Food Addiction?!

Sugar IS a drug. Please, watch Hungry for Change. It goes into food addiction.

I am highly addicted to food. My cravings are almost painful. And they don't go away. They persist, and they get worse, like withdrawal.

I would suggest that you watch a heroin addict go through withdrawals.

I manage to satisfy most of my cravings through sugar-free drinks like Crystal Light or through a bag of 100 cal popcorn!

I would suggest that all of you who have never experienced the uncontrollable urge to eat to kindly stay out of these kinds of threads. Clearly you have never experienced a behavioral addiction and so you have no ability to relate to what the people here are talking about.

Just because breaking a behavioral addiction like gambling, or internet use, or eating is not the same as breaking a physiological addiction like heroin does not mean that it is not a difficult thing to break.

Many, many, many people have set themselves up with a lifetime of deriving pleasure from eating. Their brains are now wired so that their reward centers are triggered with food.

When I started my diet in April of this year, the first 6 weeks were terrible. I thought about food all the time. I was constantly looking at my watch to figure out when I could eat again. I dreamed about food. I would go to bed early to avoid thinking about food.

It takes just as much willpower to control your eating as it does for any other behavioral addiction.

For those of you like the OP who are in the throws of breaking your behavioral addiction with food, the advice I can offer is first, make your diet boring. It is hard enough to stick to a diet - it is harder still when you try to stick to a diet and moderate the foods you love to eat! Switch to a diet that is OK to eat but that you don't feel compelled to binge on.

Also, cut your carbs and increase your protein. Cutting carbs cuts out many sources of tempting calorie-dense foods and it prevents blood sugar spikes that when they crash make you hungry again. Increased protein in your diet has been shown to decrease hunger and it works for me.

Avoid the "in for a penny, in for a pound mentality". It is easy to binge and then figure, "Well, I blew it today, I may as well blow it tomorrow. I'll start again next week." Don't do this. Realize that if you are on a 2-pound-a-week goal you will be eating a deficit of about 1000 calories a day. Even if you blow your diet by eating a bowl of ice cream it is unlikely you will get much above your 1000 calorie deficit unless you totally go hog wild. But no matter what you do start over again the next day. You are on a mission that is going to take years. It's OK if some days you just eat junk and blow your calorie goal. The important thing is that from week to week you consistently run a deficit. Stay focused.

Get MFP friends here that you want to be like and who actively comment on your progress and log entries. It is very important to know that people are watching you. You will behave better when you know you are being watched.

Publish your "ticker" in your posts, and open your log. It's a lot easier to talk the talk if you can show you are walking the walk.

DO NOT GIVE UP.

I'm 5 months in the diet, 1 month in the gym. Down 28 pounds.

Just because breaking a behavioral addiction like gambling, or internet use, or eating is not the same as breaking a physiological addiction like heroin does not mean that it is not a difficult thing to break.

Difficult? Sure.

Anything remotely like heroin or cocaine? Absolutely not.

@ maillemaker

with all due respect. I have never experienced that, but have had close family members die of heroin addiction, so I feel that I have every right to post in a thread when people try to use hard drug addictions as examples as they have no idea what they are talking about.

^Agreed....plus it's a public forum

OP: I have yet to meet the perfect person. I believe no one on here is perfect otherwise they would be just too perfect to need help or search for answers.Addictions and cravings are certainly real.

Take this from someone who has been sober for 3 years so I can certainly sympathize with the cravings you are having. No you aren't strange or weird. However, you may need to do some soul searching and find the root cause of your cravings. It isn't a pleasant process but nothing worth while is. Basically, you need to know why you do what you do to be able to change those behavioral responses. Fortunately or unfortunately the mind is a tremendous tool that can be retrained to change habits. Good luck to you in your weight loss journey I am certain you will do great!

with all due respect. I have never experienced that, but have had close family members die of heroin addiction, so I feel that I have every right to post in a thread when people try to use hard drug addictions as examples as they have no idea what they are talking about.

As long as you are honest about having an opinion on something you haven't personally experienced, it's all good.

Like I said in the last go-around on this topic, there are of course obvious differences between physiological addictions and behavioral addictions.

This does not change the fact that they are both addictions, and they both take enormous amounts of willpower to break.

Too many people here want to discount behavioral addictions as imaginary. They aren't. People who think they are should not be posting in these kinds of discussions, public or not. You aren't helping.

This topic really caught my eye. I recovering herion/meth addict of 5 years. I am also a food addict. When I got sober it now seems to me, that I switched addictions. When I got sad,mad,happy, or well anytIhing I would eat. It is the same thing I did when I got a fix. I can say for myself that the withdraw from drug.s is beyond anything that you ever want to go thru. With that being said, in my eyes addiction is addiction. It is the underlining issue. The way to overcome any addiction is to understand why it became one in the first place.

Quite often what we think are "cravings" is really a symptom of habit that often starts particularly women when they start dieting and too often at an early age (teens) and often has nothing to do with food. Eating or binging, feeling guilty, feeling like a failure them promising through sheer will power to start all over tomorrow is just a vicious cycle that you won't get off unless you step outside of that cycle and see what is actually going on.

WHat I have wrote sounds like a 'condition' that you might feel you need psycological help and medication for. You do not. You probably should first dump the diet/diet mentality. You set yourself up during the day by not eating the appropriate calories and macronutrients so by the time late afternoon/evening comes you are tired, perhaps hungry and you want some carbs hence the carb/sugar binges. This is not a mental condition you should blame yourself or SUGAR for. Give the diet up for a few days. You already know what to eat. Eat in moderation, stop the calorie counting, obsessing/anxiety and just eat plenty of fruit, veggies, lean meat and ENOUGH HEALTHY fat throughout the day (5-6 meals) that even if the habit feeling of 'binging' hits you late in the day, you are just too full. It only takes a few days to realize the cycle isn't your fault, you aren't different then anyone else and this started with "DIETING" incorrectly. Go to Dr. Oz's site and check out carb cycling and cheat days etc.

I hope this helps if not you, someone else reading this. You don't have a food addiction but more than likely a symptom of DIETING ADDICTION. IT WILL take a few days to retrain your brain and realize you can feed yourself well enough that you don't have to binge. You will start being too full to binge. Eat plenty (healthy food) throughout the day and ESPECIALLY around 2pm and again at 4pm. Not mini-skimpy calorie meals going into the evening. Your body, through years and years of genetics will fight you way to hard for you to win if you skimp.
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Do you have any thoughts or advice to help suppress late night cravings?

Make sure you eat all your meals so you aren't actually hungry. If you are hungry, eat regular food so you're full. When you have cravings it's important to eat all your meals as a protection against grabbing junk food. Set up other types of rewards for yourself.

This recently worked for me to stop uncontrolled sugar eating: I went off sugar for 4 1/2 months, except for fruit, and then began to eat some of the junk food at work (my office is loaded with crappy food, plus once in while someone puts food gifts like chocolate donuts on my desk). I kept eating it for a couple of weeks and couldn't stop. I finally went with it, bought some chocolate meal shakes, and turned the corner -- I'm losing weight again and I've stopped eating the junk at work. I have 1 or 2 shakes a day, am tapering off them back to regular food, but will immediately use them again if I need to do that. The sugar in them is far less than a candy bar or donut, but gives me a treat.

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Now today was my first day that I recorded everything I ate, until I got to about 5 o'clock that is and something quite ugly hit me.
Cravings. Unsatiable cravings that overun my willpower. It starts out small and I try to suppress it with water or watching/reading something to take my mind off it but it persists, nagging at me until I loose it.
It's like I'm on panic mode, and I have to have something. I go blind until it hits me that I've just shoved 100's of calories in my mouth and then shame and guilt kick right in....

Wow, I sound crazy but has anyone here ever experienced anything like this? Or am I on my own?
I decided to do some googling and found that sugar is more addicting than cocaine?! What! This can't be true? And if food addictions are real than how do you go about overcoming them? I'm interested in knowing how you guys feel about this, because although I feel that my relationship with food is unhealthy, saying that it is an addiction kind of is a scapegoat, isn't it? A way to make yourself seem less responsible for your unhealthy choices...sheesh I don't know
Do you have any thoughts or advice to help suppress late night cravings?

This is my OP.
Can those that are assuming that my unhealthy relationship with food= heavy drug addiction kindly point out where exactly I stated this.
I have terrible eating habits and in researching this relationship, I found "food addiction". So, I posted it here in hopes that some people may relate to my situation and offer any advice.
NOW, in articles mentioning "food addiction" I found articles stating that sugar is quite addictive, even going so far as comparing it to the addictive qualities of cocaine.
Go ahead, Google "sugar more addictive than cocaine", I didn't invent this, nor am I a believer, and I'm quite doubtful of the credibility of such "research" but it would be completely LUDICROUS to state that the effects of having a food addiction are as detrimental as those of having a heavy drug addiction.

REALLY, I MEAN REALLY come on guys. I just thought it was interesting that some people have actually researched this and YES to say that you have a food addiction is in some way, looking for an excuse--something mentioned AGAIN in my OP

So to those that keep bringing up heroine or cocaine to this post, please stop, that was not my purpose. And if you've known people who have struggled with these types of addictions, my heart goes out to them and if you'r an over eater and a drug addict- may God help you

The word addiction actually means something, and it doesn't mean "I have trouble not doing this thing."

Honestly,I usually just eat. Because I am not there in changing the behavior yet, I changed what is available to me....Red sweet apples or sweet grapes. It has helped me not to eat ice cream which is my favorite thing in the world.

Here are some examples in case you need further clarification:
If I smoke tobbaco once, how likely am I to smoke again...
If I do weed, how likely am I to do it again...
If snort crack, how likely am I to do it again....
If I take a bite of that cake, how likely am I to not eat the entire thing....etc. & etc.

Those aren't appropriate analogies, at all. If you want to do a comparison, it has to be to a heroin junkie, not to a first time heroin user. Or, alternately, a first time heroin user to a first time sugar ingestor.

Having seen both heroin addiction and sugar "addiction" up close, it is just plain silly to compare the two (heroin is *much* worse). And the original study that generated the inflammatory headline did not actually produce data to support such a hyperbolic conclusion.