Let's Talk About ED

Being ashamed of liking food is like being of ashamed of liking water, or oxygen. It’s actually okay to want the things that keep you alive.

“There is something so pathetically sad about living life in fear of food.”

Healthy or not, loving your body is an absolute necessary step toward loving yourself and if you’re lucky, loving someone else. You will never meet a more stubborn, unpredictable, complex, elusive, beautiful mate as your body — once you love it, you can love anything.

Heroin vs. Häagen-Dazs: What Food Addiction Looks Like in the Brain

Is Häagen-Dazs ice cream as addictive as heroin? Or, put another way, is heroin as addictive as Häagen-Dazs?

Depending on how you phrase the question, you’re either asking whether heroin addiction is no more serious than a love of junk food, or you’re questioning whether junk food junkies may have a serious disorder that needs intervention. Now a new study suggests that there may be no clear, bright line between addictive and normal responses—and adds to the evidence that all “addictions” act on the same motivational system in the brain.

The scientists found that when viewing images of ice cream, the women who had three or more symptoms of food addiction — things like frequently worrying about overeating, eating to the point of feeling sick and difficulty functioning due to attempts to control overeating or overeating itself — showed more brain activity in regions involved with pleasure and craving than women who had one or no such symptoms.

Similar to people suffering from substance abuse, the food-addicted participants also showed reduced activity in brain regions involved with self-control (the lateral orbitofrontal cortex).

Notably, the study also found that food addiction symptoms and brain responses to food were not associated with weight: there were some overweight women who showed no food addiction symptoms, and some normal-weight women who did.

Neither heroin nor Häagen-Dazs leads to addiction in the majority of users, and yet there are certain situations that may prompt binges in people who otherwise have high levels of self-control. So the answers to addiction may lie not in the substances themselves, but in the relationship people have with them and the settings in which they are consumed.

more at Time

I’m Tired Of Hearing About Your Diet

I can’t listen to you hate your body anymore. I just can’t.

You’re smart and beautiful. You’re funny and irreverent. And I can’t sit through one more meal where you barely eat, spend ages discussing your diet and dump on yourself. I don’t care if you feel like you gain weight only in your stomach or your thighs. I don’t want to know how you attempt to feel full on 1,200 calories a day. I hate that women make themselves feel equal by comparing their “problem areas,” or their inability to diet. I hate that my time has to be spent listening to you compare yourself to unattainable ideas of beauty. I still think that you’re wonderful and that you should spend some more time appreciating that you’re awesome.

Physical fitness is not a sign of emotional or intellectual achievement. There are many, many women who are size 00 and personally miserable. There is no reason to miss out on life’s joys because you need to count points or haven’t spent enough time on an elliptical.

I am a woman and I want you to give yourself credit for being an intelligent, caring person. I don’t care how much you weigh or how many hours you log in the gym. I think that being happy is more important than being skinny. Happy does taste better than skinny feels, and she pays way less to her psychiatrist. I may not be model skinny, but I choose to value my best attributes instead of hating my worst. 

I choose to believe that I’m as hot as I am confident. I think that my ability to attract people lies in my sarcasm, my outspokenness, and my bold laugh. I wish that you saw your sense of humour and your smart ideas as the things that drew me to you. I think that we would all decide that personal charisma and intellect are far more attractive than size 0 jeans. I wish that we would condemn those who want to tell us otherwise.

I won’t listen to you criticize yourself anymore. I won’t help by commiserating. I won’t be witness to anymore unwarranted self-hate.

Next time you sit down with me at lunch forgive me for ignoring your lengthy description of how kale is just as good as potato chips. I’m going to ask if you think that NATO intervention in Libya is justified. I’m going to inquire if you saw this week’s Glee and if you also missed Jonathan Groff. Hell, I’ll even talk about the weather.

If I can’t do any of these things, and I space out, forgive me. I’m imagining that I’m congratulating you on a promotion, or a new relationship with a caring person. I’m imagining a world where you value you for yourself.

My biggest hope for you isn’t that you lose ten pounds, it’s that you achieve intellectual and emotional self-fulfillment. I hope that you’re imagining the same for me.

more at The Gloss

Food for Anxious Thought: Can Certain Food Affect Anxiety, PTSD?

We all have our ‘comfort foods’ that we gravitate toward when we are more anxious, tense or fearful. What we may not know is that some of those foods may ultimately make our anxiety worse or put us on a repeating cycle of anxious eating- whereas, other foods can indeed be beneficial. How to know what can help and what might be worsening the situation? Hopefully, this will help clear it up.

11 (+3) Food Tips for Anxiety:

1. Complex carbohydrates (such as whole-grain cereals, breads, pastas and oatmeal) boost our serotonin level in our body in a steady manner. Serotonin levels are often found to be low in people suffering from anxiety and depression. Complex carbohydrates also stabilize blood sugar levels and are a much better choice of food than simple carbohydrates (candy, sweets, sugar) which cause spikes in both blood sugar and serotonin levels that then precipitously drop to induce anxiety again.

2. Vitamin C (found in citrus fruits such as oranges) have been shown to be somewhat helpful in lowering stress hormones in the body and to boost the immune system.

3. Magnesium (found in spinach, salmon and cooked soybeans) helps to regulate cortisol levels in the body. People with too low levels of magnesium tend to be prone to headaches and fatigue.

Read More

Fatty Foods Get You High

Fatty foods, new research indicates, have affect your brain in a similar way to marijuana, activating brain chemcials called endocannabinoids that “produce a drug-like feeling.” This feeling—like marijuana!—then encourages you to eat more fatty foods, of course.

Scientists apparently hope to use this discovery to make drugs that could help prevent people from overeating.

Apparently another way to activate endocannabinoids is to engage in “50 minutes of vigorous running on a treadmill or riding a stationary bike.”

source

I think that this article actually points out some pretty valid points relating to the correlation of addiction and food.

Is Food Addictive?

How do you decide if something is addictive? A technical journal feels obligated to question whether food acts on the brain’s neural pathways like famously addictive drugs - such as heroin and cocaine - do. And the answer is (this is my paraphrase), “In some ways yes, in some ways no. Why do you ask?” The list of follow-up articles gives a good sense of what this debate looks like:

• Obesity - is food addiction to blame?
• Food and addiction - sugars, fats and hedonic overeating.
• Food addiction not helpful: The hedonic component - implicit wanting - is important.
• All foods are habit forming - what I want to know is which will kill me!
• Important next steps in evaluating food’s addictive potential.

In fact, the history of addiction  is replete with questions of when to split hairs and when to subsume new objects into the addictive pantheon - from nicotine and cocaine in the 1980s, to marijuana in the 1990s, moving forward to gambling and potentially the Internet and sexcurrently.

And the answer to the question, “What is addictive?” is:

• What society decides in a given epoch.
• What people feel about an activity or object.
• What is helpful (or thought to be helpful) from a public health standpoint.

“Although there exist important differences between foods and addictive drugs, ignoring analogous neural and behavioral effects of foods and drugs of abuse may result in increased food-related disease and associated social and economic burdens. Public health interventions that have been effective in reducing the impact of addictive drugs may have a role in targeting obesity and related diseases.”

People become addicted to experiences. The addictive experience is the totality of effect produced by an involvement; it stems from pharmacological and physiological sources but takes its ultimate form from cultural and individual constructions of experience. The most recognizable form of an addiction is an extreme, dysfunctional attachment to an experience that is acutely harmful to a person, but that is an essential part of the person’s ecology and that the person cannot relinquish. This state is the result of a dynamic social-learning process in which the person finds an experience rewarding because it ameliorates urgently felt needs, while in the long run it damages the person’s capacity to cope and ability to generate stable sources of environmental gratification.

Even after the person has developed an addictive attachment, he or she can suddenly (as well as gradually) rearrange the values that maintain the addiction. This process is the remarkable one of maturing out, or natural remission in addiction.

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