Here is a short YouTube video about obesity, comfort foods and food addictions. What happens to to the food addiction when you lose the weight? These experts share some interesting insights into obesity, its causes and treatments.
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AC-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive
That’s the title of a song by one of the greatest American songwriters of all time, Johnny Mercer. What does that have to do with food addiction, you may ask?
Simply stated, to someone with a food addiction, everything is relative. The second line to that song says “eliminate the negative”.
When you’re struggling with a food addiction, it’s pretty easy to get down on yourself, think of all the things you should be doing and aren’t.
But what about the good things you’re doing? Your simple wins for the day? How about that great deal you got on something you had planned to buy last week for more money?
How about the way you stood up for yourself at the car repair shop? That ticket you won when you called in to the radio show? The surprise and elation you felt when someone told you that you are awesome.
Maybe getting over the food addiction is less important then learning how the chemicals in your brain work when you crave food, or finding out what your triggers are.
Maybe it’s smarter to sign up for a walking group than to tell yourself you are stupid or worthless because you feel isolated and small. You can kill two birds with one stone with that one. Exercise and companionship—what a great combination!
And just maybe you could think about how truly awesome you really are, and how even more awesome you will be tomorrow. Remember to leave out the word “if”.
Don’t focus on the negative stuff. Dealing with stress and food addiction is negative enough. Focus on what you want to attract, not what you don’t.
In other words, accentuate the positive! And sing your best song–out loud!
Aging and Food Addictions
When you think of a person with a food addiction, what do you see in your mind’s eye? Someone, perhaps a girl or young woman, who eats a lot of chips and other snacks, has a weight problem, and doesn’t fit in?
Do you see someone who is in their teens, twenties or thirties who is fat, friendless, and has emotional problems?
Do you always think of a person with a food addiction as female? An obese person? A young person?
If you search on YouTube for videos about food addiction and emotional eating, you will see that the majority are young women sharing their stories. There are some men too, but mostly women. And most are under 40 years old.
But food addictions don’t magically disappear when a person reaches a certain age. In fact, as I’ve gotten older, it gets more challenging.
The older we get, the more information is stored in our brains, like a hard drive that is never erased. We can hide some of the data, or forget where it’s filed, but it is still there to slow down the machine and inhibit peak performance.
Not all food addicts are obese, although most are overweight. “Safe” weight keeps you from exposing yourself to the circumstances that led to the emotional trauma that resulted in a food addiction.
Maybe it was isolation, sexual or physical abuse, or emotional abuse. Whatever the case, victimization is lurking in the background, always threatening you with embarrassment, humiliation, and loss.
Who wants to go up against that day after day? It’s too depressing to think about. And as you get older, it doesn’t always get better. But it can get better if you’re willing to keep working on it.
Aging works it magic on the human body, and although it may seem to take much away, it gives something to. You get feistier, more courageous, and most of all, more honest.
And that’s the rescue remedy for today. Don’t sugarcoat it any more. Be honest with yourself. Then you can be honest with others.
You may not be able to lose the weight, or maybe you will. You can move. Dance, work in the garden, take a cruise, go for a walk, be a good neighbor, resolve to be happy.
If you’ve been fighting a food addiction most of your life, then you’ve been missing some really great fun. Make up for lost time.
Aging happens. Big deal. Trying to prove to people who don’t care about you that you can be someone you don’t want to be doing stuff you hate to do gets old when you do.
So start living. Get honest and get real. Have some fun. It’s your turn now.
Food Addiction and Wellness
Those two terms don’t seem to fit together, but they can. Overcoming a food addiction takes work. When you’re ready to do the work, you can make it happen for yourself.
I’ve talked about stuffing down your emotions, feeling compelled to eat certain foods at certain times in response to specific emotions. I cannot say enough about the importance of keeping a daily journal.
What every food addict wants more than anything in the world when they feel out of control is to feel in control again.
Wellness, oddly enough, is rarely an issue when we feel like we are in control of our lives. What is easy to forget sometimes is that we can be in control only in the present moment. Once the moment is past, we have no control over it. We cannot change anything by reliving it.
We have choices in every moment until that moment is gone. Food addicts tend to eat in response to deep-seated emotional trauma that can surface at any given time to remind us of our victimization. Yes, usually a food addict has been victimized in some way at some point in their life.
It could be a lost love, the death of someone important to the person, a terrible decision that changed your life forever. Now the experience or fragments of it remain locked inside awaiting release.
The pain of remembering “how it used to be” or “what happened back then” is more than the food addict can bear sometimes. And so we eat, until we are able to release the pain. And then we’re okay again, back in the moment.
Wellness is a great goal for anyone. Freedom may seem distant, recovery long, but there is always now. Now is where freedom lives. Now is where wellness rests. Now is the best time to be alive, to be anything.
Now will never come again, and it doesn’t need to. When you fully experience each moment, now seems to last forever.