Food Addiction & The Value of Sharing

I met with a lady I see once every so often in a situation where I am her client. I was talking to her about my journey with weight loss, eating, calorie counting and exercising. It was a good chat because this lady was also going through a similar situation and has been on a similar journey. I can really see the value of sharing your thoughts and feelings with other people going through the same thing. It takes away some of the isolation that you can feel when you, in some ways, find yourself excluded from freely eating along with other people (see my Social Food's blog post). It can also help to take away some of the negative feelings that one may have about one's body and fatness.

Anyway...

The conversation turned to food addiction. This is a term and concept I became familiar with a couple of years ago when I started watching the television show: Ruby. The show features the journey of a lady named Ruby Gettinger, who has struggled with obesity (morbid obesity) for many years. You can find more information on Ruby's show here: http://www.mystyle.com/mystyle/shows/ruby/index.jsp. As part of her journey to losing weight and become fit, Rub has been confronting the fact that it is likely she has food addiction as an issue underlying much of her over-eating and consequent weight gain.

The lady I was talking to, was explaining that she felt she now understood 'addiction' (of any form) because she felt that some or much of her weight struggle was related to an addiction to using food incorrectly. By that, I mean that she did not eat and intake food purely for nutrition and energy, but partly due to uncontrolled urges and as a reaction to certain events/thoughts & feelings.

How many of us who struggle with our weight have some form of food addiction? I do wonder... I am exploring whether this is an issue for me.

I think I need to look up more information about food addiction to know what the criteria is for having this issue.

As a result of starting to think about this issue, I have come to the following conclusions:

I think that part of my problem stems from eating food when I don't actually need it... because I didn't really understand how much I truly needed. It's not that I was outright pigging - I have never eaten a whole bar of chocolate or a whole packet of biscuits or multiple bags of crisps/chips etc - but more that as someone whose health issues have included metabolic issues and have also caused great periods of pretty much complete sedentary lifestyle, I was consuming more than my body was burning up.

I also am not very mindful of food intake unless I am actively dieting. By that I mean that, when I am counting calories and hoping to drop some pounds, I am hyper conscious and vigilant about exactly what I am eating and what is going into my body in terms of both nutritional value and portion size. Yet despite changing my way of eating in the past and successfully losing weight and doing exercise, I have stopped and completely abandoned/forgotten the lessons I have learnt and thus find myself back here going through this all again! That realisation mildly depresses me. If I had learnt 1 or 2 times ago, I wouldn't be here again...

The thing I am not sure about is comfort eating. I am pretty certain I have done this on and off for years... I need to think more about it before I write about it... from the people I have talked to, it seems a common issue for those of us struggling to lose weight or to maintain a desired weight. However, I do wonder whether this is a behaviour that people at a lower weight engage in, but perhaps their bodies are naturally a lower weight or they somehow accommodate the comfort eating into their daily intake by lessening the amount of other food they eat during the day? Interesting thoughts!