Once upon a time I attended an Alcoholics Anonymous
meeting. I wasn’t there for myself, but
had gone with a friend that needed my emotional support. I went there expecting that I would only hold
this person’s hand while they took a very difficult step towards recovery, and
that my participation and emotional investment would end there.
I have never been so wrong about anything in my life.
I listened silently as each person related their struggles
with alcohol addiction. Their stories
were serious and sometimes heart-wrenching.
It was all I could do to not weep as I listened to them tell of the
physical and emotional struggles that they had to overcome or were still
struggling with. It was not an easy
hour, and it became almost impossible to bear when from seemingly out of left
field I had a sudden realization. Every
statement these folks had made about alcohol I could repeat verbatim if I
replaced the word “alcohol” with “food”.
Oh my God, I
thought. I’m addicted to food.
I’m addicted to food. That phrase started to echo through my head
as the meeting finished, and by the time I had returned to the car with my
friend I was sobbing. My emotions were all over the scale, from
shame, to anxiety, to an immense relief that I had taken an important step
towards understanding the nature of my life-long unhealthy relationship with
food. I was a food addict, and that
explained so much.
But a day later I started to second guess myself. Surely I couldn't be addicted to food in the way
an alcoholic was addicted to alcohol? It
wasn't that bad, was it? I mean, I wasn't going to die from a food
binge like an alcoholic might die from alcohol poisoning, right? I kept coming up with excuses in my head as
to why the notion of food addiction was ridiculous, but there was a nagging
voice in my head that would not stay quiet.
You’re a food addict, no matter
how many different ways you might try to deny it.
This kind of dialogue went on in my head for over a year
before I became fed up with my internal conflict. So I do what I always do when I have a
question about something: I went to
Google’s homepage and searched the words “food addiction”. The search returned 174 million results. The
first item pointed to a WebMD article titled “Food Addiction Signs and
Treatment”. Another link I found was a
questionnaire created by Narcotics Anonymous to help people figure out whether
or not they are drug addicts. I found
that if I changed the questions so that the words “drug or drugs” was replaced
with “food” I answered 24 out of 29 questions with a “yes”. Those questions included:
Have you ever
substituted one food for another, thinking that one particular food was the
problem?
Have you ever
manipulated or lied to someone to obtain food?
Have you ever stolen
food or stolen to obtain food?
Do you avoid people or
places that do not approve of you eating food?
Has your job or school
performance ever suffered from the effects of overeating?
Have you ever lied
about what or how much you eat?
Does the thought of
running out of food terrify you?
Have you ever felt
defensive, guilty or ashamed about eating food?
Have you ever eaten
food because of emotional pain or stress?
Do you continue to
overeat despite negative consequences?
Yes, in my early grade school days I actually did steal
money from my mother to buy my daily fix of fat and sugar. I would avoid people that pointed out my
overeating. I would get raging mad if
anyone even thought about questioning the amount or quality of food going into
my mouth. I’d start eating a bag of
chips thinking “I can stop after a few,” and an hour later find myself holding
an empty bag. Something at school would
stress me out and all I could think about was getting home to eat whatever so I
could feel better. I would come home
from school, sneak food from my mom’s snack drawer and eat nearly 2000 calories
and then later eat an entire dinner without giving it a second thought. I would feel horribly ill afterwards, but
that never stopped me from doing it again and again and again. I could go on and on with
examples here, but I think you might get the picture now. Food addiction is apparently a very real
thing, and I really am an addict.
Of course they always tell addicts that the first step towards
recovery is admitting you have a problem.
Even after I had that realization it took me nearly a year before I
actually acted on it. Fighting an
addiction is more than just removing the substance from your environment. There are a myriad of emotional, physical and
environmental changes involved, and every one of these aspects needs to be
addressed, no matter how big or small. I
had to learn how to stop beating myself up and that it was okay to be human and
make mistakes. I know in words this seems
like such a trivial thing, but in reality, I was my own worst enemy when it
came to overcoming my addictive behaviors.
I had to completely reprogram my internal dialogue so that my little
internal voice would stop saying things like “Why are you even trying? You know you’ll just fail again.” This took a substantial amount of time, and I
still catch myself thinking derogatory thoughts about myself. Thankfully, that happens less and less these
days.
Now, this is the sixth time in my life that I have made a
major concerted effort to get myself physically fit. But I have this feeling that it is going to
be different this time around, because I finally understand one very important thing: just as a
recovering alcoholic will always be a
recovering alcoholic, I will always
be a recovering food addict. I can never
stop counting calories, and there are certain foods that I just have to
avoid. But you know what? I’m okay with that. I understand that about myself now, and that
knowledge makes it much easier to control myself when I am in a situation that
tempts me to eat more than I should.
There are days when this is really easy. Then there are days when I am
literally tugging on my hair to distract myself because I just want that glazed donut so much that I am
unable to focus on anything else. But
at least now I understand where that behavior is coming from, and I know not to
give in to the temptation. I must
always remind myself that I cannot go back to doing things the way I was
before. I will always have to remain
vigilant.
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