Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat (5 page)

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Authors: Mike Dow,Antonia Blyth

BOOK: Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat

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Are you wondering whether that could ever be you? Don’t worry—I promise you that it can. If you’re eager to get started, turn to page 231 and begin your 28-day Diet Rehab. But I’d love for you to read through the next few chapters, because the more fully you understand what is going on in your brain and body, the better choices you’ll be able to make and the more motivated you’ll be to carry them out.

How Food Addiction Makes You Fat

My patient Sondra was a tall, striking woman whose blond hair fell to her shoulders in long, flowing waves. She worked out regularly at her gym, taking a thrice-weekly spin class and lifting weights with a personal trainer. Every morning she carefully prepared a healthy breakfast of egg whites and half a grapefruit, and every afternoon she ate the salad with grilled chicken that she had brought to work from home.

Yet Sondra was at least forty pounds overweight, and she had gained fifteen of those pounds in the past three months.

“I was doing okay there for a while,” she told me, trying to smile through what was obviously a difficult conversation. “I was on a new diet—not Atkins, that was last year; and I did South Beach the year before; and the Zone the year before that! But this one was new, and it was working really great! For a while . . . And then . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“What happened?” I finally asked.

She shook her head. “What always happens,” she said flatly. “The new diet works great, I lose a bunch of weight, then something messes me up—my boyfriend or my mom or something at work or—I don’t even know what. But all of a sudden, I just can’t stick to the new diet anymore, no matter how hard I try, and then—bam!—I start eating chocolate and bacon and muffins and cookies. I really love those black-and-white cookies—you know, with the frosting?—and then I gain back all the weight I lost plus another five or ten pounds on top. Then I start a new diet, lose some of the weight, and feel really great—until I screw everything up again.”

Sondra was struggling with a very common aspect of food addiction: yo-yo weight gain. Through sheer determination she would force herself to follow a strict diet, suffering through the pain of withdrawal from high-sugar and high-fat foods until her addiction was seemingly broken. She’d go on to eat a healthy diet, lose some weight, and feel terrific.

Then a crisis would hit—nothing major, necessarily, but the normal wear and tear of daily life. Sometimes she’d have a fight with her boyfriend. Other times her mother would make a new demand, or her boss would set a tough deadline, or she’d stress about her growing credit card debt. The anxiety Sondra felt mounted, along with a sense of gloom about why her life wasn’t working out the way she’d planned. These difficult feelings soon became overwhelming, and Sondra would inevitably end up self-medicating—with food.

As I shared with you in the introduction, I myself have turned to food for its soothing power. As long as it’s only an occasional choice, I think it’s perfectly fine to have our favorite food after a tough day or to indulge in high-cal treats. Because Sondra wasn’t getting all the nutrients she needed, however, and because she had never changed her addictive attitudes and behaviors, she had remained vulnerable to food addiction. She might escape them when times were good, but she fell prey to them again when times were hard.

Sondra’s challenge was all the more difficult because, of course, food is everywhere. Unlike a substance abuser, she couldn’t simply avoid the places where she had once gotten high. She was always going to find high-fat, high-sugar food in her break room at work, in the store on her corner, at her family’s Sunday dinners, at her boyfriend’s apartment. All the places she might have gone to escape the bad influences of a drug habit were places that beckoned and tempted her to indulge her food habit. As I tell my patients, food is the most socially acceptable drug of choice, making it all the harder to overcome a food addiction and keep our relationship to food in-bounds.

Are You Addicted to Food?

How many of us feel that powerful pull of food and think of our lives as one long battle not to give in? That sense of helplessness doesn’t come from lack of willpower or emotional hang-ups. It comes from our body’s very real, physical need to restore its serotonin and dopamine levels.

Now that you understand how food affects your brain chemistry, it’s time to take a look at your own brain. You may not be used to thinking of yourself as a food addict, but if you’re struggling with eating habits or weight, and especially if you keep trying to diet, chances are that your brain chemistry is involved.

Check out the questions below and answer them as honestly as you can. There’s a wonderful reward in store for you—a gradual detox program that will allow you to make an effortless transition into a calmer, happier, and healthier relationship to food—not to mention a painless way to achieve your ideal weight. The process starts here—so let’s get started!

Discover Your Food Habits

• Is there at least one unhealthy food or beverage that you consume every day?

• Do you panic if you think you might not have access to this unhealthy food or beverage everywhere, such as on vacation or at a restaurant?

• Have you ever felt you might need to cut down on this unhealthy food or beverage?

• Has anyone else suggested you change your eating or drinking habits?

• Do you ever feel guilty after eating or drinking?

• Is this unhealthy food or beverage on your mind within an hour of waking up?

• Do you feel powerless when you have a craving?

• Have you tried but failed to cut back on this item in the past?

• Do you turn to this unhealthy food or beverage when you’re feeling low or high, or when you’re not even hungry or thirsty?

• Have you felt as though your self-esteem and relationships might be better if you didn’t have these cravings?

• Do you seem to think about eating or drinking most of the time?

• Is there a difference between your private and public eating?

• Do you tell yourself you could quit consuming this item whenever you want, even though you’ve never been able to?

• Do you look forward to the time when you can eat or drink this item?

• Are you envious of people who have a casual attitude to food?

• Do you sometimes enter a trancelike state when you are eating?

• Does most of your eating occur late at night?

IF YOU ANSWERED YES TO:

•
One
of these questions: You show signs of a mild food addiction. Although you are basically in control of your food choices and are able to enjoy food’s role in your life, you have moments where it feels as though food, not you, is in control
.

•
Two
of these questions: You have a moderate food addiction that is probably affecting your life more than you want it to. Although you are able to enjoy many aspects of your life, food is an ongoing theme that causes you frequent distress.

•
Three or more
of these questions: You may be in the grip of a food addiction that is affecting virtually every aspect of your life. Food is probably playing a much larger role in your life than you are happy with. It’s time to deal with the struggle that has been holding you hostage.

Whatever the results of this test, please don’t be hard on yourself. Now that you have understood the role that food plays in your life, you’re about to get every tool you need to rewrite that role and restore food to its proper place: as a source of nourishment and pleasure. Once you know the right foods and activities to boost your serotonin and dopamine levels, you will restore your brain chemistry, free yourself from your addiction, and go on to a healthy weight and a satisfying life.

If you’re ready to get started this instant, turn to page 231. But many of my patients have found it extremely helpful to know a bit more about how addiction works, so that they can really understand what’s going on in their bodies, minds, and spirits as they rehab their diets. If you’d like to join them, read on.

The Dangers of Tolerance

One of the key hallmarks of an addiction is
tolerance:
when you keep needing
more
to get the same high. As we build up tolerance to addictive substances, they don’t have the power to give us the same kick they once did. Not only do we need more to get the same high; eventually we need them just to feel normal.

You can see this quite clearly with a caffeine addiction. First you drink a cup of coffee and get a pleasant buzz. You feel a bit more alert and awake for a couple of hours.

Then one cup of coffee barely has any effect, so you up your dose to two. Then eventually you need three, and the buzz isn’t quite as powerful. Pretty soon you’re drinking coffee several times a day, just to stay awake. From a mild and pleasant stimulant, caffeine has become the only thing standing between you and utter exhaustion.

The same thing happens with addictive foods:

• First you just enjoy them.

• Then you need them. You still enjoy them . . . but it hurts not to have them.

• Finally, you need them desperately, just to feel normal. You might not even enjoy them anymore—but you know you feel lousy without them.

Is it possible to have just an occasional addictive food and
not
get hooked? Sure! The Scripps study rats who were fed sweet, high-fat foods for only an hour a day never made the switch to becoming addicted. Their brains continued to work as they always had because their exposure was not great enough to trigger any change. (Likewise, if you limit your intake of caffeine to healthy amounts, you’ll probably keep getting a sustainable energy boost when you do drink coffee.)

The rats that had unlimited access to those high-fat foods, however, developed tolerance. The more they ate, the less they felt it. That’s why they couldn’t stop eating—and why they couldn’t stop gaining weight.

Addiction Prescription

Why can’t we simply regulate our brain chemistry through medication? Couldn’t we take something to prevent outside stimulants from throwing our brains out of balance?
In fact, low doses of dopamine-blocking drugs have been tried on test groups of people to see if they could affect their alcohol consumption. The treatment did reduce drinking by decreasing the enjoyment people found in it, but unfortunately, the dopamine blockers produced Parkinson’s-like tremors. (That’s probably related to the fact that Parkinson’s lowers your dopamine levels about as far as they will go.)
People with substance-abuse problems frequently get substitute drugs. Heroin addicts receive methadone, smokers use Nicorette, and alcoholics and other drug users are prescribed anti-anxiety drugs—all to help wean them off their primary drugs more slowly. The substitutes blunt or prevent withdrawal symptoms, allowing people to clear their systems and rebalance their brain chemistry without suffering.
Well, guess what? In Diet Rehab, we’re following the same effective principle! I’m going to have you detox
gradually
from addictive “pitfall foods” as you fill your diet and your life with foods and activities that naturally boost your supply of healthy brain chemicals. That way, you can overcome your addiction painlessly, and transition effortlessly into a healthy new life.

Making It Through Withdrawal

Besides tolerance, the other hallmark of addiction is
withdrawal—
the pain of giving up an addictive substance that the body has come to rely on. My training at the Betty Ford Center and my current work as the clinical director of therapeutic and behavioral services at The Body Well integrative medical center in Los Angeles have given me an intimate acquaintance with withdrawal symptoms. I know very well how painful the recovery process can be.

Here are some of the most common withdrawal symptoms; they plague food, nicotine, alcohol, and drug addicts fairly equally. Have you noticed any of these symptoms whenever you’ve tried to change
your
diet?