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.

One of Us Asks about Addiction...

I recently received this email and thought it too big a question to not take a swing at in a more formal setting:

Do you think addictions and their associated behaviors are ever cured? Or when we do things like quit drugs, alcohol, sex, junk food (what ever our particular vehicle is) we are not really "quitting" them, but merely keeping them in check? Do you ever truly rid yourself of an addictive behavior? Do you ever get over being an addict? Or are we destined to forever walk around on eggshells (no pun intended) regarding certain foods knowing, but denying, that we are one Twinkie away from the next food OD? I guess my question is...Does it ever end?

I'd realy like to know what you think...

OK, I'm willing to give this a shot, with the caveat that I can only speak from my experience and some research.

There are two kinds of addictions, first of all. The kind where you "put the plug in the jug," as they say in AA. Most of them fall into this category -- gambling, drugs, booze, sex, smoking, shoplifting, thrill-seeking. (I'm referring to a website directory of different 12-step groups that I recommend readers refer to when they want to know which I attend: http://www.minnesotarecovery.info/OtherRecoveryGroups.htm)

The other kinds are those in which one has to handle the very substance of the addiction every day. I immediately think of Debtors Annonymous (you HAVE to spend money) and the many food addiction groups. That website would provide a couple more -- depression, emotions, manic-depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, all of which are arguably biological in origin and not easily cured -- as well as workaholics ( you HAVE to make money) and possibly codependency (you have to have relationships and even brand new ones post-recovery can display symptoms you didn't suspect lurked within a new friend or lover).

None of these addictions is easy to overcome but I've heard in the Rooms from people with dual addictions that food is the hardest because you have to eat. Moreover, the food groups define abstinence in different ways that boil down to not eating "compulsively".

I've chomped many a weighed and measured, abstinent salad with the frenzy I can eat cookies.

Further, I responded to an AFG post today that these days when I binge, I do it consciously, seeking the barbituate effect, the loophole out of my reality that's better than any drug I've got on hand. It takes a lot of refined carbohydrates and sugar to do that but my choices are as deliberate as brain surgery.

Is that "compulsive"? (Microsoft Bookshelf defines compulsion as "an irresistible impulse to act, regardless of the rationality of the motivation".) It's hard to resist my desire to shut down but it's equally hard to resist my desire to eat the squeaky clean salad when I'm hungry. And lately it feels as though I force myself to go get that shit. I don't necessarily crave it.

But once started, I don't stop until my food is gone, or it's very hard to and I'm very resentful about it. I have done scary things for food, not criminal but tinged with the feeling that I am one. My heart races and I look nervously around the store to see if I know anyone from the Rooms there. My cheeks burn with embarrassment as I put the packages on the counter. I walk home hoping I don't run into anyone.

Most of the addictions (I don't think manic depression is an addiction, BTW, although I'm on the fence regarding depression and certain emotions) I've mentioned above are involved with mood alterations, whether it's through chemicals, adrenaline, hormomal alterations or seratonin boosters. Food is a complex and large set of chemicals, and both sugar and fat alter the brain by shooting it up with seratonin, the feel-good neurotransmitter we all take Zoloft to enhance.

Further, natural seratonin is manufactured from tryptophan, an amino acid extracted from protein. Sugar drives insulin up, carrying competing amino acids to muscles and leaving tryptphan able to cross the brain/blood barrier to do its work in brewing up a big pot of seratonin. Sugar also releases endorphins and other pain-killers and pleasure-enhancers into the system.

For the person suffering from mild depression, sugar can be that little something that brightens mood. Research bears this out: obese people are 25% more likely to suffer from a mood or anxiety disorder. When rats are offered the choice of water or a sweet, morphine based drink in isolated cages, they choose the latter. Rats in a rat theme park prefer water. I should mention that endorphins are chemically similar to morphine.

Boredom, isolation = mood relief = addiction.

Rats who have been forcefed sugar for long periods, then fed a drug that blocks the effects of heroin and other similar brain chemicals, showed similar withdrawl symptoms -- chattering teeth, tremors, lowered dopamine -- as heroin addicts.

Further, we know that people with a self-proclaimed sweet tooth report that their moods change when they eat sugar.

OK, so I've made a case for the chemical effect of sugar on the brain. But is this addiction?

Wikipedia defines addiction as "a chronic or recurrent condition proposed to be precipitated by one or more of the following: genetic, biological/pharmacological and social factors. Addiction is characterized by the compulsive use of substances or engagement of behaviors despite clear evidence to the user of consequent morbidity and/or other harmful effects."

We are much more aware that the tendency to be overweight is genetic. I've made a good, if brief, case for sugar as a pharmacological agent. Just as opium dens, shooting galleries, bars and casinos exist for the sake of convenience and social reinforcement of the activity, so, too, food has a strong social context. Holiday foods. Family traditions. Advertising and its associations of good times and satiation. Comfort food...

More recently, however, the American Psychiatric Association Bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has substituted "dependency" for "addiction".

Back to Microsoft Bookshelf we go! Dependence: 1. Contingent [i.e., "centered on" or subject to, also according to MB] on another. 2. Subordinate. 3. Relying on or requiring the aid of another for support.

So I guess the question is, does your world revolve around a particular substance or activity? Does your life center around it? Do you depend primarily upon it for company, reassurance, mood elevation, stress and pain relief? If you kick it out of your life, cold turkey, are you able to cope on your own?

Remember that just as there are different kinds of alcoholics -- gutter drunks, social imbibers, chronic drinkers and binge drinkers -- there are different kinds of addicts in the other categories. I can go for long stretches without sugar but when my life becomes too painful or too boring or too unrewarding or too isolated, I begin to crave.

But these are questions you have to put to yourself. There are lots of criteria around for whether We are food addicts or not. Here's one: http://www.foodaddicts.org/quiz.html. This set of questions will tell you that saying yes to any of them "may" mean you're a food addict. There aren't very many women in the Western World who don't calculate calories taken in and expended, so I don't know how definitive or scientific this quiz is.

So to answer the question...

I have not had any success in eating like a normal person when the food includes sugar or even "abstinent" food that's too much like other food. I don't know how much of this is a combination of deprivation & my feeling that I'm going to end up abstinent again & I'd better cram it all in while I can, & how much of it is genetics & an addict's neurology.

I can say that I have hangovers from sugar. It's interesting that insulin sends all those amino acids to the muscles because my muscles hurt the Day After. I'm terribly thirsty & I'm exceedingly generous with salt on my abstinent food & it doesn't make me that thirsty. Sugar makes me very tired, as opposed to the high I hear so much about. It puts me right to sleep, which is what tryptophan is supposed to do from the Thanksgiving turkey. I'll be tired & sometimes pretty spacy the next day.

I also run on dysthymic depression, a low level, chronic condition that occasionally peaks into a major depression. This is common for an addict who uses a substance for self-medication.

And then there are my other addictions. I've abused alcohol but am not dependent on it (it makes me want to eat). I smoke. I buy too much stuff -- books, clothes, music, movies, salt-&-pepper shakers, hat boxes, dolls -- when I have no retirement plan, health insurance, & taxes to pay off. I get obsessive about things like taking pictures, "labels" on posts, how much garbage I generate for each trash day (Oh! The vanilla box! A bonus piece of garbage!), waiting until the small jar of nickels is full before rolling change & putting it in my savings account.

I see my addictive patterns in many things, some more harmful than others. I see myself as being an uncured addict. This post makes me understand how 12-step programs work for addicts.

It's all food for thought.