Answers, for My Sake More than Yours, I Think...

I.

Are you angry because the author [David Kessler] glosses over the reasons people overeat, or because he doesn't offer much in the way of solutions?

Good reading, Susan. I was really furious and perhaps wasn't clear about this.

He all but calls sugar and fat addictive substances but stops at approaching them the way most clinicians would approach alcoholism. He stops short despite having spoken of people who feel out of control or obsessed by food, and writing widely about how sugar and fat stimulate the reward/pleasure/addiction/fear/pain regulator in the brain.

The reasons people overeat are as many as there are minutes in overeaters' lives. Tonight I would go out for Little Debbies because I was lethargic and tired today and didn't do any writing. (This post is supposed to save my ass.) Tomorrow morning I might go out for pancakes because I'm really tired of walking dogs and, hey, I need a little motivation.

In a way, I don't think the reasons people overeat matter. Everybody has to sort that out for themselves. But finding the reasons is not a eureka! moment. If I zone out on donuts in a land where no one can hurt me, all the reasons in the world aren't going to overcome that reward groove I've got going in my brain.

What I'm angry about is that he successfully describes sugar, fat and salt as an addiction but deliberately doesn't use the word or the techniques of the addiction model. He could have at least investigated it.

There was a lot of fascinating material in the book but I don't think anyone is going to lose weight because they read it. I do not feel that way about other books. People lose weight because of reading Atkins or Geneen Roth because they either give an inspiration of how to do it or why to do it.

II.
The God Thing

I'm a doubter by nature, although when I walk into a Catholic Church I immediately believe the wildest fairy tales. When I did my Third Step this time, I decided I would create a god who is at my beck and call. I won't ask him for anything. I demand it.

There is a dusk bird singing loudly in the gardens beyond my window. Daisy has loved me through the emotionally toughest years of my life. I will have very cold stewed apples for dinner. That's my personal, capsule-sized proof that God exists.

I want to yack every time I hear someone say "Goddess, grant me the serenity..." or refers to HP for "higher power". But there are some tangible things that are bigger than me, one of them being my desire to eat sugar, fat and salt. Electricity, my favorite thing (where would ice cream be without it?) is bigger than me. The Rooms and their success stories and support are bigger than me. Inspiration is bigger than me. My sponsor's 20 years of abstinence and affection for me is bigger than me.

So personally I don't have a problem thinking that there are powers beyond my own. And I don't have a problem squooshing them together and inventing a god that suits me.

Some Rooms are really, really Jesus-obsessed. I've been warned that the South is not a good place to go into recovery if you kind of think Jesus was prissy. Some are so new age that my blood sugar rises at the thought of them. Some have a good balance where the god thing isn't too heavy.

But I definitely get it that the God Thing can get in the way. I happen to take it for real, but not very seriously and not very zealously.

If it's what's stopping you from dropping into the Rooms, you can write sarcastic emails to me.

III.
Eaties and Foodies

Everybody seems to see themself in that post. There are moments that I'm a foodie, but when I am, I often want more.

Right now I'm ruminating on how abstinence makes me a foodie more often than I am when I'm not abstinent. I love what I'm eating when I'm abstinent, partly because I'm actually hungry and food is gratifying under that condition.

Goodnight, all. Dream of good things tonight!

If It Looks Like a Duck...

I. Am. So. Angry.

I've stopped in the middle of revising the eleventh chapter (don't get excited: I didn't dig into heavy revising until the fourth or fifth chapter & have lots of places marked to return to) to read a hot new book, David A. Kessler's The End of Overeating. The first half of the book focuses on the power of sugar-fat-salt in our diets and on the food industry which exploits those qualities. Good stuff, albeit in need of editing -- you'll have a lot of "Didn't I just read that?" moments along the way.

The last half explores how to get off the sugar-fat-salt "hypereating" that the U.S. has evolved into in the last 30 years.

Within the first 30 pages, Kessler presents a couple of colleagues with unwrapped fast food candy and bakery products. In discussing the affects of their sight and smell, one of his friends says "'...I cannot control my desire to eat them. I'm obsessing. I feel totally out of control.'" (p. 25) Throughout the book, people liken eating calorie dense food to the experience of a compulsive gambler who walks into a casino. He ends the book by talking about the aversion therapies used by those who treat smokers and compulsive shoplifters, and five pages from the end of the book he writes, "We can lead long and healthy lives without consuming alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs of abuse, so treatment for those addictions can be built around the principle of abstinence. But since we can't survive without eating, we need other strategies for changing our perception of foods..."

Did I mention I was angry? Actually, I'm shaking with anger.

He states early on that he's not talking about "compulsive overeaters" or "bingers" or bulimics, and yet he blandly passes by his colleague's sense of powerlessness and his friend's gambling simile. I really, really need to ask Dr. Kessler: If it quacks like a duck (or fizzes like a rootbeer float), isn't it possible that it's..."an acquatic bird of the family anatidae"???

I talk about 12 step programs for eating disorders all the time in this blog so if you're really adverse to the idea of them, first remind yourself that I have never recommended that anyone go to one. You are the only one who can decide to do that and the day you decide is going to be one of the ugliest days of your life. There aren't many people I'd wish that on.

Next, I advise you to stop reading this now.

Having established, in mind-numbingly over-technical, new-fangled language that made me go back to reread in the same way that a slice of pizza drives me to more pizza even when I hate myself for it (i.e., "incentive salience" = desire-driven, or "hyperpalatable," which means extra tasty and confounds my and Blogger's spell check) that industrial food stimulates serotonin production (also not in Blogger's spell check) and blocks dopamine receptors, he suggests a largely self-monitored cognitive cure.

To whit, did you know that a pint of Ben & Jerry's is a dangerous thing to bring home at night? Maybe you shouldn't eat ice cream. Maybe a diet of moderate portions high in protein, whole grains and vegetative stuff is what you should be eating instead of Big Macs...

By dressing up all the stuff that many of us have been writing about, talking about, doing stepwork over and reading about in swan's down, he's still turned out a duck.

Although fascinating in many parts, especially so to those who haven't dug around to find the heretofore obscurer studies on sugar addiction. At least he's brought half of it out into the clear light of National Public Radio.

The other half is that if neural pathways change over time because of the disproportion of mood-changing neurotransmitters affected by what I eat makes it hard for my brain's pleasure centers to get going from anything except sugars and fats...then I've got an addiction that works exactly like cocaine or heroine or speedballing or booze. And like them, it's degenerating because I need increasingly more to keep my buzz on. (Or off, in the case of serotonin.) In the end, after having taken my life, it will simply extinguish my life.

And I don't see him suggesting self-rehab for that.

Nota Bene: I told my sponsor about this post and she, too, was outraged. She called Kessler a quack...

OK, maybe it's just funny in the moment after a long day of trying to fit serotonin, dopamine & endorphins into as little space as possible...

The Martha Beck book looks interesting & yes, I, too, am glad whenever an expose of the food industry comes out. He does some fascinating work with industry consultants.