Part One | Part Two | Part ThreePart Three
By: Jean Johnson for Reflux1
Running across Gina Mallet’s line about sugar being an industrial narcotic was only part of what eventually gave Jill Schmidt the strength to stand on her own without using food as a drug. “It took me two years in Overeater’s Anonymous (OA) to get to where I am today, and I fell on my face so many, many times,” Schmidt said.
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Choose Healthy Complex-Carbs
Harvard School of Public Health notes, “While it may be true that easily digested carbohydrates from white bread, white rice, pastries, and other highly processed foods may contribute to weight gain and interfere with weight loss, that doesn't mean all carbohydrates are suspect.”
Harvard School of Public Health gives this advice to increase healthy carb intake:
Start the day with whole grains. If you're partial to hot cereals, try old-fashioned or steel-cut oats. If you're a cold cereal person, look for one that lists whole wheat, oats, barley, or other grain first on the ingredient list.
Use whole-grain breads for lunch or snacks. Check the label to make sure that whole wheat or other whole grain is the first ingredient listed.
Bag the potatoes. Instead, try brown rice or even "newer" grains like bulgur, wheat berries, millet, or hulled barley with your dinner.
Pick up some whole wheat pasta. If the whole-grain products are too chewy for you, look for those that are made with half whole-wheat flour and half white flour.
To read more about choosing health carbohydrates, visit www.hsph.harvard.edu
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One of Schmidt’s last binges was during the holiday season. “I take a number of food magazines since when I’m not stuffing myself with cheap fill, I do enjoy good food. One after another would arrive with these gorgeous photos of cookies plastered all over the cover. Cookies have always been my downfall. Cookies and milk,” Schmidt said.Schmidt recounts how she was three days into what she calls abstinence, or eating sensibly from a three meal per day, sugar-free food plan she designed with the help of a nutritionist. She says that when she walked into the grocery store at 9:30 p.m. and bought three gourmet chocolate chip cookies, a quart of full-fat eggnog, and a family-size chocolate bar that she was not physically hungry in the least. Rather, she said she was just tired and couldn’t say no to her dear, dear “Ed.” (See Part One for Schmidt’s account of why she named her eating compulsion “Ed.”)
“I knew it was fatigue. In my brain, being tired always did get translated as wanting to do what I call ‘pick up.’ I even tried some of the things OA suggests trying before I actually went to the store: Talked to an OA friend about what I wanted to do and why it wouldn’t be a good idea; Asked my higher power to help me,” Schmidt said. In OA the emphasis is off any particular god and instead on what they call a higher power. The idea is that addicts are powerless over their drug of choice but that a power greater than themselves that can help. “Then I got an apple and some cheese – telling myself that if I just had to have something, at least I could make it healthy. But after I bolted that down – I think it was two apples and seconds on the cheese as well – I told myself that if I was going to overeat I might as well go get what I really wanted,” said Schmidt.
Schmidt says that she’s never satisfied with the taste of the goodies when she binges. Rather, her wistful dream has always been able to enjoy a nice dessert after dinner like a normal person. “I even did it for a month two years ago. Ate three polite meals every day and then allowed myself to have whatever dessert I wanted. It was great as long as I only brought single servings into the house. It worked for awhile, but eventually I got cocky and thought I could be my own pastry chef. A whole pie sitting around the house is definitely not something I can deal with. And frankly, I don’t think I dealt with the single desserts either. They just kept my focus on sugar ramped up.”
The idea of picturing sugar as the industrial narcotic, though, has helped Schmidt remove her fixation from sweet nothings. “A quick Google search shows you all the foul chemicals they use to process sugar cane and beets. Things like acid based evaporators and cleaning additives, juice clarification flocculants, and syrup clarification and defoamers. I know they bleach sugar too in some way or another to get it so snowy white. So it’s really not something someone like me who prefers unprocessed food should even consider putting into their body,” Schmidt said laughing. “Here the little tart has misrepresented herself all these years. Harlot that she is.”
But logic and emotion are two different things when it comes to an eating compulsion. Before Schmidt finally found the key to freeing herself from her addiction a year ago, she repeatedly returned to her sugar binges. The good news, though, was that between those nightmarish times, she enjoyed increasing numbers of days in what she calls “the light.”
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Kicking the Sugar Addiction
Kathleen DesMaisons, author of “Potatoes Not Prozac” suggests eating a nightly potato in a variety of forms including baked, boiled, and oven fried. The key, she notes, is to leave the skin on. “The potato with skin will help the body raise your serotonin level and make you feel more confident, competent, creative and optimistic.”
DesMasions goes on to explain that the complex carbohydrate in the potato “creates an insulin response that effects the movement of the amino acid tryptophan from your blood into your brain.”
Since tryptophan (which comes from healthy intakes of protein at each meal) is used to make serotonin, the feel good brain chemical, sugar addicts will have the added boost they need to steer clear of sweets and generally in DesMaison’s words, put “the brakes on your impulsivity.”
DesMasions leads the Radiant Recovery program at www.radiantrecovery.com.
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“I think that was very helpful, actually. Trying to remind myself of how things were changing even though it seemed so slow and a step back for every two I took. But really, what was going on was that for the first time in my life I was getting some relief – some distance from Ed and his sweet talk. From sugar and her simpering, cloying allure. Instead of wanting to eat all over the map, more and more I found the willingness to settle down and eat three meals without running to sugar.“At the time, I didn’t really realize I was getting anywhere. I’ve always been a glass-half-empty person like addicts tend to be. In fact, I think that’s a big part of the reason I have a food addiction. Anything to calm myself down from all the anxiety I live with,” said Schmidt.
Schmidt has much to say about how OA helped her deal with anxiety in Part Four of this story, but she also wanted to credit one other source along with those she’s already mentioned in earlier parts of this account.
“It’s a book called ‘Potatoes Not Prozac’ by Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D.,” said Schmidt. “There’s much about DesMaisons’ approach that I question – quite a bit if you want to know the truth, including the loud come-on covers of her books and her rather patronizing tone – but her idea that people who are strung out on sugar do better severing the tie if they eat complex carbohydrates is a compelling one for me.
“Before I ran across her work, the diets and food plans I found encouraged people to pare way back on the carbs and ramp up the protein. Kind of in the Atkins mode I suppose. But I really did find that including moderate amounts of complex carbohydrates seemed to help the physiological cravings for sugar. DesMaisons is very much into the protein as well, but she gives good carbs more due than places like Weight Watchers and their ilk who are always getting you to pare them way back.”
Schmidt says that she eats a nightly potato as DesMaisons suggests. “I eat the complex carb three hours after my dinner just like she recommends. I really do think I was trying to self-medicate with food before in order to bring my serotonin levels into some normal range as she argues in her work. The problem is that my chemistry was so wigged out from years of sugar addiction that it took some time for things to change. Eating the potato seemed to help facilitate that transformation. At least it was one of the things that I did which seemed to help.”
Continued in Part Four
