Struggle with junk food addiction...

[dado potato]

Ultralight,

I would say you are already well on your way, as you white-knuckle along. You are adopting a minimalist style; you are relatively self-disciplined in the grocery store. You are coming to grips with your compulsive behavior seeking "junk food" … and you are asking for ideas. Kudos!

Support first!

Now a couple of ideas...


Have you read the memoir by Bullitt-Jonas, Holy Hunger: A Woman's Journey from Food Addiction to Spiritual Fulfillment? The author's father was an alcoholic, and around age 10 she developed compulsive eating. Her memoir details her personal journey in the Overeaters Anonymous 12-step program. She is an Episcopal priest and a Harvard PhD. Her faith perspective may seem simplistic to an atheist, but it does appear that OA worked for her.


OA is structured around meetings and sponsorship, but their website contains some on-line resources. https://oa.org 12 Traditions, 12 Steps, Recovery that is physical, emotional, and spiritual.

As rosaruga suggested above, there may be healthy alternatives to the junk food you are concerned about. (Minimizing harm as a goal, rather than the goal of abstinence.) I would add my own personal favorite, Medjool dates (watch out for pits!), and copious amounts of filtered water with a twist of lemon or lime. Also, there is quite a satisfactory crunch in crisp celery, an apple or a carrot. On occasion I will air-pop hull-less popcorn.

Be well!

[ApatheticNoMore]

Yea it's hard to entirely know what the problem is, eating disordered though probably. I mean first UL has perfectionist tendencies that can be disordered in their own way, very black and white, so maybe cut yourself some slack on the watermelon (again with caveats like IF one has diabetes one may have to watch even the watermelon). And it's probably ok to eat vegetables with fat as well (the only caveat with that one is fat has calories but only a small amount compared to binges), so don't eat plain lettuce or greens, add olive oil etc.. There seems to be a lot of swinging between binging and extreme ascetic orthorexia and there might be a happy medium somewhere.

Now this is from my own experience:

What about true junk food, eating a bag of chips or chocolate chip cookies or a cake or a giant portion of pancakes or massive amounts of pizza in a sitting? Yea now that IS actual binging, not perfectionism. Well I've said many times it's not about willpower, but about those foods being hyper-palatable. They hijack your brain. That many such junk foods are designed to be hyper-palatable and so are many restaurant foods. And the only solution is to try to mostly avoid those foods. Does this mean one needs to eat plain lettuce, uh unless one binges on salad as soon as one adds a vinaigrette. No. There is a difference between palatable and hyper-palatable. One doesn't have to go all ascetic to stop binging, one just has to accept that some foods are hyper-palatable and best avoided and that it's not about willpower.

Now dark chocolate (70% dark) is a treat I like that I don't binge on, so there is that for damage control, but it's still probably a larger part of my diet than it should be even though I don't binge. So I can't say I recommend that strategy as the ideal one, it's just one I use.

Also low calorie dieting ITSELF can cause binging, there are studies on this. Does this mean one should or should not diet? I don't know, up to one's doctor and if one actually is overweight and it's actually causing health problems (people who only have a little extra weight and for whom dieting causes binges probably shouldn't, they just need a healthier acceptance of their weight and relationship to food. Dieting when you don't really need to is me. Also it might be more important to get the binging under control than to diet. Also some people can lose weight with just exercise and that might be best). But regardless low calorie dieting can trigger binges and so one has to be careful. Maybe something like a lower carb diet would work better if one needs to lose weight, one has to experiment with their body and what actually works with it.

It's possible subtle things like food allergies and sensitivities may come in and one binges on things one is allergic or sensitive to. I wouldn't even consider the hypothesis for hyper palatable foods as the hyper-palatability is the explanation. But if one has sensitivities then one can be aware of how they affect one's food behavior is all.

[Ultralight]

As an aside, I don’t really understand how bariatric surgeries affect cravings. These cravings are all in our heads. The bariatric surgeries are in our torso area. They aren’t brain surgeries. Someone here can speak to that.

Apparently, after a barbaric surgery you want to go number three if you eat more than a cup of food.

[lmerullo]

I don't know a whole lot about bariatric surgery, but I have a friend who rebounded after. Apparently you CAN restretch the volume of food one can consume.

[Ultralight]

Small victory. Today I did something I never do. I got lunch at a Mexican restaurant. I ate half the meal. Then I took the rest home in a box. I am having it for dinner now.

[Zoe Girl]

Good job!! I can say that quitting smoking was killer a few years ago. I was treating it like a bad habit instead of an addiction. Changing that assumption made a big difference.

Recently i started going to refuge recovery groups, a Buddhist path to addiction recovery, mostly meditation and talking about craving It is a good place for me with my bipolar brain. But no one asks what kind of addiction you are dealing with, and it does not have the god thing like AA, lots of meetings around on their website. There are some online ones if you want to check it out first

[Ultralight]

I am fighting the urge to rampage on some fast food right now. Fighting it. Fighting it.

[gimmethesimplelife]

I am fighting the urge to rampage on some fast food right now. Fighting it. Fighting it.

Think of how much more energy you would likely have if you ate better....seriously - it doesn't have to be expensive. Beans and whatever vegetable is cheap on Wednesdays when most supermarkets have their produce loss leaders on sale......I wish you good luck with kicking this addiction. It's not easy, I know as I was once addicted to regular soda and it was so hard to give that up. What finally did it for me was losing almost 40 pounds during my liver infection illness and being skinny again and wanting to stay that way so I had incentive to give up the soda.

I get that in your case you don't have this particular incentive but is there something you could do or accomplish with more energy/better health/less weight? Rob

[ApatheticNoMore]

I am fighting the urge to rampage on some fast food right now. Fighting it. Fighting it.

well are you:

1) hungry but trying to eat salads or fruits or whatever is healthier instead of hitting the fast food
2) hungry but trying not to eat anymore today (yea you'll lose weight but this is hard to sustain without very strong reasons)
3) not hungry but it's mealtime when one usually eats so ..
4) not hungry but wanting a treat

or what?

[ToomuchStuff]

As an aside, I don’t really understand how bariatric surgeries affect cravings. These cravings are all in our heads. The bariatric surgeries are in our torso area. They aren’t brain surgeries. Someone here can speak to that.

It doesn't. What does happen is eating more makes you physically ill. I've known three people (the ones that pop up in my head, I am sure more), that have had the surgery. One person (relative), has had it due to long time weight issues and has stuck with it. One had the band, and the cravings caused them to effectively kill themselves. A third couldn't afford the surgery here and went to this touted wonderful medical country to our south, where after the surgery, she remained sick and bedridden for a year all while she kept losing weight. She was less then 100lbs when doctors in this country went in and found the Mexican doctor did stomach stapling with non medical staples and routed a bile duct back into her stomach. When she came back up for a visit, I wouldn't have recognized her is I didn't know she was coming up and her voice.

The surgery will not help those that have other issues, such as a friend of mine. They have to lock up cabinets and the fridge as they have an adult kid who has no off switch on his appetite. (and hasn't his entire life)