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WHAT ARE THE WAYS OF GETTING OVER FOOD ADDICTION?

https://chandlerka5.wixsite.com/foodaddictrecover

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  • “Food Addiction Recovery”

 

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Weight--and What We Can Do about It. New York City: Ballantine, 2016. Print.

  • What It Is

    • Food addiction is a grown reliance to the over consumption of foods, especially foods that contain high sugar and carbohydrate levels. According to Jill Karson, who is the author of the research titled “Issues in Society: How Can the Obesity Epidemic Be Controlled?,” 671 million individuals are obese due to food addiction in today’s world. The majority of these individuals became food addicts from unbearable anxiety that was created by comparing themselves to others. Author Harriet Brown believes that this is because the human mind is susceptible to comparing oneself to others because we feel as if it helps us survive and thrive in hostile environments. This is only because it takes our minds off of the built up tension in such environments.

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    • Brown, Harriet. How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with

Weight--and What We Can Do about It. New York City: Ballantine, 2016. Print.

  • Karson, Jill. "Issues in Society: How Can the Obesity Epidemic Be Controlled?"

SIRS. ReferencePoint Press, 2017. Web. Accessed 15 Oct. 2018. sks.sirs.com/webapp/article?artno=0000394125&type=ART.

  • How It Happens

    • Eating larger portions, without any effects, rapidly evolves into food addiction because of the cooperation of both the psychological and physical factors. How this happens is very similar to how any other addiction works. Maia Szalavitz explains this when she tells her story in her book “Unbroken Brain.” As she is telling her story, she points out that fact that she was “driven enough to excel academically and fundamentally scared of change and of other people,” yet she was “reckless enough to sell cocaine and shoot heroin.”

    • Szalavitz, Maia. Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding

Addiction. New York City: St. Martin's, 2016. Print.

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  • How To Stop It

    • Throughout the years, there have been many diets and fast weight loss programs and products that have come out with millions anxiously waiting  to try it. What corporations are not telling you is that none of these diets work except for one. However, there are many other steps to take to overcome addiction than just a change in diet. To fully accomplish every step needed to overcome addiction, you first need to understand what food addiction is and how it happens

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  • Motivation

    • Image Address: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTJQmeQOjuGpsdJmZgF2rQtmyASUrcc6NfIsG75QBe98A4PjwiP

    • Title: “Spencer’s Story”

    • In Beth Macy’s book “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America”, she tells a real life story about a man named Spencer. Spencer was a man who definitely had pitfalls in his life and thought that he had found the only way to manage his psychological pain, through heroin and methamphetamine. However, he managed to become sober for seven years before he was incarcerated for his drug crimes. Spencer even managed to stay sober through his incarceration despite the fact that his long time girlfriend broke up with him and that his “onetime father figure was arrested and jailed for taking indecent liberties with a teenage female student.” The reason that Spencer was able to maintain sobriety for so long, especially through his hard times, is because of martial arts. Spencer was able to refocus his urges and cravings towards studying and learning all that he possibly could about martial arts and jujitsu. He would practice every day and would stick to his prison workouts rather than focusing on the “copious drugs that had been smuggled inside”. He even managed to contact a martial arts expert who would send him research as well as introduce him to pro fighters. Spencer is a prime example of what addicts of any form can be, they just have to have the need to want recovery.

    • Macy, Beth. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted

America. Boston: Little, Brown, 2018. Print

  • Contacts

    • Title: “You always have someone…”

    • Find Where You Fit

    • Find A Nutritionists Near You

      • Once you are think that you are ready to make a serious change, it can be challenging to learn about what diets work, what to buy at the grocery store, and how to make it taste great. There are nutritionists everywhere that are there to help you figure these things out. Click the box below and type “nutritionist near me” to find an office near you.

      • “Find Nutritionist” Button

    • Contact Helplines

      • No matter what you are feeling, what time of day it is, or how important you feel your situation is you can call any helpline. A few free helplines are:

Food Addiction Hotline: 866-418-1207

Addiction Hotline: 855-315-4766

Family of Food Addicts Hotline: 800-931-2237

(Monday-Thursday 9a.m to 9p.m. EST, Friday 9a.m. to 5p.m.)

Suicide Hotline: 800-273-8255

    • Find A Support Group Near You

      • It always helps to have a group of people supporting you through your struggle that are going through the same one themselves. There are millions of support groups for different struggles everywhere around you. Find a support group for yourself today by calling “Food Addicts Anonymous”.

        • “Call 772-878-9657” Button

 

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  • What It Is

    • Food addiction, or any other addiction, is defined as a behavioral disorder. A behavioral disorder is “the experience of the individual rather than his or her physiology” (Gearhardt and Corbin 167). We are able to notice and characterize someone as an addict by using the “addiction cycle: binge/intoxication, withdrawal/negative affect, and preoccupation/anticipation” (Koob 20). These three steps can be used as long as the reliance of a substance is known. The main contributor of any addiction is an environmental influence: something that influences bad behavior in the environment around you. In the case of food addiction, the environmental influence is the high energy dense food, or carbohydrate dense food, that is easily accessible in the world today. Before we can further understand what the three steps of the addiction cycle are, we must know what happens psychologically to fully be able to understand food addiction and be able to stop it. When humans eats high carbohydrate dense foods that generally tend to taste better, they “trigger feel-good brain chemicals such as dopamine” (Gearhardt and Corbin 166). After people feel pleasure that is induced by an increase in dopamine in the brain’s reward pathway “they quickly feel the need to eat again” (Gearhardt and Corbin 167). By eating highly palliative foods that cause a rewardful reaction, they can cause the reward signals to “override other signals of fullness and satisfaction” (Gearhardt and Corbin 167). This is where an addiction to food can start and where we are able to identify the three steps because the body cannot tell when it is hungry or not and eats food off of wants and craves. After a long period of time, the amount of food consumed may not form that same rewardful reaction as it did before. This can cause a tolerance to food which happens “when an individual needs to consume larger amounts to receive the desired effects” (Gearhardt and Corbin 167). Tolerance soon forces a loss of control over an addiction which “ is defined by the frequent consumption of a substance in greater amounts or over longer periods of time than was initially needed” (Gearhardt and Corbin 168). Usually patients with a food addiction do not realize that they are suffering from a loss of control because they are aware that their overconsumption is not good for them, but they are suppressing the matter at hand and become unable to recognize the effects. However, by suppressing the matter a patient with substance dependency can “typically continue use in the face of legal, financial, interpersonal, and health problems” (Gearhardt and Corbin 169). In the case of food addiction, people continue use disregarding the health problems that it can and will cause. All of these are characteristics of the first stage, nige/intoxication. The next stage happens when food addicts are running low or craving food and go into withdrawal which “is defined as the development of physiological or cognitive symptoms in response to periods of abstinence of reduced consumption of a substance” (Gearhardt and Corbin 167). If people who are deciding to change their addictive habits are able to overcome the withdrawal stage, this may not mean that they have recovered. The number one characteristic among all addicts is the “high rates of chronic relapse in substance dependence” (Gearhardt and Corbin 169). The last stage of the addiction cycle, preoccupation/anticipation, is defined in the next section, “How It Happens”, which is needed to know to be able to overcome your food addiction.

  • How It Happens

    • The last stage of the addiction cycle, talked about in the section “What It Is”, is preoccupation/anticipation. The aspects that drive this stage of addiction are desire and reward. Our minds associate one with the other, desire being the fuel for reward. In the book “Unbroken Brain” by Maia Szalavitz, she mentions that “Desire fuels learning, whether it is normal learning or the pathological ‘overlearning’ that occurs in addiction.” Over time, when the human mind or body desires an object or feeling, it initiates a learned association with the rewarding feeling that is obtained when the object or feeling is reached. The feeling of reward, which is the key psychological aspect of food addiction, is defined “as a stimulus that has the property of eliciting approach responses, and reinforcement, as the tendency for stimuli to strengthen learned stimulus-response tendencies” (Small 178). From extensive research about the reward sectors of the human brain, scientists have been able to gather that there are three different mannerisms that signal reward. These three layers are “(1) proximal signals associated with food consumption (e.g., taste/flavor), (2) distal signals, associated with the postingestive effects produced by nutrients, and (3) pre ingestive signals, such as visual or olfactory cues that predict the proximal and distal rewards” (Small 178). The most influential of these mannerisms for food addicts is the pre ingestive signals. In all human bodies, the pre ingestive signals are meant to “provide information about food availability and quality” (Small 180). The attributes that are categorized as pre ingestive signals are sight and smell. This is why it is so difficult for food addicts to resist addictive foods. Whenever an addictive food is seen, smelled, or even imagined, the brain remembers the feeling of reward gained by eating the addictive food. Often times, the mind remembers the feeling of reward as the taste of the food giving them that feeling, not the addictive properties of that food. Taste is able to be perceived through the next important mannerism of food addicts, proximal signals. Proximal signals “refer to the flavors of food and drink, which result from the integration of taste, oral somatosensation, and retronasal olfaction” (Small 179). However, these signals themselves do not have addictive properties. It is the association between them, the pre ingestive signals, and the replacement of the rewarding feeling that interferes with the next set of signals to create a food addict. The reason for this is because the next set of signals, the distal signals, are responsible for “pre- and postabsorptive post ingestive effects. These signals may promote or inhibit eating” (Small 180). Distal signals make it possible for our body to learn flavor nutrient conditioning, which is how our body is taught to “prefer foods that are biologically useful” (Small 180). The tastes that proximal signals perceive enable a release of dopamine, a chemical released in the brain when a pleasurable action is performed and causes a feeling of reward. Flavor nutrient conditioning is disrupted when there is an “injection of dopamine enablers into the prefrontal cortex” (Small 180). This disruption is the cause of the association made between the taste of food and the rewarding feeling that makes it possible to obsess over addictive foods when an addict even thinks about them. The aftermath of this is the first two stages of the addiction cycle that were talked about in detail in the “What It Is” section. If you have read both this section an the “What It Is” section, you now have enough understanding to read the section title “How To Stop It”, which goes in detail about how to prevent food addiction from worsening and how to get better.

  • How To Stop It

    • The first step to overcoming and maintaining sobriety from food addiction is to understand what food addiction is and how it happens. To learn more about those topics, read the previous sections “What It Is” and “How It Happens”. The reason that a full understanding of food addiction is needed to overcome it is: (1) it is easier to achieve sobriety when you understand why you are doing what is needed, and (2) realizing what is happening to your body as a result of food addiction can make you want to achieve sobriety. Achieving sobriety is not something that can be forced, “only the patient can choose whether to change his or her substance use habits” (Merlo 286). If a family member is suffering from food addiction, keep this in mind if you are going to use one of the tactics to help them, brief intervention. A brief intervention is when you sit the food addict down to express your concerns and provide support for them to reach out to a clinician. “Brief interventions are most suitable for patients at the beginning stages of problematic substance use” (Merlo 286). Once the food addict decides to receive psychological treatment, clinicians tend to use “methods grounded in motivational interviewing, explore the patient’s view on his or her situation, pros and cons of continuing the problematic substance use, and goals for the future” (Merlo 286). Clinicians use these methods to emphasize the fact that only the addict can make the decision to achieve sobriety by communicating empathy towards the patient in hopes that they will become more open to help. In most cases, clinicians will help the patient by providing “environmental modification and contingency management, cognitive reconstructing, and skill building” (Merlo 286). Through trial and error, the clinician will be able to detect how addicted to food a patient is and how much help they will need to receive. If the patient is unwilling to use the clinicians advice, the majority of the time the patient will be required to participate “in an intensive specialized program and typically benefit most from a longer period of treatment” (Merlo 287). These methods are a good place to start for food addict who are looking to recover, or for family members who are trying to get their loved ones to that point. If these options work and you or the food addict becomes mentally healthy to the point of physical recovery, then look at the different steps and diets down below to find what you believe is best for you. Everybody’s body is different, so do not be ashamed and quit recovery if a diet or exercise plan does not work for you. Instead, take the time to find the plan that gives you the benefits you are looking for.

    • When trying to overcome food addiction, there are different diets to start with and change into as time goes on. Here is a list of diets, what they do for your health, and a link to further your knowledge on each:

  1. THE KETO DIET: The keto diet is a low carb, high fat diet that takes fat and proteins and turns it into energy for the body, called ketosis, rather than carbs. Carbohydrates are what the body breaks down into energy for the body and when an excess amount is consumed, it builds fat accumulation in the body. Since this diet is considered a fast weight loss diet, it has been recommended as a good diet for food addicts to start off with, but it does have dangers for long term use. Make sure you are knowledgeable about this diet and any other diet you plan to switch to before you start.

2) THE DASH DIET: The DASH diet stands for dietary approaches to stop hypertension. It consists of fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean proteins, and low-fat diary. This diet is a great diet to start after the keto diet when you have adjusted to eating healthier and have lost a comfortable amount of weight to switch diets. The DASH diet is not as low in carbs, however, it is a great way to bring a healthier amount of carbs back into your diet that are from better food sources.

3) THE MEDITERRANEAN DIET: The mediterranean diet is a low red meat, sugar, and saturated fat diet that consists of produce, nuts, fruits, vegetables, and other healthier food options. This is the last transition that is good to make and easy to stick to once you have reached this point. Exercise is required for this diet to maintain the healthy lifestyle and body that you have worked so hard for up to this point, but it will be easier if you did a small amount of exercise recommended in the DASH diet to make this transition easier.

Motivation Tab:

Brown, Harriet. How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight and What We Can Do about It. New York City: Ballantine,

2016. Print.

 

This book is a summary of the authors experience with eating disorders as well as her knowledge about all disorders. It discusses the idea that company’s thrive off of people insecurities about their bodies, especially when it comes to women. The most helpful information that this book provided was the emotionally knowledge from the perspective of someone who has had an eating disorder. Without this source, it would not be as easy to convey the emotion background supported by a story that would help readers.

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“Food and Addiction, A Comprehensive Handbook.” Google Play, Google, play.google.com/books/reader

id=6ARpAgAAQBAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1.

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This source was a collection of different scientific publishing's to provide a sufficient amount of information about the psychology and physiology of food addiction. This source also provides information about how to stop and prevent food addiction, once again, both psychologically and physiology. This was the most helpful source about food addiction that I have found and provides the most information yet.

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Karson, Jill. "Issues in Society: How Can the Obesity Epidemic Be Controlled?"  SIRS. ReferencePoint Press, 2017. Web. Accessed 15 Oct.

2018. sks.sirs.com/webapp/article?artno=0000394125&type=ART.

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This source gives information about the lasting causes of food addiction, gives a variation of statistical evidence to support all of the claims made, and defines obesity. This source is the most helpful because it gives a variety of information on all perspectives of food addiction and obesity.

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Macy, Beth. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America. Boston: Little, Brown, 2018. Print

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This book was chosen as a comparison between drug addiction and food addiction. It provides detail about the in's and out's of drug addiction and how it can change a personal both physically and mentally. This book was most useful in helping with overall addiction definitions, as well as characteristics of addicts no matter the substance. In this book, it also mentions different similarities that drug addicts share most commonly with food addicts.

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Overall, Best Diets. “DASH Diet: What To Know.” U.S. News & World Report, U.S. News & World Report, health.usnews.com/best-diet/dash

diet.

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This source shares information about the DASH diet and all there is to know about it. It goes in detail about certain recipes and what food to make sure and avoid. This article also shares information about the level of physical activity needed for this specific diet. 

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Overall, Best Diets. “Keto Diet: Does It Really Work?” U.S. News & World Report, U.S. News & World Report, health.usnews.com/best

diet/keto-diet.

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This source shares information about the Keto diet and all there is to know about it. It goes in detail about certain recipes and what food to make sure and avoid. This article also shares information about the level of physical activity needed for this specific diet.

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Overall, Best Diets. “Mediterranean Diet: What It Is & What to Know.” U.S. News & World Report, U.S. News & World Report,

health.usnews.com/best-diet/mediterranean-diet.

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This source shares information about the Mediterranean diet and all there is to know about it. It goes in detail about certain recipes and what food to make sure and avoid. This article also shares information about the level of physical activity needed for this specific diet.

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Szalavitz, Maia. Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction. New York City: St. Martin's, 2016. Print.

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This book readers further understand the connection and links between certain aspects of everyday life and any form of addiction. A main comparison that really stuck out and made this book helpful was the comparison of substances that are addicting and music. This helps because it lets the reader connect with addicts on an emotional level by putting them in this situation where they have withdrawls of music throughout the day. It is basically an overall life vs addiction connection that helps readers understand where addicts are coming from.

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