Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat Read Online Free PDF Page B

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