"Normal" Eating by Karen R. Koenig

Habituating to Challenging Foods

Here’s an interesting headline—“Food habituation may help weight loss"—from a nutrition newsletter summarizing results of a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (8/11). The results support what intuitive eating professionals have been advising for decades: habituating to a food can help you avoid overeating it.

Food and Addiction

I recently read something that stopped me in my tracks: “Of course, when there are problems, people love to blame the thing being used instead of the person doing the using. This thinking is fed by the damaging contention that addiction is a ‘disease.’ Multiple sclerosis is a disease. You can’t decide to not have multiple sclerosis. You can decide to stop engaging in some behaviors.” Wow, huh!

Sugar Questions Yet Again

A while ago, a client asked me what I thought about whether or not sugar is addictive, and I said I wasn’t sure. Then I read yet another article about sugar which said that it hadn’t been proven addictive. A confusing issue, one which has a direct impact on our thinking, and often our behavior, around sugar-laden foods. I blog on this subject to help you decide how you want to make choices about them.

Cravings and Addictions

A message board (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/foodandfeelings) member asked me to blog about cravings, compulsions, and addictions. Here's my take. Over recent decades, scientific research has concluded that brain chemistry dictates far more of our behavior than we had previously thought. Alternately, it also stresses that we still retain free will and, fortunately, that changing behavior can modify brain chemistry.

More on Sugar Addiction

There’s always new information coming out on eating and weight. Here’s recent evidence which indicates that sugar might very well might be addictive. Study Suggests Sugar May be Addictive, by Amanda Gardner. Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2008 (Health Day News) -- Science is verifying what many overeaters have suspected for a long time: sugar can be addictive. In fact, the sweetener seems to prompt the same chemical changes in the brain seen in people who abuse drugs such as cocaine and heroin. The findings were to be presented Wednesday at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology's annual meeting, in Nashville.
 

Sugar and Cravings

An article in Environmental Nutrition (July 2008, vol. 31, No. 7) confirms that although sugar and sugary foods taste good and it can be hard to stop eating them, “you cannot get physiologically addicted to sweet foods.” Their studies conclude that “a craving for sweets…is the result of conditioning based on cultural, social, and individual cues.” More evidence that food is not physiologically addictive. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel as if you’re addicted to sugar. What you suffer from, however, is not an addiction, but a dependence.

Choice or Disease

Whether you view eating problems as a disease or not may determine your ability to recover. When we think of diseases, we often believe we have to wait until they’ve run their course or that we need to find an external cure. Couple this attitude with the standard model used to heal from addictions--that once you have severe drug, sex, alcohol, or gambling problems, you’ll have them for life--and a condition can feel like destiny.

Abuse or Disease?

What’s in a name? A recent letter to the editor in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune made the case that people should think twice about using the term substance abuse because alcohol and chemical dependence qualify as diseases. Of course, my thoughts immediately jumped to people who have an unhealthy relationship with food, so I spent a while thinking about the terms we use to describe them—anorexic, bulimic, binge-eater, food abuser, and disordered, dysfunctional, restrictive, over- or undereater.

Addiction to Looking Good

Whether you grew from an adorable toddler into a knockout or morphed from an “ugly duckling” into a “swan,” you may have become addicted to looking good. Because this culture worships and rewards beauty, if you’re attractive (especially if you’re female), you may be so hooked on receiving admiring glances and gushing compliments on your appearance, that you may not realize how attached you are to them. You even may be greedy for praise and convinced you can’t live without it.

If you were cute as a button as a child and blossomed into a striking adult—with classic or eye-catching looks—you may have been complimented and rewarded all your life for nature’s gifts. Receiving too much praise for appearance, especially if you get none or few compliments for other innate qualities and learned skills, may make you believe that you are nothing more than a pretty face or an ideal body. Somewhere along the way, you may have stopped trying to be anything but a pretty package, forsaking other avenues that make you feel good about yourself. If so, you’ve been cheated and continue to cheat yourself because you’ve ended up relying on your looks to hold yourself in high regard.

On the other hand, maybe you were a plain or gawky child, but have developed into a stunner.  Specifically, maybe you were chubby and are now thin or were told all your life, “You have such a pretty/handsome face. If only you’d lose some weight.” Now you’ve lost it and really are a head-turner and it feels oh-so-wonderful to have people stealing admiring glances at you. You may believe that you can make up for feeling ugly, overweight, or unattractive as a child by being thin now, and may be unwilling to relinquish thinness because you love to be admired and complimented.

There’s nothing wrong with valuing your appearance. The problem arises if you are compromising your health because you are addicted to flattery or if you are not rounding out your personality because you’ve become dependent on your looks to bring you happiness and success. You will never feel confident and authentically good about yourself unless you know that you are lovable, talented, and valued in spite of looking good. It’s one thing to enjoy compliments; it’s another to need them so badly that you use them to fill yourself up inside with positive feelings and believe that without them (or being thin) you are nothing much. If you suspect that you may be addicted to looking good, take a minute to consider your attachment to thinness or beauty and how it may be working against you.    

Best,

Karen

Normal Eating web site

Normal Eating talks and workshops

Visit the message board exclusively devoted to my new book, The Food and Feelings Workbook, at Food and Feelings message board

PLEASE NOTE: I encourage you to comment on my blogs and will do my best to address topics/questions you raise in future blogs. Unfortunately, however, due to time constraints, I cannot provide individual responses. Do join my message board for conversation.

Overeating and Alcohol

You don’t have to be an alcoholic to abuse alcohol in a way that exacerbates eating problems. All you have to do is drink enough to lower your inhibitions, and your desire to eat when you’re not hungry or overeat past full will take over by itself. There’s no question that alcohol is a relaxant that smoothes out your rough edges after a hard day at the office or with the kids. There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with taking a drink now and then to chill out and unwind. 

However, if you have difficulty relaxing without an external substance and begin to rely on alcohol and food in tandem to do the job, you’re headed for trouble. Let’s say you come home from work on a Friday night after the week from hell. You’re tired, grumpy, wound up, and looking for instant comfort. What’s easier than pouring yourself a tall one to get the kinks out? After one drink, you’ve loosened up enough to enjoy the feeling and want to hold on to it, so maybe you fix yourself another. Letting go is both the good and bad news about alcohol—the fact that it lowers your inhibitions helps you relax but also hampers your judgment.

So there you are on Friday night.  Because alcohol acts as an appetite stimulant (and because it’s probably past dinner time by now), you’re hungry and go searching for food. Your judgment may be slightly impaired, so, in starvation mode, you grab anything that’s edible, within easy reach, and can be consumed on the spot. With lowered restraint, you overlook how much you’re eating and continue until you’re numb and zoned out. Between alcohol and food, you finally achieve the fog you’ve been yearning for all week—total unconsciousness (perhaps literally, more likely metaphorically). You’re stuffed and feeling no pain except in your strained belly muscles.  Perhaps you even allow yourself to get tipsy in order to overindulge your favorite foods and not feel guilty—in the morning you can always blame your binge on cloudy judgment. 

If the above scenario sounds remotely familiar, it’s time to take a look at your drinking pattern because it may just be adding to your food problems. Be honest. Does overindulging in drinking lead you to overeating or to eating when you’re not hungry? Do you look to alcohol and food to relax you together? Are you in the habit of coming home and drinking and eating to zone out? Do you look forward to these activities? Do you drink so you can eat without guilt? If so, consider that drinking may be part of your eating problem and that you won’t become a “normal” eater until you change your alcohol habits.

Best,

Karen

www.eatingnormal.com

www.squidoo.com/eatnormalnow

Visit the message board exclusively devoted to my new book, The Food and Feelings Workbook, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/foodandfeelings.

PLEASE NOTE: I encourage you to comment on my blogs and will do my best to address topics/questions you raise in future blogs. Unfortunately, however, due to time constraints, I cannot provide individual responses.