Category: Stories of Food Addiction and Recovery

There is a particular noodle dish that I liked, but restaurants always served too many noodles and too much broth. I could never finish all of it. And I always felt full after eating about half of the serving, but I never stopped there. I always kept on eating, one more bite, then another. Eventually, I would get to the point of actual bursting and I couldn’t eat another bite. But even though I had already figured out that I was full about ten bites before that, and even though I was having a conversation in my head about the fact that I was full and should stop eating, I could not stop eating.

I eat my portion of food and it is enough. I never get that feeling of being too full, and I don’t have to try to apply the brakes in the middle of a meal.

I suffer from terrible migraines. I don’t know what causes them, but I have had them all my life. At various times in my life, I have been told that they could be caused by cheese, chocolate, yoghurt, nuts, mangoes, coffee, and a whole host of other things. If a food was identified as a possible trigger, I would try to avoid it, but I was completely incapable of avoiding certain foods. Chocolate, for example, was non-negotiable. Also cheese. I could not give up chocolate for even a short time. I am pretty sure that if my doctor told me I had to stop eating chocolate or I would die, I couldn’t have done it. I would have just accepted death by chocolate as my fate.

I have not eaten chocolate in nine months.

I would eat because it was time to eat. Because I was tired. Because I was bored. Because I was mad. Because I was sad. Because I missed my bus. Because someone said something to me that I didn’t like. Because I was happy. Because I felt insecure. Because I bought a certain food and couldn’t wait to eat it. Because someone bought food for me, so I had to eat it. Because I was watching TV. Because I had a headache. Because I was hot.

I am not sure I even knew what actual hunger felt like.

I eat when it is time to eat, which is at three set windows of time per day for breakfast, lunch, and supper, and I don’t eat at any other times.

This might sound impossible, and it certainly was for me in the past, but that is how I eat now, and I am happy about it. The best bit is that I feel satisfied and can move on with my day without obsessing about food all the time.

My doctor would tell me that I was overweight and that I should lose weight. Uh huh. Tell me something I don’t already know. But when I actually did lose some weight and then started gaining it back, he had no advice for what to do about it. I lost almost 20 kg, and was feeling much better about myself, but then the weight started to creep back on. I thought I was doing the same things that I had been doing all along, so I didn’t understand what was happening. When I told my doctor about it, he asked how much weight I had gained. When I said 3 kg, he just shrugged. I had fought so hard to lose the weight, and when it started coming back even though I thought I was still doing all the right things, I had no idea what to do. I lost hope. And then I put all the weight back on, and even surpassed the original weight that I started at, and put on another 15 kg after that, too. It was so disheartening.

I know now that when my weight was going up it was because I stopped doing some of the things that I was doing to keep my weight down. I felt very “hard done by” and had decided that I had had enough of eating that way and exercising that much. I gave up, little by little, over time, and the weight came back on… with a vengeance.

Now I am losing weight, slowly but noticeably over many months. I know exactly what I have eaten every day, and how much I have eaten, so there are no surprises.

If I started to eat, then there was no way to stop. I would try to start eating as late in the day as possible so there was a better chance that I could keep the total amount that I ate in a day from being too much. But it didn’t matter. As soon as I started to eat, I would be hungry for the rest of the day. For example, I would skip breakfast, but then I would get hungry at around 10:30 am and would start looking around my office for things to eat. At that time, it wouldn’t make sense to eat my lunch, so I would keep various snacks in my desk such as crackers, granola bars, chocolate bars, cookies, etc., and I would eat one of those. But then I had “broken the seal” and I would continue feeling hungry until lunchtime. Then I would eat the lunch that I had bought from a store at lunchtime, and it would be too many calories, and not the right foods, and I would still be hungry. In order to force myself to stop eating, I would often eat a chocolate bar, because I noticed that after I ate a chocolate bar, I tended to stop eating. But then that stopped working, and I found myself wanting another chocolate bar.

I eat my meal, which is enough to fuel me to my next meal. When I am finished eating my meal, I stop eating. Then, when it is time to eat the next meal, I eat the next meal.

Almost every night, just before I went to sleep, I would tell myself that, in the morning, I would get up early and go for a jog or do some other sort of exercise. And I would get my eating under control. Tomorrow was going to be a better day. And sometimes I managed to get up and do some exercise. But most times I wouldn’t. And I almost never got to the end of the next day without eating too much, or eating the wrong things. Then, the night would come, and I would make another promise that I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, keep.

I don’t need to make any promises to myself that I know I can’t keep. I just need to keep doing what I have been doing for months now. No mental gymnastics necessary, and no disappointment when I don’t meet my own expectations.