A for ‘addiction’

On 18 April last year, I wrote in my diary (and in my IE book) about food addiction. Last night, I watched an episode of Desperate Housewives 2, the bit where Bree realises that she does indeed have a problem with alcohol and she can’t live without it.

I was reminded once more that I do have an addiction myself – a food addiction.

If you have just started on this IE journey, this might not be obvious to you at all. Also, maybe it’s different for everyone else, I don’t know. However, I would like to write about this, because I believe that it was fundamental to my recovery, and it obviously still is something I need to think about and work on because for the past 3 months, I have been slightly off-course. I reckon that by thinking about my food problems as an addiction problem once again, I will be able to ‘rectify the trajectory’.

First, here is what I wrote in April last year:

Today, I reread what I’ve written for my book and feel like a fraud. I don’t believe a word I’ve written and the obsession has well and truly returned – again... What’s happened? I just want to diet and lose the weight. I don’t want to go through this process, I can’t bear it any more!

Oh I know what’s happened! I’ve read a diet book! I’ve finally bought and read Dr Phil’s latest book, The Ultimate Weight Solution. I’ve got the feeling he might be right. I’ve got the feeling I might have been fooling myself, for the past six years.

Let’s face it, nothing has changed: I still overeat, I’m still obsessed with my weight and food, I still watch what I eat most of the time, I still criticise myself for it a lot of the time, I still worry about my body shape and what will happen to it if I really do what the authors of Overcoming Overeating say (‘Surround myself with my favourite sweeties, cakes and chocolates?! You ought to be joking!’), and I’m still... fatter than I used to be. In the past six years, nothing has changed, except for my weight, which has gone up and up and up.

So who’s right in this story? Who to trust? Who to believe? How can I develop my own voice in this mess and trust it 100%, all the time, for ever?

Today, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impossible.

Today, I’ve come back to the conclusion that I am addicted to food and that I seem unable to get rid of my addiction.

Today, I’ve remembered the bit in James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces where he finally recognises that he is addicted and what it all means. And I’ve remembered how I completely related to that when I read those words, realising that I was addicted too: addicted to anxiety, to stress and ultimately (or is it primarily?) to food. How I couldn’t live a normal life because of this addiction.

Today, I feel again how I felt in that moment – what he said is true of all addictions. If it’s true for him, it’s true for me. I must stop fooling myself.

I need to sort this out. I need to stop using food as my best friend, as my worst enemy, as the kind of parents I wanted but never had. I need to realise that food will never be my life, never be me, will never help me, will never help me live my life in a more productive way, in a more serene way, in a more natural and healthy way. I need to stop using food as my crutch. Food is just food.

I don’t want to scare you or disappoint you, but on the IE path, I have found that there are issues that keep showing their faces. It’s not pleasant, but it happens, and you need to know that it will probably happen to you too, and over several months or years. Even after six years of knowing that diets don’t work, last year I still wanted to diet, I still had moments when I thought that dieting, depriving myself were the only solution. Right now, even after two years of knowing that I have an addiction and need to treat it as such, and after two readings of Eating Less by Gillian Riley in less than a year, I need to be reminded, again, that I do have an addiction and that it won’t go away if I keep forgetting or ignoring it and if I keep running away from it.

So today, you’ve guessed it, I’m going to read Eating Less for the third time, and hopefully this time I will take all it says on board and make it my way of life.

Watching Desperate Housewives last night, I was also reminded that if you suffer from an addiction, you need to take it one day at a time. I have been very good at that in the past year or so, and I believe that it is the only way to be on the IE path – be in the present, take things as they come, one day at a time. The same is true for addictions. Each morning, I have to decide that I will tackle this part of my life as an addiction and that I will not succumb to food that is not good for me.

Right now, I bet you’re thinking ‘This is not intuitive eating, is it?’ That’s exactly what I thought when I first read Gillian’s book. I rejected it straight away and thought ‘It’s complete rubbish, it’s just another diet book’ and put it away (I kept it for future reference, because I had mainly bought it as part of my research for my own book). I thought that if I have to think about food so hard every time it enters my mind, surely it’s counter-intuitive, so I don’t want it and I don’t even want to try.

However, I’m not sure when, say four or five months later, I found myself thinking about it all again, about chemical addiction, about sugar and salt, and realised that perhaps there was at least some truth in it. So I read the book again. That time, it made a lot more sense and I started to believe in some of the principles outlined in it, simply because I had come to the same conclusion.

By the way, this is a big thing (I have found) when you are on the IE path. No matter how many times you read a book or a blog or you hear something: it is only when you come to that conclusion (whatever it is) by yourself that it truly becomes your principle too, that it becomes true for you too and that you can incorporate it into your life naturally.

Today I’m writing about all this mainly because in the past two weeks I have had insurmountable cravings for white chocolate Magnums. I indulged every time I wanted one. I was very glad the days that I didn’t fancy one (to me, it meant that IE was ‘working’), but I was very glad to indulge the days that I badly wanted one (it also meant that IE was ‘working’ – I was listening to my body and doing as it dictated). However, slowly slowly, I came to realise that it was the intrinsic ‘qualities’ of the Magnum that made me want to eat Magnums. And then I remembered: the more you eat of that crap, the more you want to eat it. I remembered: A-D-D-I-C-T-I-O-N.

You feel like you’re doing it right, like you’re doing it the IE way, because you listen to your body and feelings and cravings and ‘do as you’re told’ (in the sense of ‘do what your body tells you to do’). But after a while, you realise that it’s only because you’ve been eating that thing that you keep wanting it, and that you’ve entered the vicious circle, once more.

OK, so what is the solution? Well, here is what I found: all you have to do once you’ve realised and understood this (and accepted it, as well, which is another matter...) is to force yourself a tiny little bit for a couple of days to say ‘no’ to your cravings, to reason yourself, to remember that it’s only the sugar and the chemicals that make you want to eat more of that thing. I promise you, if you do that for a day or so, the cravings will go and you’ll be fine again. When I had done that a few times, I realised that it was then a lot easier to go back to IE. It was the sugar and the chemicals that had confused my body. After that, my body wasn’t chemically craving the particular food any more, so it was free to tell me what it truly wanted and needed, and it usually was healthy food, with a few unhealthy foods, such as a few crisps or two squares of chocolate or a biscuit.

But let’s go back to my recent Magnum cravings. I remembered Andrea Wren’s post on A perspective on eating what you want and what I wrote in her comment box. Well, it’s helped me remember that indeed, we are on this journey to treat ourselves and our bodies better, and this includes eating less junk food and more good, healthy, wholesome foods, in order to feel good, in mind and body. From then on, it made it easy for me to stop wanting white chocolate Magnums and stop eating them, cold turkey. The ultimate goal was to feel better and to help my body stop craving things that, really, it didn’t crave at all.

Here’s the deal: IE is a very delicate thing. Attaining balance is very hard (I’m sure you’ve noticed!). After a while, you’ll realise that, really, it’s just like dieting: you need to eat healthily (because you want to feel good about yourself) and you need to move (because you want to feel good about yourself). You need to do both these things to be the best person you can be. However, the process is completely different (as I’m sure you know by now). When you diet, you just follow some rules dictated by somebody else and you end up rebelling. When you are on the IE path, you come to the same conclusions but all by yourself (and so you don’t need to rebel), and you don’t need to count points/fat grams/calories/carbohydrates, that is (and it’s the best thing): you don’t need to think about it, you don’t need to obsess about it. Little by little, step by step, you just find your own balance, by trial and error, and it’s your balance. Needless to say, it takes a long time... but you will feel really good because you will have done it all by yourself and because you will have freed yourself. The taste of freedom is better than anything else, in this process. Losing weight sure feels good, but oh, the freedom...!

I’m aware that this is a very long post, but I had to write it, first for myself, as a HUGE reminder of how my life truly is (addiction is a big part of it, I must stop fooling myself once and for all: my brain keeps thinking that food is the ultimate solution to a good life, even though my life is already wonderful, so I need to look into this more deeply), and second in the hope that it might help somebody out there. Even if only one person finds out that the same is true for her/him, then I’ll be happy and this blog will have served its purpose.