Carbs = an addiction?
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inspirationstation wrote: »I have never had a chemical or psychological addiction beyond food, so I can't compare, but I do know that it becomes overwhelming. You plan to eat, you hide food to eat, you alter your activities to eat...and sometimes you do it alone, because the guilt is real.
Yes!! This is exactly it.0 -
chaoticdreams wrote: »My cousin, my husbands bff, and my mother are all alcoholics. I'm a little hesitant to call my desire for sugar an addiction after seeing that kind of addiction up close and personally. My cousin will shake and sweat until he has just a sip of alcohol and can't function at all until then. I am never like that with sugar and having cravings for doughnuts never made me lose my license and job, and aside from arguing over the last piece of pecan pie at Thanksgiving, it never caused me lasting heartache with my family.
That being said, I have read the studies about sugars effect on the brain and I do agree that it lights up your pleasure center and makes you want more, just like crack and other drugs, but not on that same level. Still, if something is repeatedly pressing the happy button, the more you are likely to indulge in it.
Oftentimes food is completely linked with emotion, hence why we have comfort food, and once you equate something with a strong emotion, it's hard to break that bond. For most people comfort food is carby. Food can have a hold over people emotionally and psychologically. Plus, it's tied to a many social situations.
Add to that the feelings of guilt society puts on overweight people for indulging in said comfort foods, then that opens up a whole other mess of issues, like hoarding and hiding food. I've been there and done that, so I completely understand.
So while I do not think sugar/carbs are an addiction in the medical sense or anywhere close to alcoholism or drug dependency, I do see that they can cause similar behaviors and a variety of other problems all on their own. Plus, everyone is wired differently. Some people can have a beer and go home and be fine, while others can't stop.
Some people can eat a cupcake and go about their day. People like me eat a cupcake and then eat the other 11 too. I don't think I'm addicted to carbs, I just can't handle myself around them.
Caffeine on the other hand....
I can have my addictive personality type manifest itself in other areas of life.
I jump hard into things! I got into diet and went full on. I got a food scale and started weighing and prepping meals.
Sometimes it works out well. Now at the same time I know... And it is true that even good healthy Ezrkiel flax seed bread, it is so yummy I want 4 slices not one.
So I get compulsion. I know I can be a spoiled brat and give myself what I want all the time.
But now I know I can and do have power over compulsions. I can say no. Wanting never killed anybody as grandma used to say.
That was my weight problem in a nutshell
I never told myself no.
It is the biggest change for me. I'm responsible to say no. Be it the first cup cake so I never get the craving fed.
Or I make myself get off the comfy couch and hit the gym.
Great thought provoking topic.
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chaoticdreams wrote: »My cousin, my husbands bff, and my mother are all alcoholics. I'm a little hesitant to call my desire for sugar an addiction after seeing that kind of addiction up close and personally. My cousin will shake and sweat until he has just a sip of alcohol and can't function at all until then.
What you are describing here is withdrawal, not addiction. When someone cuts out carbs for the first time, they also go through withdrawals, commonly called "keto-flu" but in actuality it's your body detoxing from the carbs.
I am firmly in the carbs are addicting camp. It's why so many foods are manufactured using high carb ingredients. It has to do with the insulin spike and how your body seeks more upon depletion. In combination with that, your mind tells you that you'll feel better with another carb hit, we are emotionally and physically attached to carbs and when we cut them, we physically and emotionally suffer.
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A lot of semantics always gets debated when this issue comes up.
For me, it's simple. Good food makes me less hungry after I eat it. Some carb-laden food (definitely not all of it) makes me want MORE after I eat it. I try to avoid the latter.0 -
One thing is for sure. We're all addicted to food and water. As far as carbs.. I can see both sides. But I've experienced eating them when my brain did not want them but my body did. And eating a few of certain types (bread, potatoes) makes my willpower flee.0
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I think also some of the answer is in your body's makeup. I'm a diabetic so there are powerful forces at work when my blood sugar dips And my body says "eat now!" Another reason I don't skip meals or IF, but others can just fine.
I think it also depends on your understanding of addiction. Do you mean something you can't control or something hard to control but still in your power? I believe all addictions can be cured. So maybe it's also a philosophical question. I had an uncle who could not stop drinking. He killed a girl driving drunk, and never drank again.
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I can't have ANYthing in the house that will tempt me….even hid a tiny bag of licorice in the freezer, way in the back when I began LC in Feb.....but dragged them out last month…so now they are gone, and I know I can't buy anything that will 'call my name'
To my credit I haven't bought bread, or cake, or a bag of caramels..…I think my fear of getting to T2 diabetes, and being permanently disabled by loading on more weight to my damaged hip keeps me on the path.
motivator Tony Robbins says we are motivated by " pain, and losing something", not by the" reward and pleasure"…and it's true for me. I can IMAGINE how good it feels to be slim again, but fear of requiring a wheelchair keeps me on this path.
Putting up a photo of me at size 6 doesn't work..(I just think of how good I looked!) it HAS to be the worst photo.. that's the one that inspires me to NOT look like that anymore…knowing that is what people see, and judge.
Or having to get dialysis 3 days a week in some horrible understaffed, over busy clinic really motivates me to stick with LCHF for life. ( I've talked to people trapped in that world and I will do anything to avoid it)
Find what motivates you best..and do it.0 -
@AngInCanada, just broke out of what was largely a week of binging. Trying to shake off the unavoidable shame, which time and success will heal. Doing my own post-mortem this week, too.
From the discussion here, it seems like there's a fuzzy line between a habit and an addiction. I'll side-step that for the moment, just to comment on how habits work, as far as I know.
In the book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg talks about how and where habits are physically created in the brain. They move out of the prefrontal cortex (where you make conscious decisions) to the basal ganglia (where actions are automated). This is how you can have the experience of "waking up" in front of a bowl of ice cream you don't remember deciding to eat. He points out that the neural pathway created by a habit never goes away. You can establish new habits, but you can't erase the old ones. I think of it like this: your thoughts are trains, which make new tracks if you're making conscious effort, but can easily switch over to old tracks and just ride them to the same destinations as before. So you have to look out for the triggers, which are the switch-over points to the old tracks. But you can deliberately go over and over those new, desirable tracks, to make them more automatic--easier--over time. As an example, I quit smoking 10 years ago, after several failed attempts. While I still experience a kind of nostalgia when I smell cigarette smoke, the craving is very distant, and quite heavily outweighed by the joy and convenience of not smoking. But it took years for that to be the case, and I know that if I ever smoke again, even one drag, I'd be right back where I was before.
Anyone remember the Adam Sandler movie "Click"? This reminds me of that movie, too.0 -
Having prior problems with binge eating, I still struggle with this. I have/had food rules and most restaurants I had a go to meal - pretty much the only thing I would eat there. Because of this there are restaurants that I just can't walk into because I'm afraid they will be a trigger for me that sets me off on eating carbs with great abandon. While I can probably order something low carb, I know I would struggle with not getting what I want. I have not been known for my willpower.
To me, the label of whatever you want to call it, addiction, withdrawal, habit or something else entirely, doesn't matter as much as my ability to recognize it as a problem area and put measures in place to prevent it. I just had this discussion with my sister who wanted to go to Panera for breakfast and I flat out refused. She wouldn't budge on her restaurant choice, and Panera is a trigger restaurant for me. I used to use tricks and deception to hide the binging or amount of food I ate, and now I use it as a weapon against it - one trick I use is pretending the restaurant just doesn't exist.
On the upside, because of the lack of cravings, I can make it through the grocery checkout without buying a candy bar (a big deal for me), and I can make it through a restaurant meal without partaking of the bread, or even appetizers. I celebrate these small successes and look forward to the day that I can make healthy choices all the time.
It's a tough journey and everyone handles it a little differently.
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What you are describing here is withdrawal, not addiction. When someone cuts out carbs for the first time, they also go through withdrawals, commonly called "keto-flu" but in actuality it's your body detoxing from the carbs.
I am firmly in the carbs are addicting camp. It's why so many foods are manufactured using high carb ingredients. It has to do with the insulin spike and how your body seeks more upon depletion. In combination with that, your mind tells you that you'll feel better with another carb hit, we are emotionally and physically attached to carbs and when we cut them, we physically and emotionally suffer.
Pretty sure if you're experiencing withdrawals from something, it's because you're addicted to it - whether psychologically or physiologically, you're still addicted to it. Withdrawal is a side effect of the absence of something you're addicted to, and if you weren't addicted to it, you certainly wouldn't be having withdrawals from it.
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Short Definition of Addiction:
Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors.
Addiction is characterized by inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional emotional response. Like other chronic diseases, addiction often involves cycles of relapse and remission. Without treatment or engagement in recovery activities, addiction is progressive and can result in disability or premature death.
This is from the American Society of Addiction Medicine. It seems like a pretty fair statement and I think what Ang is describing has a lot of these elements. So I'll chime in on the yes side.
Thanks for posting the definition. I tend to stay away from the sugar/carb addiction threads as they can become rather heated and nasty.
I do believe that people have different criteria for what qualifies as an addiction. Based on their own personal experiences. I personally have never seen first hand individuals dependant on drugs or alcohol so other than what I've seen on Intervention i don't really know what people go through. I can only imagine how awful it must actually be.
What I dont like seeing is others who have faced addictions to drugs/alcohol telling someone else that their addiction to carbs/sugar doesn't qualify as an actual addiction based on their own beliefs on the subject. Also i don't feel that brushing it of as someone 'making excuses' for their behavior, does anything other than insult the individual struggling with it. I would argue that the same could be said about any addiction, I've heard of people quitting drugs/alcohol cold turkey, so if some can make the decision to do that, then are others that haven't just making excuses for their behavior?
Based on the above definition of addiction, one does not have to be selling their body, etc to obtain a substance to be an addict. Therefore addiction can come in many forms and mean different things to different people.
Chemical dependency may be the term many are looking for when arguing that carb addiction does not meet the standards.0 -
I believe I am addicted to carbs/sugar. I used to think it was just all food. This was due to the physical response I had to it. If I went into a bakery I would get the shakes and couldn't concentrate. It would almost bring me to tears to be around it. I couldn't just have 1 piece of cake. I hid food. I was ashamed of what I ate. I lied about it. I would get the shakes if I wanted it. That first bite would calm me down. Now that I haven't had any processed carbs or sugar in 2 months that is all gone. So I would say yes, there can be some form of physical reaction to carbs/sugar.0
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I believe carbs can be addictive. There is a lot of research that indicates this may be the case. Based on my experience, I think the research is correct. The more of certain carbs I have (anything with added sugar is the absolute worst, but bread or wheat in general has a similar though slightly weaker effect on me) the more I want.
People talk about moderation, but it isn't realistic with carbs for me. I can moderate any other food with no problem...cheese, dairy in general, almonds, any meat, etc. But once sugar enters the equation, it sets off massive cravings that are extremely difficult to resist. It often results not only in finishing the sugary food (the entire pint of ice cream or entire bag of cookies) but then looking around for anything else I can binge on.
It is MUCH easier and sustainable for me to just not buy that stuff. Every month or two, when out in a social situation, I might have a small sugary something...but that is it. Anything more is asking for trouble.0 -
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I tried over and over to taper off of carbs and did not make it happen so I finally went off cold turkey. It was a hellish two weeks.0
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A lot of semantics always gets debated when this issue comes up.
For me, it's simple. Good food makes me less hungry after I eat it. Some carb-laden food (definitely not all of it) makes me want MORE after I eat it. I try to avoid the latter.
Don't wake up the Sugar Devil and I don't have to fight it
Carbs are a funny thing. I do eat them but only before exercise and burn them off
The craving does not kick in
But I have not had a doughnut in almost 2 years
There is something to keeping out of harms way0 -
I appreciate and respect the differing ideas here and appreciate that conversations like this don't suddenly "disappear" from the post list as others I have contributed to elsewhere have.
Having an open mind is important. As we have all figured out already when we decided to eat lots of fat! Lol0 -
I am firmly on the addiction bandwagon, mostly because of the inability of many people to stop eating excess carbs despite obvious physical detriment. I know someone who could get off their blood pressure medication, if they would give up soda. They did this for a while, but then went back to the soda and medication. I know someone with the elevated levels to suggest early stage NAFL (Non-Alcholic Fatty Liver). Finding that out convinced them to give up carbs, to stop and reverse the damage. They lasted less than 72 hours. I have a diabetic relative who knows their blood sugar is chronically too high and out of control, but will go out and buy enough pastry for 10 people. Same person even pointed out that the things he was buying drove his blood sugar up, but he had new faster acting insulin, so now he could eat them again.
There's hundreds of other examples. But, when you know something is harming you and you still can't stop, that's addiction in my book.0 -
I think a lot of the disagreement concerning this topic is because the word addiction is interpreted as something extremely compulsive, almost involuntary, enslaved, which is based mostly on a subjective experience. From my view across the pond, americans of the USA are very quick to politicize words...making them more normative. This drive to turn behaviors into disease, isn't doing anything good, IMO.
Avoidance. So, is addiction purely a psychological phenomenon or does it also have physiological processes ?
IMO, addiction does come in many forms and shapes. I was quite obsessed by videogaming for years. I'm also prone to bingeing on food and shopping. All of this is for ME a distraction. A way to avoid myself. Someone (slimzandra ?) said something like this: "Wherever I go, there I am." This is cut to the core about any addictive behavior. One is ultimately forced to face oneself if the core reason for "treating myself", "celebrating stuff", "bad day comforting"...is not addressed in the first place. I can choose different strategies to varying degrees, abstaining, moderating, occasional treat etc...but merely cutting down the supply will NOT remove why I have addictive behavior. I think this is one of the reasons why yo-yo dieters find themselves starting over. Ignoring the emotional component of destructive behavior patterns is like trying to fill a bag of grains with a hole in the bottom.
Birth defect. I think any addictive behavior has mostly a psychological component and it can have a physiological component. After watching Rob Sapolsky's lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology from Stanford, I think that some people do come at an disadvantage from birth. Poor frontal lobe function (low impulse control) paired with traumatic events/neglect amp up the difficulty to say "no" to oneself. It comes as no surprise that prisons are full of people who scores high on aggression paired with low impulse control. (Hare: Without Conscience) A bit more surprising to me was that people who scored high on aggressiveness, but also high in impulse control often were good leaders, Fortune 500-esque people. Some people are also more sensitive to the dopamine and other hormones that flush when experiencing pleasure. Making the emotional loop even more seductive. However, low impulse control does NOT mean that we as individuals can't say no to ourselves. It means it's harder. "No fate" to paraphrase Terminator 2.
Repeating patterns. We all know or have met that one person who in casual settings, the company xmas party, the old friends get together, always end up getting hammered, repeating the same old jokes. Or they reek alc on the bus or they drink themselves to stupor most nights. I know this, cause I grew up with it in my family. There are still family members who are seldom sober, addicted to pills. They do have the ability to say no. It's just executed very seldom.
YMMV. I don't like the labelling of trying to define which addictions are worse or "easier". In my case I've chosen to be addicted to lesser aggravating stuff. I'm still addicted to the act of eating. Keto is not the fix for this for ME, it just makes it easier to not go totally overboard stay within reasonable calorie limits with less negative effects.
What are your triggers ? I still have some "organic yummy candy" somewhere from last year. No trouble. Gimme a bag of onion rings and they're gone within 5 mins. Go figure. I'm working on the moderation part. The last bag of potato chips (fried in peanut oil) has been in my cupboard for a couple of months, but when I first started eating it, it was gone in 2 days. We all have our different triggers.
You're not alone. And if there is any consolation. You are not alone. One of the most profound and harrowing authors in world literature wrote an "autobiography" about his gambling addiction:And I believed in my system ... within a quarter of an hour I won 600 francs. This whetted my appetite. Suddenly I started to lose, couldn't control myself and lost everything. After that I ... took my last money, and went to play ... I was carried away by this unusual good fortune and I risked all 35 napoleons and lost them all. I had 6 napoleons d'or left to pay the landlady and for the journey. In Geneva I pawned my watch.
He describes how he moves from city to city in order to avoid paying his piling debts. He describes the despair, the hopelessness of being sucked back in. The feelings and reactions are classic, although the setting is from the 1860's. Who is he ? None other than Fyodor Dostoevsky, the author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot etc. The book is called The Gambler.
Another book is Novel with Cocaine, author unknown. IMO, both books were pioneers in describing addictive behavior.
So it doesn't matter whether the hero in the story has to hail horsecarriages in St. Petersburg or secretly makes stashes of candy in the innermost closet in modern day life. The reaction patterns are the same. I have pondered a lot about this topic. I think the common denominator is inability to handle, accept feelings or never learnt how to healthily cope with having bad/conflicting/ambiguous feelings. Sometimes cognitive dissonance is an emotionally easier solution than facing the uncomfortable truth. Because, by logic, if you consciously admit to something, you'll have to act on it. Excuses are run out. Change is hard.
But it's possible. Work hard. Forgive yourself mistakes. Work hard again. No excuses.
Do you wonder who you are? BBC Child of Our Time - The Big Personality Test 2010
A docu series about a bunch of kids, Nature vs. Nurture. Interestingly enough, people who have experienced trauma in some form, often get to be extroverted with low conscientiousness = more impulsive, more led by validation. People who are high earners: extroverted, high conscientiousness, slightly less agreeable. Most successful in corporate ladder: Medium range. Happy/content people: rated higher agreeable by others. See for yourself it only takes 10 mins!
...now I need a drink...of water.
Edit: put in a book reference and inserted more info in that paragraph, plus some minor changes.
Oh, forgot to mention I quit smoking (slow process), quit my love affair with gaming cold turkey.0 -
I am absolutely convinced it's an addiction. For me, cutting carbs back to nothing produced similar feelings of anxiety and physical withdrawal that I went through when I quit smoking. My wife has also said the same thing. Over the last 10 months, the craving for carbs has also waned. The cravings are still there, but the intensity of those cravings is nothing like it used to be. Now it's more just background noise that I can easily choose to ignore. This sensation is not all that different from the cravings I still occasionally experience when I see someone smoking in a social situation. I remember the pleasure I once derived from smoking, but it's not something I have any desire to ever do again.0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWXXvOJ4SKI
