Tag Archive | Food Addictions

New Book for Food Addicts and Overeaters

Nov8

A new book by David Kessler, M.D. is being touted as one that will change forever the way we look at food.

Rodale Books publishes some of the finest books you will read in the field of health and well-being. I should know; I’ve read most of them.

Dr. Kessler’s new book, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite is certainly worth taking the time to read.

Besides having some great information for emotional eaters, overeaters, people with food addictions, and those whose eating has led to obesity, there are insights in Dr. Kessler’s book that you may not have found elsewhere.

Being heavy, overweight, or obese is very uncomfortable at a number of levels. It isn’t the goal of people with food addictions or problems with emotional eating to be as skinny as a stick, nor should it be.

Learning to manage the discomfort or just making peace with your size at the present moment can make life more livable.  The information in this book can help.

One chapter in the book, Chapter 11  in Part One, particularly caught my attention. It is titled “Emotions Make Food Memorable”.  The title alone speaks volumes.

I got a kick out of its being Chapter 11, a concept and term most often associated with bankruptcy and reorganization. How appropriate to think of a food addiction as bankrupting your health and reorganization as a rescue remedy.

I encourage you to buy the book or get it at the Library. It’s just under $14 on Amazon and only about 250 pages without the acknowledgments, index, etc.

Like food, don’t try to digest it all at once. Read a little each day, or at night before you go to bed. Then write about what you learned in your journal.

As with any other resource, keep an open mind. Don’t accept or reject the ideas. Just use what you can and let the rest go, no judgments.  Maybe it will be meaningful to you later, maybe not. Who cares?

Find something–a phrase, a line, a paragraph–that will inspire you to action today. One action each day to take you in the direction of your goal. That’s 365 actions a year. One day at a time.

Let me know how it goes.

Food For Thought

Nov4

Today was a very long day, and not as productive as I would have liked. I felt more fatigued than usual, even though I slept no more or less than I do most nights.

I seemed more easily agitated than I normally am. There was too much activity with few opportunities to rest.

I was less hungry but ate more of the foods I usually avoid. While I got all 22 items on my “to do” list completed, none of them seemed relevant to the accomplishment of my goals.

In reflection, today I had no feelings about food addictions yet I embraced mine feeling nothing. How can something so powerfully overwhelming one day feel like nothing the next?

Perhaps the answer will come to me during sleep when my body has a chance to realign itself and regain its state of balance.

So much goes on beneath the surface and yet we have all the answers inside. It is up to us to ask the questions that will allow us to sidestep the conscious mind and reveal the truth in our hearts.

Aging and Food Addictions

Nov3

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.