Food Junkies
In the last chapter from the book ‘The Truth About Food Addiction Food Junkies’ written by Dr. Vera Tarman. She talks about how she has struggled with food and how her entire life she would continue to slip back into obsessive unmanageability from white knuckling to ferocious eating. She would start eating slightly bigger desserts, then she would increase to two desserts a day, and then she would just eat dessert. So the last chapter of the book, the epilogue, she talks about the exact same situation happening again after she had finally found food serenity. She takes about how she shocked herself by looking at a tablespoon of almond butter and experiencing that old familiar feeling of excitement. Three tablespoons later she forced herself to put it away but it didn't end there and the next day did the exact same thing only this time with heaping tablespoons. The next day she recites, increasing her consumption to five towering tablespoons, she recites how this had nothing to do with taste at all and that it was to try to attain a feeling of satisfaction and by the end of the month she had increased her habits to more than ten huge tablespoons every night. All of a sudden she started to look at the scale with terror gaining a few extra pounds, promising herself that she would stop once she had gained five pounds which then became ten pounds and then fifteen pounds. She adopted many strategies to stop eating this one food and it actually took her an entire year and she finally admitted to herself that this one particular food had become an addiction and that having them in the house was a trigger and she had to stop eating it forever. She could only come up with one final solution and that was abstinence. She had resorted to her old strategies during that year, she would fast for a day, or walk for hours, just to allow herself to continue her obsession. Once again she realized, just like she realized with eating sugar, eating bread, eating chips, and eating pasta, that she found herself powerless to control her need to eat them and that when she stopped her desire for them would gradually fade, loosing that mental obsession and eventually regaining peace of mind. She truly believes that addiction actually has no cure because her evidence suggests that she is always in recovery. Just one mouthful away from the next binge. She suggests that for each one of us we need to identify what our triggers are in order to avoid those triggers. The difficulty cannot be overcome by trying to fill the bottomless pit with food because it does not create satisfaction because the problem it eating more of it only leads to wanting more of it which becomes relentless and inescapable. I think that this description is very accurate because I know for myself when I sit down now to have my cheese and grapes that I can easily start adding more and more grapes! At first I used to count my grapes, I would allow myself twenty, but then I started to eyeball how many were in the munch. If I don't pay attention I can easily out carb myself just by grapes alone. I think it is interesting how just because the food is being healthy that it is really easy to forget about the carb content. I totally agree with her in regards to nuts too, it doesn't take very many nuts before your carb count is over whelming. And every once in a while I do feel the need to add nuts! And the next day I can feel that added weight gain, so then I stay away from nuts until I make sure that I am back to where I want to be.
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Emerald HillOn the quest to lose 50 pounds in a year. Can she do it? Only time will tell....with the help of this blog. Archives
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