Food for Thought

Today I thought about food. All. Day. Long.

I'm pretty sure it's because I was hungry. All. Day. Long.

This is my problem. I'm pretty sure that I have a food addiction and most likely a deep down addictive personality. That's scary to think about. I don't know a whole lot about food addiction, I haven't really done any research, but I think I understand addiction fairly well. I got a very real understanding of how it works when I was on intense prescription pain medication after the accident. I don't remember exactly what dose I was on (I'm pretty sure it was a lot), but I wasn't able to take morphine because it made me itchy and Demerol made me sick, so I was on Oxycontin and Oxycodone in both drip form (initially) and pills later on. I was in some serious pain, and that was some serious, scary medicine. Eventually as I was healing I didn't need quite so much medicine, so the doctors started stepping down my dosage, and that's when I learned what withdrawal felt like.

For me, I knew it was time for my medicine because my arms started to twitch and I couldn't control it. I would shake them out to get the feeling to go away, but it often wouldn't. It was this weird discomfort that only went away after I took my medicine. The last thing in the world I needed was to get addicted to narcotics. With my parents help I started to ween myself off of the medicine, going from (something like) two pills twice a day, to one twice a day, to one a day, to a half a day, and so on. When it got really bad it would feel like I had little bugs crawling under my skin and I would hug myself tightly to try to make it go away. I've heard that this feeling is your body searching for the drug in your system. I'm glad that I was able get myself off the medicine as quickly as I did, because that experience was not fun at all. Even now though, almost 9 years later, every once and awhile my arms will still get that uneasy twitchy feeling when my legs start to hurt.

With food it's never been that bad, but I did experience headaches when I first did my Whole 30 challenge and cut out sugar, grains, and dairy. I'm sure that others have that experience when they cut out caffeine. I've never been much of a coffee or soda drinker, but that's what I've heard. What I see as the addiction from a food perspective is how much it can take over my thoughts. Before I used to drive down a street that had pretty much every fast food place known to man. As soon as I started my drive home I would start to think about something I wanted to eat. At every place on the street I had a "go-to" favorite. Baja fish tacos at Long John Silver's, McDonald's double cheeseburger and a sweet tea, Bojangles fries and a sweet potato pie, Taco Bell cheesy gordita crunch. I would go back and forth from one bad choice to another all the way through my 30 minute drive until I finally decided on the thing I wanted most, and I really wouldn't be satisfied until I got it. And this was all before I had dinner. Disgusting, right?

During the first two weeks of my Whole 30 challenge I still felt like this and actually changed the way I drove home so I wouldn't pass these places. It really did help. Once I got the "drugs" out of my system, that voice that told me how much I wanted those bad foods slowly got fainter to the point where I had to strain to make out what it was saying, not that I wanted to hear it anymore. I wasn't always focused on what I wanted to eat because I ate good foods often that fulfilled me and fueled me. I would still "think" that I wanted something bad, like a cupcake...but I wasn't obsessing over these foods like I used to. I was doing really well until I started to add bad foods back into my diet.

Your body has a memory. You can train it to forget, but deep down it always remembers. When I took the sugar away, for a while I still thought a lot about eating sugary things, the same way that my arms will twitch when I'm in pain because my body wants medicine. Eventually the thoughts quieted down, until I made a bad choice. The first time I put sugar back in my body it was all "Oh hey, we remember this! Must. Have. More!" Sigh. The strange thing is, my body's memory is sometimes better than my own. When I started putting bad things back in my body I felt terrible. I got headaches, and stomach cramps, and felt weak and dizzy, and just completely and utterly crappy. If this was the way I was feeling all the time before, I never really knew it. The food drugs were keeping me in a constant state of suck that became what normal felt like for me. I didn't realize how crappy my old normal felt until all of those feelings came back. Unfortunately I don't always remember (or think too much about) how terrible I felt the last time I ate something I shouldn't have.

This is I guess part of the addiction. I only think about the immediate satisfaction of shutting down the sugar voice, and not about how I'm going to feel later. Even though I know that it's not good for me as a diabetic, it's basically poison, I will eat it anyway. It's a vicious cycle.

The best part of doing the Whole 30 challenge was that it gave me an acute awareness of how food was having an effect on my body. Just like when I realized what the pain medicine was doing, I began to correlate the headaches to the sugar, or the stomachache to the cheese that I ate. The worst part about a food addiction though is that you can't avoid all food. I could avoid alcohol, or tobacco, or pain medicine, but I have to eat. Sometimes, like recently, I get to where I know that if I'm not prepared or if I don't plan ahead I won't have the foods that I need to eat or be able to make a good choice. So I make no choice instead. I don't eat, or I barely eat. This is just as bad as eating bad food because it freaks my body out and thinks it's starving and I think about bad food all day long. All the way to the Metro..."Ooh, I bet Starbucks has some good muffins, maybe I could get something at the corner bakery, or if I take a left here there's a Burger King and I can get an ice cream, Oh. You know what would be really good, Safeway cookies - but I don't want to eat a whole box, maybe I can just buy one or give the rest to a neighbor." Seriously. That was my internal dialogue on the way home today.

I don't always shut down the voices. Today I did. I came home and made bacon and kale. I've still thought a few times about going back out for one of those things, but as of yet I'm still holding strong.

October 1st is the start of a "Back to Basics" plan for me. I have a goal of losing 100 total pounds by New Years Eve. 3 months away and a little more than 10 pounds each month to lose. They say if you fail to plan, you plan to fail (or something like that). This is true for me.

Here's my plan:
1. Find things to make ahead for breakfast so that I will eat breakfast.
2. Pack my lunch.
3. Drink more water.
4. Take my medicine and fish oil every day.
5. Hit mobility and hit it hard.

Here's to an awesome October and to shutting down the little voices.