Tag Archive | Food Addicts

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.

Food Addiction and Wellness

Oct31

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.

A Food Addict’s Halloween

Oct30

Halloween can be sheer hell for food addicts handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. Yeah, you’re supposed to hand it out, not turn out all your lights and sit there in the dark and eat it yourself.

Halloween is one of the few opportunities some of us get to interact with real people, and children at that. Few things are more entertaining than watching children enjoying themselves.

The smiles, the big eyes when they get to choose their favorite candy all by themselves, the shrieks when an older ghostly creature jumps out of the bushes and scares the crap out of them, and the sweet, distracted “thank you” at Mom and Dad’s urging. It’s just too cool.

True, all that candy can be tempting, but I have noticed that I don’t feel overly emotional or stressed out waiting for the trick-or-treaters, so I don’t have any addictive cravings. That doesn’t mean that I won’t eat candy corn or M&M Peanuts but I just don’t go nuts with the stuff.

I’ve had 4 bags of candy stashed in the corner in a tightly-tied plastic bag for three days and I haven’t been tempted once. It actually feels weird. And just try to journal your feelings when you don‘t crave the addictive food!

My food addiction plan is in place. I expect to eat some kind of candy, so I’ll keep a couple of fat blockers on hand, but my plan is what will save my bacon.

I plan to enjoy every single bite of Halloween candy I eat–every morsel. No negative self-talk about shoulda, coulda, woulda baloney. Of course, I will drink lots of water to help flush the fats from the Snickers, Tootsie Rolls, and Peanut M&M’s, should the kids leave any for me.

And my surefire backup is a group of teenagers who come by around 9:30 and are happy to see a smiling face after being run off by some of my neighbors who close up shop by 8:00 PM.

Not only do we have a nice conversation, but they know that Ms. Bernie will give them the rest whatever candy is left over at the end of the night, so they really look forward to that.

Little do they know that they are helping me more than I am helping them. I’ve learned that when all is said and done, people are the absolute best rescue remedy for any food addiction, any time. Count on it.