re talking agony. Of course, this was something I didn’t see very often, because I usually had a spare box of cookies. I am nothing if not prepared. But seriously, agony. After I dropped the carbs, the agony went away. If I didn’t have any cookies at all, I couldn’t care less who ate the last one. I was wary of changing my eating because I thought it would be a double whammy – first, the denial of not eating cookies, plus the agony of knowing that other people were eating cookies. But it didn’t play out that way at all. For me, it seemed like the cookie itself led to the emotional rollercoaster – no cookie, no problem. It was extremely liberating, and extremely surprising. I had heard that people often need to address the emotional issues before achieving any significant weight loss, and that seemed really overwhelming to me. For me, it was at least a two way street – cutting out the problematic foods actually took away a lot of the feelings of compulsion.

Of course, I should add that the transition wasn’t too pleasant – while I was adjusting to the new eating plan, there was plenty of food angst, and in many ways it was worse because the temptation was all the time, instead of between satisfying periods of going to trough. But once I was solidly onboard, it was exponentially easier, and all things considered, it didn’t take that much time. I also know from experience that once I start, everything comes rushing right back. I snap right back to wanting to, and being capable of, eating ridiculous amounts of Entenmann’s. Hence the 20 lbs. I have gained and lost three times. At the very least, I have more clinical detatchment about these 20 lbs (maybe I should name each pound – “Jane, you’re back! Sorry Mary Lou, I’m cutting you loose.”). It’s less emotional that I thought it would be. It’s like cleaning house – you know if you let a mess build up, it will take you X amount of time to clean it. It’s annoying – for me cleaning the house is a chore, but I’m at least I’m not thinking “omg, this is agony, I’m a bad person, this is out of control, I’m losing my mind, I’m going to snap” while I’m doing it. I’m thinking more like “eh, this is a tiresome way to spend a Saturday but whatever.” Now I’m at the point where facing 20 lbs is tiresome, but not profoundly mentally disturbing.

45

All of the binge stories in this thread sound very familiar. But I find myself more interested in “the itch”–that feeling you get that leads you into the binge. Like when you’re sitting there trying not to think about what you want to eat, and you’re just squirming, feeling like you’ve got bugs under your skin, and you’ve got to go get that pizza NOW, because that will put a stop to that feeling. Or like when you’re standing in the kitchen, holding the refrigerator door open for the sixth time in a half an hour, staring into that box and wondering, “What the fuck am I doing here?” Or the way you sit there telling yourself, in you mind, that you should not get a burger and fries, that you’re not really hungry, that you don’t need a burger and fries…even as your going through the drive-thru and placing the order, and paying for the meal, and driving home with it–like your body’s on autopilot, disassociated from what’s going on in your brain.

Being addicted to food (and I categorically deny the deniers, those who say you can’t be addicted to food) is so insidious. A heroin addict can live without heroin. He used to, before he started shooting up the smack. But there’s no living without food. You must eat, whether you’ve got a problem with it or not. How can one truly kick an addiction to something so necessary.

I’m visiting my mom this weekend. Not a good weight-loss situation. You walk in my mom’s apartment, take a breath, and you’ve put on 5 pounds right there. And on the flight down here, I had to ask the flight attendant for one of those seat belt extenders–the first time I’ve ever had to do that. A wake up call? No, I still got junk food for dinner after I arrived last night. Consequences be damned. When you want it, you want it.

And why not? The fact is, food is the only thing I have. The only thing I’m allowed to have. I live so much of my life under duress, seemingly under attack from all sides, that having a damn pizza is the only thing that makes me feel halfway decent. I don’t feel good in the aftermath of eating 3/4 of a large pie, knowing what I’ve done, but at least in the moment life feels less awful.

Good times are few and far between for me. Like my recent vacation, a camping trip around No. California and So. Oregon. I was out for a week. Is it significant that I lost 3 pounds in the six days I was away? (Even though I was making no effort to eat healthy, and in fact ate junk food at least 4 times during that week.) I think so. I gained the weight right back–and more–as soon as I came back from vacation. (By the way, I’m still the only person I know who goes on vacation and loses weight. Most folks are the other way around.) Why? Because I stopped having the time to be as active as I was while on vacation (setting up and breaking down camp, hiking and sightseeing, etc.) Because I had to come home and deal with my stupid, annoying neighbors. Because I had to go back to my job and deal with all the clusterfucks and idiocy that goes on there. Get me out of those bad situations, and things get better.

But of course, I always seem to be in those bad situations. I don’t have the money to live in a better place. I can’t afford to take an easier (but probably less paying) job. (Even if someone were to hire me; which, let’s face it, is not probable. If two applicants are equal in skills, and one’s skinny and one’s as fat as me…well, who’s going to get hired?) I’m stuck in a situation that constantly propels me towards poor eating choices. On top of everything, I simply don’t have the money to live a better, healthier life.

And make no mistake about it: in this society, fat is a class issue. Just try to eat healthy if you don’t have the dough (pun intended). The fresh produce at someplace like the local Safeway is awful. If that’s all you can afford, it’s no wonder you’d go for chips or candy. And if you’re short on cash and need a fix of junk food, the “buy one get one free” Doritos look pretty good. Both bags.

Food is what gets me through, or at least keeps me relatively stable. Who knows what I’d do if I couldn’t eat what I want? It could get downright dangerous. I damage myself, but maybe I keep others from damage by doing so.

I apologize for the length of this post, and its divergences from the OP topic. But I think there are larger issues in all of our situations. These conditions we live with are the products not just of inner motivations, but also the results of forces within the larger context. I just wanted to touch on some of those. Thanks. And good luck to everyone who has posted on their problems here. I hope we can all get over this stuff and improve our lives.

46

No need to apologizing for veering off topic. It’s all welcome in this thread.

47

I just want to say that this is one of the best threads I have read in a while. It helps to know that other struggle with this too. Thank you to everyone who has shared their story.

48

More ammunition for the debate: I just found an interesting article on the New York Times newspaper site. Here’s a blurb from it:

You probably need to register to read the article.

49

Glory, I would love to hear about some of the food you eat and a sample menu.

Really an amazing topic, and thanks for sharing your stories.

50

My family went through a period of “food insecurity” when I was an adolescent, and as an adult I sometimes eat beyond the point of satiation at meals. I don’t, however, snack much and when I am scared, angry, depressed, etc I tend to not eat rather than over eat. I do eat too much sometimes when the food is there, but I don’t really think about food unless I’m hungry.

My partner, however, is a foodie and lives to eat, cook, and think about eating and cooking. She is a gourmet cook and wakes up in the morning with menus on her mind. She doesn’t understand why I am unable to tell her, at 7am, what I might feel like eating for dinner.

51

I have always been a binge eater, but I have always had really high self esteem. It is weird, but when I look at myself in the mirror I dont see 220+ pounds of 5’5" woman, I see SEXY! I know that there is something wrong with me though, and other people have pointed out to me that nothing in my diet is mediocre. Everything is *delicious * or terrible. I don’t have any food that I can say I would take or leave it. Pizza or a double cheeseburger are always incredible and I could easily sit and eat a large pizza (or two) in one sitting. Tuna fish, liver and other foods like that make me feel like I am going to vomit. A woman at work the other day was making some sort of mush with tuna and mayo and whatever else and the smell was so bad I went and stood on the other side of the room fighting my gag reflex, looking like a cat horking up a hairball. I couldn’t be near her and the hideous concoction of food she was making.

I am about to admit something I have never admitted to anyone. Earlier this year I lost 42 lbs, not from dieting but from chewing up an spitting out huge quantities of food. I could sit with a 12 oz bag of chips and a box of little debbie’s cosmic brownies and chew them up, spit them out into a ziploc bag and throw away the evidence. No one was the wiser and I was quite a bit smaller, but then I saw the episode of Sex and the City where the guy Miranda knew in NYC was living in LA and that was exactly how he had lost all his weight and they described the behavior as an eating disorder so I stopped. Now I have gained back all of that weight and I am starting to wonder which eating disorder is worse, spitting out your food or turning it into body fat.

I hate the concept of OA because I am not xtian and from what I understand a lot of these meetings are devoted to letting God handle your problem otherwise I would go. I have thought about going into counciling or getting the gastric bypass surgery, but I don’t have the money for that kind of thing. I wonder if my health insurance would cover those kind of things.

52

My insurance paid almost 100% for my duodenal switch weight loss surgery this past June (I had a co-pay to the hospital of $100.00, and have a co-pay of $15.00 every time I see my surgeon). My insurance also pays for psych counseling, again with the $15.00 co-pay.

I love my surgery because I don’t feel like I’m fighting my appetite all the time (as I did every time I dieted in the past). When I’m hungry, I eat. When I’m satisfied, I stop eating. I never have to think “Oh, I wish I could have that, but I can’t, because I need to lose weight!”

53

There’s some relationship between eating disorders and addictions, but it’s probably a mistake to assume that not being able to control your eating is because of some kind of food addiction. That begs the question can anybody fully control how much they eat (probably not) and are fat people really eating so much more than thin people to warrant calling it an addiction (probably not).

What **Norinew’s ** going through underscores that point. She can eat whatever she wants now because of surgery on her GI system, not her head. Notice she’s not saying she wants to eat more but it’s uncomfortable to eat. She just desires food less. If it were just an addiction or a psychological compulsion you wouldn’t expect stomach surgery to just cure it.

54

Well, one aspect of my surgery that really helps is that most of my stomach was removed, which greatly reduced my production of the hormone ghrelin (some gastric procedures staple off part of the stomach, not remove it, leaving it to produce as much ghrelin as ever). Now, ghrelin is a growth hormone (hence, it starts with the letters “gh”), but was only discovered about 8 years ago, and is not well understood yet. But it plays a big roll in both appetite stimulation and metabolism. High ghrelin production was very desirable back in the days of “feast or famine”, when you needed a huge appetite to eat all the food in times of feast, plus you needed to slow down the metabolism afterwards in order to make it last as long as possible. But it’s not so desirable now. And there’s some pretty convincing evidence that MOs produce more than their share of ghrelin.

So, in a manner of speaking, they did “fix my head”, because they fixed the part that stimulated my appetite to the extent that I felt compelled to eat huge quantities of food.

I don’t know if “food addiction” is a ‘true addiction’. I do know that, when my compulsive eating was at it’s worst, addictive behavior is as close to an accurate description of my behavior as I can get.

55

Well, if you look at some of the diagnostic criteria used to classify addiction, you have recurrent use resulting in a failure to fulfill major obligations at work, school, or home and continuing to use the substance of choice despite negative consequences. (Partially cribbed from here, although these are fairly common definitions in the psychiatric/addiction specialist world.

So, have you ever…eaten instead of finishing a work project or school paper? Stayed home to eat rather than getting together with friends or family? Have you ever made promises that you will eat less/healthier/differently tomorrow…only to have tomorrow come and you “fail” at this? What about the negative consequences of health issues, societal scorn, loss of relationships?

Sounds like addiction to me.

FWIW, I agree with whoever said upthread that this was at its peak when they were underweight, or something to that effect. I’m certainly far less obsessive than I was when I was anorexic, but the demons still lurk, if you know what I mean. Some days, I am closer to compulsive or emotional undereating than anything else.

56

No, I understand that bariatric surgery is basically an endocrine surgery that affects hormones being sent back to the hypothalamus. But that’s sort of my point. It is a compulsion, but that doesn’t mean it’s addictive or “psychological.” Any more than the fact that we have a hard time controlling sleeping, drinking or breathing means we’re “addicts.”

57

I think it’s safe to say that some of these people are addicts and their drug is food. I have never had a problem with controlling my food intake. I have the opposite problem when I get stressed, I stop eating and I have to force myself to eat. Sometimes I will be hungry but don’t really feel like eating anything that I currently have in my apartment so I’ll just skip that meal. If I ever want to lose a bunch of weight, I just have to limit the variety of food in my apartment. The idea of eating a large quantity of food, any food (unless it’s pure sugar, my addiction) to the extremes expressed here is sickening to me. It takes me a day to eat a whole pizza, yet it apparently takes some posters here a few hours. Their cravings to eat food in such large quantities are alien to me.

There’s something different between us. I don’t know if it’s biological, psychological or both, but something compells them to eat yet doesn’t compell me to do the same. If I go to a buffet that has a wide variety of fresh, healthy food then I can eat plate after plate but eventually I will get bored of eating the same type of food and stop eating. I’ve never eaten until I felt sick even at the buffets where I ate a lot of food. Something always stopped me before that point, something that isn’t stopping others.

My mom has had trouble with her weight for most of her adult life. Most of my relatives on that side of the family tend toward the “chunky” side and I doubt having 9 kids helped her any. She eats as healthy as possible but she still has trouble losing weight. She has told me that she never feels full. Her body works differently than mine, we can eat the same amounts of food but she will gain weight and I won’t. We both have hypoglycemia but I gotta work hard to gain weight and she’s gotta work hard to lose it.

I’m a sugar addict and I normally eat candies or have some other form of sugar throughout the day. Once I tried to cut out the sugar and I could not stop eating. I ate more in three hours than I ate in a day. I couldn’t even go an entire day without eating some excess form of sugar. I couldn’t stand the constant feeling of hunger. I can’t imagine what that must be like to have to live with that constantly.

It’s late at night and I don’t know where I am going with this but I wanted to thank all of you for sharing your stories. It’s been a real eye-opener for me.

58

Sure, I totally agree with you on that. I’m just disputing the term addiction here. This is a homeostatic mechanism, like drinking or breathing or sleeping. When you’re not trying to fight it, you feel in control…you drink when you want to, you can control your breathing, you can either sleep or stay awake. But it’s when - for whatever reason - you oppose it for a while that you realize you’re not in full control. Trying not to drink when your body thinks you’re dehydrated, or not to sleep when you’ve stayed up two nights…these are compulsions that are the result of physiological drives, not addictions. People who have been on a diet for a while will feel compelled to eat constantly. They will feel out of control.

You may feel fully in control of your eating, but even for you if you diet long enough and hard enough there most certainly is a point at which the switch will flip and you will experience a compulsion to eat. Well almost certainly. Anorexics seem to have trouble controlling their appetite in the opposite direction and need to force themselves to eat even if they are literally starving to death. Which just goes to show that the controls work in both directions, and the limits of our control of our own behavior works in both directions. And the disorders work in both directions.

There’s surely something wrong with overeaters, but it’s a mistake to assume that lack of control means addiction. Lack of control is actually normal when it comes to eating. It’s at what point that lack of control kicks in that may be pathological. But just feeling out of control or eating compulsively does not mean this is an addiciton, any more than a person with polydypsia (excessive drinking) from diabetes is “addicted” to water.

And just to confuse the situation further, yes, there are overlaps in the mechanisms involved in addiction and eating. So I don’t want to imply there’s no relationship whatsoever. But this is also not just a matter of eating to escape or to replace love. There’s some basic and formidable drives at work here. But the good news is, it doesn’t necessarily mean there are deep-seeded psychological issues that need to be worked out over years of therapy. Some of this is just hormones.

59

Thank you for sharing. I really identified with everything you expressed.

60

I don’t know if others out there are like me, but I’m just basicaly addicted to sugar. My binge eating is only done with sugar. Not really ice cream or muffins or doughnuts, but candy. I have killed a 2 kilo bag of gummi bears in 2 days. And wanted more.

This is why I love the Atkins diet. It takes away the compulsion and sugar cravings. It has its problems, but, those aren’t outwieghed by my lack of sugar craving when on it.

I think there is something genetic about my sugar addiction…I see it in my daughter. She is completely consumed by sugar. Every meal is followed by sugar. She constantly wants candies. We constantly have to fight the sugar demon with her. Sugarsugarsugarsugarsugar. Luckily she has the wife’s metabolism and is thin as a rail; I hope it lasts.

My problems from my sugar addiction are being slightly overweight (10 to 15 lbs), a mouthful of cavities, and the occasional vomitting because I combo’ed wrong (dinner of creamy things and meat, followed by ice cream, then super sticky sweet candies all mixed with a glass or three of wine make for an interesting stomach experiment).

I exercise regularly now and do a modified Atkins - I avoid carbo’s when I can - like for a couple of days I’ll have 20 grams of carbs max - but don’t sweat it too much and will eat carb’s or drink a beer if the social setting is right. It seems to work and my sugar cravings are much lower. But give me a bowl of rice or spaghetti and 2 hours later I want a Snickers bar. Badly.

-Tcat