Obesity and addiction

[goldfinch]

Like you, I've never been where he is but I do think it might help him to realize that those folks around him who "just... ate" may be also struggling with their willpower and habits. I know many people who've lost a significant amount of weight and you wouldn't know unless they told you.

It's like seeing a person use a handicapped parking spot and thinking "they don't need it!" Just how do you know they don't?

Yes, his case might be extreme but perhaps he should realize that few people "just eat."

Yes, you don't know other people's struggles. And maybe few people just eat. But very few people go from morbid obesity to normal weight and keep it off. Everyone who does that successfully is an extreme case. That struggle is significant and I feel it should not be minimized by saying that everyone has their issues. The physiology of the ex-obese person is different from someone who has always been normal weight and maybe deals a bit with five, or ten extra pounds. I do not even think it is out of line to compare it to drug addiction.

So, my opinion is that it is likely not helpful for him (or for me) to realize few people just eat. I am sorry, but mentally roll my eyes at that kind of statement. Instead, he can acknowledge that his struggle is significant and different and substantially harder than the efforts of those who were never as fat as he was.

This is my opinion, fwiw. I do tend to have rather strong opinions.

[limewave]

Yes, you don't know other people's struggles. And maybe few people just eat. But very few people go from morbid obesity to normal weight and keep it off. Everyone who does that successfully is an extreme case. That struggle is significant and I feel it should not be minimized by saying that everyone has their issues. The physiology of the ex-obese person is different from someone who has always been normal weight and maybe deals a bit with five, or ten extra pounds. I do not even think it is out of line to compare it to drug addiction.

That is my big fear! I've managed to keep off 160-170 pounds for 10 years now. But I feel like I'm one misstep from being morbidly obese again. I did go back up to 200 pounds when I was pregnant with my son (that's 200 pounds after I gave birth to him). It was a real struggle to lose weight a second time. My goal now is to get on the scale every day and try to maintain. If I go up 5 pounds, I can correct it before the extra 5 pounds turns into 10, 15 . . . 30.

[goldfinch]

That is my big fear! I've managed to keep off 160-170 pounds for 10 years now. But I feel like I'm one misstep from being morbidly obese again. I did go back up to 200 pounds when I was pregnant with my son (that's 200 pounds after I gave birth to him). It was a real struggle to lose weight a second time. My goal now is to get on the scale every day and try to maintain. If I go up 5 pounds, I can correct it before the extra 5 pounds turns into 10, 15 . . . 30.

The good news is the longer you keep it off the more likely you will continue to keep it off. Data from the National Weight Control Registry indicates that the odds improve after a couple of years of weight maintenance.

What a loss! And ten years of keeping it off! Those who try to get you to eat against the rules you have developed for yourself can stick it! You should join the Weight Control Registry. Your experiences can provide valuable data for researchers. People are eligible after they have maintained at least a 30 pound weight loss over the course of at least one year. http://www.nwcr.ws/

I keep track of my weight daily using the Hackersdiet tools. It keeps a running average for you, which can help you catch slips early. Thirty days of daily data is a pretty robust view of where you are at, whether you are trending up or down or pretty much stable. https://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/HackDiet/

[lph]

I really appreciate the great answers here! I think it is very difficult for someone who has never been more than a little overweight to understand how it feels to live with real obesity. It must be a very real challenge if one has a type of addiction to have to face that addiction several times a day. There's no way of just avoiding food.

We all are hardwired to some extent to eat when there's food available, and to enjoy calorie-rich foods. But most of us who cycle also know the joy of movement, of getting fitter, of feeling your body work well the way it's supposed to. And everybody knows the actual physics of "burn more, eat less". On paper it's so simple. In real life it's obviously hard, otherwise we wouldn't be spending masses of time and money talking about it and inventing strange diets. But I'm also convinced that it's very much harder for some people, whether it's genes, psychology, habits, culture, metabolism or whatever. Willpower can get you only so far for a certain amount of time, after that a lot more things have to be in place to get you through.

[GLC1968]

So, my opinion is that it is likely not helpful for him (or for me) to realize few people just eat. I am sorry, but mentally roll my eyes at that kind of statement. Instead, he can acknowledge that his struggle is significant and different and substantially harder than the efforts of those who were never as fat as he was.

Perhaps it's not helpful for him (or for you) to know that other people don't 'just eat' but it IS extremely helpful to acknowledge that this is the case for many 'regular' sized people. There are those of us with fairly extreme food issues who never got to the extreme obese situation. I realize it's different, but I don't think that it should be dismissed as eye-roll worthy, if you know what I mean.

I've been overweight (if sometimes only slightly so) my whole life and I have quite extreme food issues. Bingeing, purging, hiding food, replacing food that I've eaten, eating in private, hiding packaging, hoarding, obsessing about what others eat, obsessing about what I eat, eating until I was in physical pain and even blacking out. I also consider myself 'normal', highly well-adjusted and quite confident in most areas. And yet I've always hated my relationship with food. How I never got more than just tipping the scales into obese is beyond me. I think having always been very athletic and living with a thin family has kept my overall weight gain at bay (for the most part) despite severe food issues.

That doesn't mean that just because I don't have to struggle to fit into an airplane seat that my struggles with food are any less severe than my aunt who was morbidly obese. I was just really good at 'hiding' and internalizing it because it wasn't as outwardly obvious.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I was lucky in that I was always athletic and lived an active life, so I managed to keep the worst of the actual weight gain at bay. I have cycled up and down the scale gaining and losing the same 40 or so pounds multiple times over the course of my life. And again, I have always hated my relationship with food. I hated the power it had over me (or so it felt). I hated the shame. I hated the physical pain. I hated constantly thinking about it, constantly desiring it and never ever actually feeling GOOD about it.

Conversations like this one actually really help me these days. It helps me to remember how I used to feel and how important it is for me to stick to my new habits. I've made such a huge change in my life that sometimes I forget what it felt like to be controlled by food (no, I'm not exaggerating) and how freeing it is to be done with that. The bad habits can creep back in when I am not thinking about it, so I do think it's important to remember and to be ever on guard.

[goldfinch]

Perhaps it's not helpful for him (or for you) to know that other people don't 'just eat' but it IS extremely helpful to acknowledge that this is the case for many 'regular' sized people. There are those of us with fairly extreme food issues who never got to the extreme obese situation. I realize it's different, but I don't think that it should be dismissed as eye-roll worthy, if you know what I mean.

I've been overweight (if sometimes only slightly so) my whole life and I have quite extreme food issues. Bingeing, purging, hiding food, replacing food that I've eaten, eating in private, hiding packaging, hoarding, obsessing about what others eat, obsessing about what I eat, eating until I was in physical pain and even blacking out. I also consider myself 'normal', highly well-adjusted and quite confident in most areas. And yet I've always hated my relationship with food. How I never got more than just tipping the scales into obese is beyond me. I think having always been very athletic and living with a thin family has kept my overall weight gain at bay (for the most part) despite severe food issues.

That doesn't mean that just because I don't have to struggle to fit into an airplane seat that my struggles with food are any less severe than my aunt who was morbidly obese. I was just really good at 'hiding' and internalizing it because it wasn't as outwardly obvious.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I was lucky in that I was always athletic and lived an active life, so I managed to keep the worst of the actual weight gain at bay. I have cycled up and down the scale gaining and losing the same 40 or so pounds multiple times over the course of my life. And again, I have always hated my relationship with food. I hated the power it had over me (or so it felt). I hated the shame. I hated the physical pain. I hated constantly thinking about it, constantly desiring it and never ever actually feeling GOOD about it.

Conversations like this one actually really help me these days. It helps me to remember how I used to feel and how important it is for me to stick to my new habits. I've made such a huge change in my life that sometimes I forget what it felt like to be controlled by food (no, I'm not exaggerating) and how freeing it is to be done with that. The bad habits can creep back in when I am not thinking about it, so I do think it's important to remember and to be ever on guard.

Thanks you for your response. My comparison was with those who maybe struggled with a few pounds here and there or would push away a second helping because they shouldn't have it, not with an eating disorder. And I agree, you can't tell by looking at someone what there struggles are. Bulimia and anorexia are extremely difficult and life threatening issues as well. I just do not want to minimize the extreme difficulty it is for people to deal with obesity by saying that everyone has issues.

[GLC1968]

I just do not want to minimize the extreme difficulty it is for people to deal with obesity by saying that everyone has issues.

Oh absolutely not, and I totally agree. I just think perhaps (and this is me putting my experiences into the equation, of course) that it may help some who are obese and struggling to know that they are not alone. That even if someone is not extremely overweight, they may still be able to relate and could very well be 'on your side' in terms of dealing with food issues. I don't think anyone wants to minimize the struggle at all.

I know that it helped me to learn that a thin, athletic coworker of mine was not 'naturally' thin and that even though she looked really lean and healthy, she was only that way because she planned out her meals and carefully tracked her nutrition and activity. It was inspiring in many ways to know that I could be her one day if I was willing to put in the effort that clearly she was making. And honestly, it made me happy to learn that despite what I originally thought, she couldn't eat just anything she wanted either!

Oh, and just to clarify, I was never diagnosed with any eating disorders. I would never have admitted any of my issues to a doctor at any point in my life (even now). No way. That's admitting to a weakness and I don't have weaknesses.

[SadieKate]

+1 on ALL of the above.

[Wahine]

I continue to be fascinated by this thread. There is so much insight here.

My situation and past experience is very different from what most of you are discussing here. But the more I think about it, the more it makes me wonder about when and how such seriuos food issues start. Mostly because I never want to end up in that boat.

I haven't been that active on the forum for the last few years, but those of you who remember me from before may remember that I was a fairly serious Ironman athlete. One of the interesting things about Ironman is that when you are training that much, you eat a ton. In retrospect I think I was actually eating too much a lot of the time during the week. On long workout weekends, it's pretty hard to overeat. I never lost a lot of weight training for IM. In fact sometimes I would put weight on. But I never worried about it, I just assumed that my body would adjust and I would eat what I needed.

Fast forward to about 1.5 years ago. I put on about 10 lbs after IM, during my recovery season, and it never really came off last summer. I was just riding mostly. This winter comes and I put on another 5 lbs. So come January, I was the heaviest I've ever been and activity modification was not doing the job. You can only increase your activity level so much when you're already really active to begin with. So I decided that I would start tracking my caloric expenditure and intake very closely and try to run an appropriate 20% deficit per day.

What an eye opener. I've lost 10 lbs and I have another 5 to go to get back to my fighting weight so to speak. I am amazed at how skewed my perception of what a healthy portion size was and how little I actually burn on that run or ride. But what's getting me now is that I do not want to be obsessed with what I eat. I don't want to feel like I have to record every little thing. It just doesn't seem psychologically healthy to be preoccupied by it. I want food to be joyful and not conrtolling.

So what I've done is kept track of my eating and exercise during the week, but on the weekends, I let it go. I'm not doing as well with my weight loss as I was, but I think I'm OK with that, because I don't want to be obsessed with it.

I'm not fearful that I will go down the obesity road, or that I will end up with an eating disorder. But I wonder if that's how it starts for some people.

[GLC1968]

But the more I think about it, the more it makes me wonder about when and how such seriuos food issues start. Mostly because I never want to end up in that boat.

From my experience, I think that food issues (the severe ones) start well outside of the kitchen.

I know that for me, my issues started with social and familial pressures. I wasn't who I felt I should be (or who I felt others wanted me to be) so I blamed my weight and therefore what I ate. From there I 'learned' to be ashamed of eating and of my body. Food was at fault, but it was also a way of punishing myself for not being in control. Add in a personality that was fairly obsessive about stuff and my issues grew. THEN, you throw in the entire 'low fat' concept that was touted in the 80's, fake non-food additives and then the convenience of highly processed fast food (either at restaurants or in 'snack' form) and a busy life and it was a vicious, vicious circle.

Anyway, I think it is a combination of factors. When I was younger, I had a good friend who was a severe anorexic in remission. We used to have lots of long talks about this stuff and I remember being totally stunned that we had so much in common but that we'd had so totally different outcomes. I remember thinking the exact same thing when I had a heart to heart with my obese aunt. We obviously share some of the same DNA (she was my dad's sister) but I remember being shocked that we had similar food, personality and body image issues. She had the added factors of being inactive and having a food pushing mother so her outcome was different from mine.

I would think that it may be possible that starting down the obsessive road of tracking every little thing and calorie might be a trigger for bigger problems IF there are already underlying or unresolved issues. I don't think that just getting crazy about calories (or points or whatever) is necessarily going to do it on it's own.

[channlluv]

There's a lot I'd like to share here, but can't right now. You all are mostly familiar with my weight struggles, though, and yes, I agree it's an addiction, or something close.

I just wanted to add, though, that for someone like me, being included in a group of women who define themselves as athletes is very empowering.

Roxy