10/3/2015: More About Therapy and Addiction

Days of abstinence: 10

Days until surgery: 74

Weight:  165.8 pounds

The last time Stan saw me I weighed over 200 pounds, so his first reaction when he saw me was, “Wow, you’ve lost a lot of weight!  You look terrific!”  That felt good.  Most of the people in my life have gotten used to the fact that I am not way overweight anymore so it’s always nice to see someone that hasn’t seen me for a while and see their surprise and delight at my accomplishment.  It feels like a reward for all the hard work.

As the session got started, Stan wanted to know why I was there and I reviewed the last three and a half years and my decision to have surgery to remove my loose and sagging skin.  I weighed 224 pounds in February of 2012, lost 74 pounds over the course of 11 months of hard work, gained back 5, then 5 more.  Maintained that for quite a while and then last fall and winter gained back 15 more.  This January, I recommitted to being at 150, was introduced to the Whole 30 by Luz, and got back within 8 pounds of my target weight.  I made the decision to have the surgery and committed to losing that last 8 pounds, instead I gained 8.  All summer I’ve been battling this 16 – 20 pounds.  Losing 4 gaining 3, losing 5, gaining it back.  I blamed stress for the fact that I was eating sweets on a daily basis.  The summer has been stressful, but that is just an excuse.  I knew that, but I used it as an excuse, anyway.

My problem, I told Stan, is not my entire diet.  My daily food regimen is fine.  In fact, my daily food regimen is excellent.  I cook all of my own food and almost never eat out.  Meals consist of lean proteins, lots of veggies and a little fruit.  I eat three healthy meals a day.  This is not a problem.  The problem is sweet treats.  In particular, the problem is my desire to sneak sweet treats.

The epiphany came this way.  One day, a few weeks ago, I was on my way to work at 5:45 in the morning after dropping Steve off at the airport.  The drive from the airport is difficult when it is very dark out because the route is so dark and I have trouble seeing in the dark.  There is also a lot of road construction at an already confusing intersection and it’s difficult to figure out which exit is the right one.  So I’m driving along, it’s very dark, I’m a little stressed about the upcoming road construction confusion, and I think to myself, “It’s early, I can stop at Starbucks on the way to work and get a coffee and a treat.  Nobody will know.”  I thought about it for a minute or two, savoring the idea of the treat.  I wasn’t hungry.  I had a good breakfast an hour ago.  I didn’t need coffee, I had my coffee with breakfast.  But, I still wanted that treat and nobody would know.  Nobody would know?  What the fuck is up with that?  As I’m driving down the dark and deserted highway I’m wondering to myself, “Who cares if anyone knows?”  There is no one in my life that is going to give a shit whether I have a treat or not.”  No one.  The only person who cares is me.  So what is the allure of “Nobody will know?”  I realized that sneaking the treat somehow felt like winning to me, or like I was getting one up on someone or something.  Then I knew that this was something, that this was somehow significant.   There was something about sneaking the treat that was as satisfying, if not more satisfying, than the treat itself.

At that moment, I didn’t try to delve into the psychology about why the sneaking was satisfying, but I did say to myself, “Who is going to win if you sneak that treat?”  Me?  No, clearly not.  Then who wins?  The answer hit me like a ton of bricks.  The BFFI wins, that’s who.  Monsanto and ConAgra and the entire Big Food Industry that has gotten insanely rich getting us addicted to Crap Food are the ones that win.  If I buy and eat a treat from Starbucks, I am supporting the industry that I despise so much.   If I sneak a treat, my enemy wins, not me.  That was a powerful moment.  I decided not to stop at Starbucks after all.  My cravings did not go away, but my conviction to not feed the BFFI was stronger than my craving to have a sweet reat.  My intellect was stronger than my instinct, for a moment.

I thought about this all the way to work and wondered how I was going to stop myself from feeding the coffers of the BFFI the next time I had a craving, and the time after that and the time after that.  What am I going to do?  I cannot let the BFFI win this war.  I will not let the BFFI win this war.  I just won’t.  What am I going to do?  Then I had a great idea, a brilliant idea!  This idea got me through the next couple of days of abstinence, which were days of intense cravings.  What I decided to do was this:  every time I had a craving for something sweet, I would text Carla and say, “I want a treat because _______” and fill in the blank.  The blank would be filled in with, “because I have a craving,” or “because I am stressed,” or “because I want a reward,” or something like that.  Whatever popped into my mind as to why I wanted the treat is what I would write.  Then, right after I hit send on the text message, I would text her again and say, “I want to be thin because _________” and fill in the blank with the first thing that came to mind.  This turned out to be a fascinating exercise.  Very quickly I recognized the power of this.  While my reason for wanting the treat was always an insipid response like, “because I am feeling stressed,” my reason for wanting to be thin were always powerful.  My fill-in-the-blanks for wanting to be thin were things like, “because I feel strong and confident when I am thin,” and “because I want to be healthy,” and “because I want to be as fit as possible going into surgery so that I can have the best possible results.”  They were real reasons, not excuses.  By texting Carla whenever I got a craving, I did two things.  First, I took away the fun of sneaking a treat.  If I told her that I was getting a treat, then I was no longer sneaking it.  Second, I overpowered the craving with an intellectual response, so that I could get past it.

This tactic got me through those really rough couple of days of intense cravings and in fact, that epiphany, that I like to sneak treats, is what caused me to decide to start blogging again.  I’ve been meaning to talk about that morning ever since I resurrected my blog, and I just haven’t had the time or opportunity until now. 

I explained all of this to Stan and, of course, (at least to me, of course, because I know Stan and I’ve been here before) this led to a discussion of childhood.  He wanted to know if I felt the need to sneak food as a kid.  We then had a brief discussion about the weird food environment that I grew up in.  I did sneak food as a kid.  As far as I know, we all did.  I know my memories of childhood are different than my siblings, but my memories are of a mother that had significant food issues of her own.  Sweet treats were rationed at our house, probably as much for economic reasons as anything else.  Food was certainly a significant part of my parents’ budget.  It seemed like there was never enough of it, or certainly never enough of the food that we wanted to eat.  Everything was rationed, from cereal to milk to the pork chops at dinner.  We used to “Horse-n-goggle” food.  I know that is not the word, I think the actual word must have been a German word, but it sounded like “Horse-n-goggle,” to me.  When we were at the dinner table and there was one serving of something left and there were 5 kids that wanted it, my dad would count to three in German and then say, “Horse-n-goggle.”  At that moment we would all hold up as many fingers as we wanted.  My dad would count all the fingers, add them up, and come up with the sum.  And then, starting with the kid on his left, he would count around the table until he got to that number.  Whoever he landed on would then get half of whatever it was that we were Horse-n-goggling, let’s say it was a pork chop (pork chps used to come in packages of eight and there were seven of us, so usually, when we had pork chops, one would get horse-n-goggled).  That lucky kid would get half the pork chop, then it got passed to the next kid who got half of that (so that person would get a fourth of a chop), then the pork chop got passed to the next kid who got half of that (an eighth), and the food would continue to get passed and halved until there was not enough left for anyone to care about.  At the time, this seemed very fair to me.  It was a very random way to see who got the limited amount of food that was available.  But I can see now how this whole scenario reinforced the notion of scarcity when it came to food.  The scarcity of food was particularly pronounced when it came to sweets.  My parents did buy some packaged treats, I remember Ho-Hos and Ding Dongs, in particular, and Oreo cookies.  We took sack lunches to school and I think we sometimes got a treat like this in our lunch.  Honestly, I don’t remember the treat being in my lunch bag as much as I remember the packages being in the cupboard.  We were not allowed to eat any of these things unless my mom gave them to us.  So we snuck them.  Mom used to get so pissed!  I don’t know why.  Was it because they were expensive?  Was it because she wanted the treat?  I don’t know.  I also remember her keeping Snickers Bars in the freezer.  We were not allowed to eat those, they were for her.  But we snuck those, too.  I remember her baking cheesecakes, but always for company, never for us.  That seemed so unfair.  I have a lot of memories around food and sweet treats as a kid.  Most of the time those memories have something to do with trying to get something that was being withheld from me.  It doesn’t take a huge leap of intuition or a PhD in psychology (sorry Stan) to figure out where this desire to sneak food, particularly sweets, came from.  It’s solidly rooted in the strange and twisted food environment that I grew up in.  Add to that my mother was the central figure in all of this and it gets more obvious that this is the root of my addiction.  My relationship with my mom was not good, for reasons that I don’t need to discuss now.  That was my first eleven years of therapy and mostly that has all been put to rest.  But, this sugar addiction, this sneaking of sweet treats, this still needs to be figured out, once and for all.

Now Stan and I are about a half hour into the session.  We’ve identified the fact that the thrill is in the sneaking of the treat (I don’t even try to hide it afterwards.  I leave wrappers in plain sight, for example) and that the roots of the addiction come from feeling like I won something if I successfully snuck a treat as a child.  Now it’s time to figure out how to fix it.  He introduced me to the idea of cognitive distortions and we ran through the 10 most common mind games people play with themselves.  We determined that that didn’t seem to be a major issue for me.  We talked about aversion therapy.  The idea here is that every time you do the thing you are trying to quit (like eat a sweet treat) you do something else that is painful for you, like send $20 to an ex-husband.  That just seems silly to me.  Reject that idea.  Besides, if he really wanted it to be painful, it would be more effective if I sent the $20 to the republican candidate of Jack’s choice.  Yeah, that would stop me in my tracks! We talked about Freud and the id, ego, and super ego.  We talked about behavior modification therapy.  We knocked around a lot of different theories and ideas, not really settling on anything, but just exploring different theories and ideas for how to get this thing figured out and fixed.  After talking about the different theories for treatment, Stan summed it up like this, “You know, if you accept the premise that you are an addict, and it appears to me as if you are, then you can never use sugar again.”  Bam!  Just like that!  Never use sugar again!  He said, “You keep talking about abstaining for the next 77 days and that’s great.  I am convinced that you are committed to that goal and that you will be successful in achieving that goal.  But the problem isn’t the next 77 days.  The problem is after that, after you have had your surgery and you’ve recovered.  Then what?  Are you going to start eating sweets again?  Gain that 10 pounds, and then 20 and then 10 more?  Is that what you are going to do?  This commitment isn’t about the next 77 days, it is about the rest of your life.”  (Obviously, that is not a direct quote, but it is a pretty decent paraphrase.)  He said, “Can an alcoholic have one drink?  A drug addict snort one line of coke?  A gambling addict walk into a casino with $25?  No, of course not.  Can you have one sweet treat?  I don’t think so.”

I acknowledge that this is obvious, but I tried, inanely, to argue the point.  I brought up the Whole 30 and talked about what they say about food having social significance and that once in a while a piece of birthday cake is OK because it is part of the celebration of life.  He just looked at me.  I knew it sounded foolish.  I knew he was right.  Ugh.  Really?  No more sweet treats ever?  And double ugh, why do I care?  Why is this a big deal?  What is it about sugar, anyway?

I have talked to a few people about this since Wednesday and their responses are fascinating.  People have such a visceral response to the statement, “I can never eat sugar again.”  They all say, “I couldn’t do that!”  To sum it up, they all think the statement is ridiculous for two reasons.  First, they think it is unnecessary and second, they think it is impossible.  “Sugar is in everything,” they say.  As if that is a good reason to eat it.  In fact, sugar is not in everything.  Let me clarify, when I talk about sugar I am talking about all sweeteners added to food.  I am not talking about the sugar that naturally occurs in an apple.  Sugar is not added to chicken.  Sugar is not added to broccoli.  Sugar is not added to butter.  Sugar is not added to a pineapple.  In fact, the food that I cook, the food that makes up my entire diet, with the exception of sweet treats, is free of added sugars.  Therefore, I can change the statement to, “I can never eat a sweet treat again.”  But, let’s get back to my friends’ response to hearing this statement, “I can never eat sugar again.”  They claim that this is impossible and unreasonable.  And I say, “Should the alcoholic ever drink again?”  Everyone agrees the answer is no.  Everyone.  When I ask, “What’s the difference?”  The answer is, “We don’t have to drink alcohol, but we have to eat.”  And I say, “But do we have to eat sugar?”  You know where this is going.  It doesn’t take long to follow this logic trail.  No, I don’t have to eat sugar.  No, I don’t have to eat sweet treats.  It is becoming pretty obvious, in fact, that I had my last sweet treat 11 days ago.  Huh.  I should have enjoyed it more.

It’s time for me to go.  Jack is up and showered and I need to cook breakfast, make a shopping list, and head to work. 

Have a beautiful day!!