What causes someone to be morbidly obese?

I'm in a 12 step program for food addiction, and most of the people come in with anywhere from 40 - 100 pounds excess fat that they often say is the result of eating "a ton" of sugar. For those of you who don't know, the word "sugar" is used in the food addiction recovery meetings to indicate food like candy, cakes, pies, donuts, cookies, ice cream--you know, the sweet stuff. Now, I'm not averse to eating sweets myself, but only after I have had what my family called "real food", which was usually high fat protein (steak, fried chicken or pork chops, homemade hamburgers or meatloaf), LOTS of bread slathered in butter and some kind vegetables as a side dish. Then it was dessert. Snacks could be anything from a soup bowl filled with cereal and milk or a hot link sandwich with mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup and hot sauce. Oh, you thought I meant potato chips or popcorn for a snack? Yes, but that stuff was usually paired with the hot link sandwich. And I topped it all off with cookies and milk. THAT, my friends, is how a person eats their way into a 400+ pound body by age 40. By the grace of God, I don't eat like that anymore. It's truly a miracle, but I have to remember that it's a one day at a time issue. I can't afford to forget that I am a real hardcore, self destructive food addict who, without the help of a Higher Power Who I don't really understand (but pray and ask for help with this addiction all the time), and the food addiction recovery program, my family would have buried me a long time ago.

Here's some food related stories and videos that I recently found. Please read the Huffington Post story that I've posted, and watch the Jamie Oliver video that's posted below that. By the way, I was more than appalled that even though the kids in the video knew that those chicken nuggets contained ingredients that they all said "EWWWW!" and scrunched up their noses at when Jamie showed them what goes into the nuggets, when Jamie asked them if they wanted to eat any, they all raised their hands and said "yes". Why? "Because we're hungry!" Wow. Nice, Madison Avenue. You've effectively brain-snatched America's kids.

I nearly fainted one day when a young mom with a toddler in a stroller asked her little one "Do you want Wendy's or Taco Bell for dinner?" I saw another one giving her infant some Fanta orange soda one day. The child couldn't have been older than six months. That's like shooting diabetes into your child's veins! I kept my mouth shut, but I was screaming inside. In my opinion, this what mass marketing does--encourage people to become zombie consumers. The messages to buy that garbage are so persuasive that there isn't much resistance to keeping large quantities of it in their homes. My parents didn't feed me that stuff all the time; they did everything they could to limit my portion sizes, encourage me to eat all my vegetables (which I HATED), and stop me from drinking more than one soda a day.

It bears mentioning that the sugar content for sodas was different back in 60s because the soft drink companies used cane sugar instead high fructose corn syrup. Cane sugar still creates "sugar cravings" and metabolizes the same way in the body, but there's something about HFCS that seems to cause people to pack on the pounds faster and put them into hard core sugar addict mode. One example: when school districts were voting to take HFCS sweetened sodas out of their vending machines back in the late 90s/early 2000, a very obese teenaged girl who was being interviewed by a local Sacramento (CA) news station claimed that she was going to stop coming to school if they got rid of the sweet stuff because she HAD to have her sodas. (Unfortunately, I can't locate that news story, but I believe it was done by either KCRA Channel 3 or Channel 10 in Sacramento.)

However, I think I was one of those kids who was genetically predisposed to food addiction. There's nothing my mother and father could have done to prevent me from being a food addict, and they spent a lot of money trying. No amount of diets, nutritional consults with doctors, hypnotherapy or even locking up the refrigerator worked for long. I became a sneak, creeping into the kitchen to get another slice of my mother's meat loaf for a sandwich, or grab a bowl of her amazing (and VERY rich) homemade macaroni and cheese. My mom would yell, "Get out of the kitchen, now! You've had enough to eat!", but that didn't stop me from coming back when she was busy doing something else. I learned to wait until she was caught up with arguing with my father, which usually happened as soon as he walked through the front door. Yes, there was a connection. But that's a whole 'nother story.

Families these days are at an even greater disadvantage when it comes to trying to preventing food addiction and childhood obesity.  We didn't have the overwheming sensory overload of food commericials or the abundance of high fructose corn syrup and chemically additives in food like we did now. Couple that with the fact that many parents grew up eating even more of that  non-nutritional junk than I did, add that with the fact that they never learned to cook well balanced meals for themselves, you have the perfect recipe for childhood (and adult) obesity. A lot of parents probably don't realize this, but they are potentially taking 10-15 years off their kids' life span by feeding them all that junk. Unless they make a very determined effort to provide very nutritious meals with no processed ingredients in them, their children stand a good chance of developing nutritional deficiencies that could lead to obesity at an early age.

That's why I don't let my grandson watch television (and feed him the same food I eat), and I insisted on unleashing my critical analysis of food (and toy) commericials when my three children were growing up. Of course, they didn't appreciate it at the time. ("Mom, can we just watch T.V.?!!") But they know how to keep away from the Kool-Aid as adults, and I'm taking credit for that. :) Yes, they wanted to eat the junk food like all the other kids, and I did give in sometimes. But none of them had the horrendous problems with obesity like I did growing up. And I'm very grateful for that.

Fast food truths

Brotherly Love Goes Viral, Big Time Rush Surprises Bullied Sister

I saw this post...um, somewhere. My brain hasn't been holding on to much information lately, as far as remembering things is concerned. This disturbs me, but that will probably be the subject of another blog. If I remember to write it, of course. (Oh, wait, now I remember! I get email notifications from the web service UpWorthy, then I watched it on YouTube.) Anyway, I had several flashbacks when I saw this story. I had to go through bullying in elementary school, but it was primarily about the color of my skin. A few kids teased me about my weight, which was 135 pounds by the time I was 9 years old. I was also five feet, four inches tall, considerably taller than most of my classmates at the time. Actually, I was harassed more for the color of my skin than my weight, which is something I discussed on my other blog, "Yeah...and so, anyway...", which was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the March On Washington. Basically, I didn't have to go through the same type of abuse that this dear child has to endure because I was very, very good with my fists. It's a shame she has to go through all that.

But it's wonderful how passionate her adorable twin brother is about protecting her. I was very touched by this story. But I wish she didn't have to deal with that horrific bullying issue. I understand how deeply words can hurt when you are only a child. It's so ugly, and depressing how cruel other children can be. There's no reason or excuse for that unacceptable behavior, either. Don't get me started. I've had to fight my way out of several bullying episodes, and after all these years, I can definitely tell you that it isn't the pain from punches that I remember so vividly. It's the words. Forget "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me". That's not how I experienced bullying, and apparently, this little girl doesn't either. I can't remember any of the punches that the bullies managed to land, but I can tell you every single derogatory term that they called me. It's not that it has an emotional charge on it anymore because all that happened in the 60s and 70s, and I look back at all that as experiences that have made me emboldened and strengthened me as far as going out into the world and dealing with people and situations. What disturbs me is how nasty the bullies have become these days. It's deplorable. How do these children learn to be so vicious? Is it television, the music or the video games like some people like to claim? Or is it something else? I hate to say this, but even in the post Brown vs. The Board of Education era that I grew up in, I didn't have to put up with the daily torment the young people have to contend with these days. And my siblings and I were often the only black kids in the school.

The planet healer in me wants to reach out to her and her mother, and share with them about what I've been through so they know that other people have faced bullying, and conquered it. I'm not proud that I had to fight my way out of those situations because the bullies thought physical confrontations would frighten me into be as submissive as a toy poodle trained to do somersaults on command. But it worked. They learned that I was not the one to play with, and that it was very prudent to leave me the hell alone. That discovery on their part, and the subsequent reputation I gained as hard hitter followed me all the way from elementary school to graduation from high school. Unfortunately, I don't think that's a viable solution for this young lady and her family. These are very different days, and I think she would find herself in a lot more trouble if she ever turned physical on her tormentors.

I wish I could sit down and have a private conversation with her mother. I know what she's going through with being a single parent, trying to deal with raising her children, work, and the on-going pain of being obese. I don't know if the mother is a food addict, but if she is, it could be that her daughter has also picked up the tool of numbing the pain of daily life with food. In my experience, very little good comes from being obese and using food as a drug to get through life. It's a pretty miserable way of living. But since I have no idea how to get in touch with them, I'll take the next right action--pray for her and her children to be free of that abusive behavior, and that the bullies learn a very memorable lesson about the very negative consequences of their behavior.

There's a positive side to this story, however--the young lady (whose name I can't remember) had how much her mother and twin brother love her, and she was serenaded by the boy band "Big Time Rush".  I've seen them on Nickelodeon a few times over the past three years while I was waiting for a cartoon to come on. (Yes, I love cartoons and comic books--I'm a SERIOUS tomboy/geek girl!) The band sang a beautiful a cappella song (They can SANG!) appreciatively well during the Good Morning America broadcast for their very excited fan. I'm sure she will remember that for the rest of her life!

Well, it's official....The American Medical Association says obesity is a disease

“Recognizing obesity as a disease will help change the way the medical community tackles this complex issue that affects approximately one in three Americans,” AMA board member Dr. Patrice Harris said in a statement." This statement made the usual rounds on many news sites like this one and this one AND including the Today Show. Impressive, isn't it? I'm not being sarcastic, for once. Obesity has been in the news from time to time, and a lot of people have opinions about it. Unfortunately, these same people don't have many facts about the recently named disease, other than "fat people need to diet and exercise" or "push away from the table, Tubby, or even worse, "They caused it on themselves; all it takes is willpower!". (There are other caustic observations that I've read on the various websites, but they are variations of the aforementioned themes. 

I know all too well the physical, mental and emotional torture of morbid obesity, as I have shared on this blog. I've done way too many diets, and the inevitable failure of each one became unbearably depressing. And I tried the "fat and happy" approach to life. It didn't work for me. Not when I was doing things like sobbing in excruiating pain becuase the cartilidge in my left was completely gone, and my hip bones were grinding into each other so much that they resembled a pretzel more than a normal hip on X-rays. And I haven't even got into my back and knees, which still give me a lot of problems, even though I've taken off a total of 158 pounds (It was 230, but I'm now coming out of relapse.) I couldn't resist to responding an NPR story in which made one of those variations on the same theme comments:

Beg to differ. There's a lot of research linking the escalating rate of obesity amongst children and the proliferation of fructose corn syrup in soft drinks and many processed food. If you looked at the labels of soft drinks prior to cane and beet sugar shortage in the 70s, you would have found NO high fructose cane sugar in the ingredients.But corn syrup is easily processed and a much cheaper ingredient for the beverage industry. Obvious translation: higher profits. Same thing with snack foods, which does really good business these days. The beverage and snack food industry intentionally put ingredients in food that will appeal to the senses in a very profound way, creating a longing for their products. (NPR had a story about this not too long ago.) How many people haven't craved a Snicker's or a Pepsi when they are tired? (I've learned that a nap works much better.) That craving is precisely what the food and beverage companies are going for with their products. And young people, with their still-forming brains, are particularily vulnerable to addiction to that junk. When they grow up, do you think they'll suddenly become spectacularly healthy and fit? No. They are hooked. Even if they diet and exercise to a normal weight, the research shows that they will gain it all back within a year plus 10-20 percent more. Yes, parents have a responsiblity to monitor their children's food intake. But it doesn't make a difference if the child is hooked on Cheetos and Cherry Cokes or cocaine, as the imaging done on people's brains after eating sugary products has demonstrated. A 14 year old brain hooked on high fructose corn syrup is no different than a 14 year old brain hooked on crack, legal issues and moral judgments aside. Both kids believe they ave to have it, and they will lie, cheat and steal to get it. Ask any mother who has an obese child. She will tell you all about how all the treats she bought for a party "just vanished", according to her very overweight child. This problem runs far deeper than anyone can imagine. This decision by the AMA is a step in the right direction, in my opinion, but that's all it is. One step.

So, will this decison made by the American Medical Association make a difference in the lives of obese people? Time will tell. But I really think it will make a monumental difference in the income of the pharmacuetical companies. They have several weight loss drugs lined up, just waiting for the doctors' prescriptions. 

An Open Letter from a Food Addict

With much love and sincere thanks to Al-Anon Family Groups, for pioneering the way to keep substance abusers and food addicts accountable for their actions.

I am a food addict. I do need your help, but not in the ways you have tried in the past. The best way you can help me is to leave me to my own devices. Believe me; I have a lot of them.

Don't lecture, blame or scold me. I know exactly what I’m doing to myself, even though I eat as if I will never get another meal. I berate and demonize myself almost every moment of the day about my obsession with eating large quantities of highly refined, processed sugar/flour/high fat food.

Don’t show me the latest magazine diet or clip out articles about obesity risks and weight loss treatments from the newspaper. I will thank you politely on some days, become surly and distant on others. But I won’t do anything more than glance at the clippings before tossing them in the garbage. Please don’t take it personally.

Do not buy me diet books; I’ve bought enough of them over the years. Do not get angry if you’ve noticed that I haven’t opened those books. I am sick. You wouldn't be angry with me for having cancer or diabetes. Food addiction is a disease, too.

Don't throw away my “secret” stashes of food when you find them; it's just a waste because I can always find ways of getting more.

Don’t hide the bathroom scale from me; I will find it. Or if I hide the scale, don’t put it out in the open again. I know this doesn’t make any sense, but there is nothing rational about food addiction.

Don't let me provoke your anger. If you attack me verbally or physically, you will only confirm my bad opinion abut myself. I hate myself enough already.

Don't let your love and anxiety for me lead you into doing what I ought to do for myself. Don’t bring me food, cook my meals, help me get dressed, or call my boss when I feel too depressed to get out of bed and ready for work. If you assume my responsibilities, you make my failure to assume them permanent. My sense of guilt will be increased, and you will feel resentful.

Don't accept my promises and solemn pledges to lose weight. I'll promise anything to get off the hook. But the nature of my illness prevents me from keeping my promises, even though I mean them at the time.

Don't make empty threats, as in you will send me to one of those fat camps or reality shows to force me to lose weight. I know you’re not going to do that, and the fact that you would even say that to me just compounds my shame. But if you do decide to do those things or anything else, stick to your decision. Do not let me talk you ought of it.

Don't believe everything I tell you; it may be a lie. I’m not going to Weight Watcher’s or start the latest magazine diet on Monday, and even if I do, I will only half-heartedly follow those programs. I will tell you that another family member or a friend ate all the entire box of cookies, the gallon of ice cream or the whole bucket of fried chicken. What I tell you about my eating may even sound plausible, completely rational. But my word can’t be trusted when it comes to food. Denial of reality is a symptom of my illness, and I am in so much denial that I don’t always see how much more weight I’ve put on. It’s unfair of me to require you to be in denial about my food issues the way I am. Moreover, I'm likely to lose respect for those I can fool too easily.

Don't let me take advantage of you or exploit you in any way. Love cannot exist for long without the dimension of justice. It doesn’t matter how much I yell, scream, cry or make you feel guilty. Don’t give into my overt or passive/aggressive machinations.

Don't cover up for me or try in any way to spare me the consequences of my addictive eating. Don't lie for me, pay my bills, or meet my obligations. It may avert or reduce the very crisis that would prompt me to seek help. I can continue to deny that I have a a serious problem with food as long as you provide an automatic escape for the consequences of my eating.

Above all, do learn all you can about food addiction and your role in relation to me. Go to Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) meetings when you can. Attend Al-Anon meetings regularly and adapt whatever they say about alcoholism and the alcoholic to food addiction and the food addict. Read the literature and keep in touch with Al-Anon members. They're the people who can help you see the whole situation clearly.

I love you.

Your Food Addict

Angela in OA

PHOTO: I'm at Bosch Baha'i School with the Rancho Cordova Baha'i community, about six months before I entered food addiction recovery. I may have weighed more than 306 pounds, from the way I look in this picture.

I can’t recall the exact month or day that this happened, but I know the season and the year—it was late winter, 1987 that I entered the rooms of Overeater’s Anonymous and stayed for a while. (For those of who are familiar with the traditions of 12 step programs, please be assured that I am not breaking my anonymity by revealing this because I am no longer a member of OA.) I had attempted to attend the meeting a few years before, but I wasn’t ready.

The entire experience seemed completely surreal to me, from the circle in which people sitting to the way they said “My name is Janice (or Susan or Betty) and I’m a compulsive overeater.” Why did they do that? And why the rest of the group keep saying “Hi, Janice (or Susan or Betty)” in response? Then there was what felt to me to be an interminable silence following the short testimony given by Janice (or Susan or Betty), which was quite uncomfortable to me. The silence lasted until another person raised her hand, and I felt like I could breathe again. I was hoping they didn’t want me to say anything because I had no clue what was going on. Besides, nothing I heard seemed to relate to the reasons I came to OA in the first place, which were: a) I wanted to lose weight and, for the first time in my adult life, live in a normal sized body; b) stop my then-husband from sleeping with other women by losing weight, since he told me that was the reason why he did it.

An aside pertaining to the letter “b” in the previous paragraph: I know this is a hot topic with many women, and I promise it will be the subject of another blog when I get enough serenity in my recovery to stop referring to my ex-husband as a “piss-colored bastard” and many other “choice” monikers that I have retained for him over the past 20 years.

Every single word coming out of the mouths of those OA members were incomprehensible abstractions to me. When it was over, I decided to ask a few of them some burning questions: “What is abstinence? Does it mean you just stop eating completely?” (The thought of that kind of abstaining from my best friend and lover, was terrifying to me.) The ladies smiled graciously and told me that the OA program suggested that they eat three moderate meals a day with nothing in between, avoiding white flour and sugar. Since I was well over 350 pounds at the time this made no sense to me. Did that mean that I could eat as four huge slabs of thick crust pizza for lunch and a plate filled with macaroni and cheese for dinner, as long as those items were made whole grain wheat? Yes, they responded. OA does not endorse any food plan, and what you eat is between you and your Higher Power. I liked that concept because it seemed to me that I would get to continue eating the foods I loved and still lose weight. If that program could do that for me, I was all for it. Eating whatever I wanted, even though it was supposed to be in moderation, seemed heavenly to me.

But the skeptic in me wasn’t convinced, so I asked them, “Is that how you all lost weight?” Again, they smiled. “Yes, that is part of it, but the program also promise release from the pain.” Inwardly, I scowled. What pain? What are you chicks TALKING about? But that’s not what I said out loud. “So what you are telling me is that if I eat three moderate meals a day with nothing in between, I will lose weight.” “You will, if you keep coming back. It works.” Well, none of them were particularly large; in fact, one lady looked down right skinny to me. Even more importantly, she told me lost eighty pounds by doing the three-moderate-meals-a-day-with-nothing-in-between deal, and kept it off for five years. That impressed me somewhat. I had reservations about whether I could do the same because I had a lot more than eighty pounds to lose. But for the first time in my life, I had some hope about what to do about the most difficult issue in my life, which was my weight. An idea was planted in my mind about recovery from OBESITY (versus compulsive overeating or food addiction), which was that I could lose the weight and eat whatever I wanted as long as it was limited to three moderate meals a day.

After all, as OA explained to me, my food plan was between me and my Higher Power, who is certainly powerful enough to change my body chemistry so that I would experience miraculous weight loss on that food plan. I was going to slide into home base, free and easy. Since I didn’t hear any objections from the heavenly realm, I proceeded to define moderation as a large dinner platter or bowl heaping with whole grain pastas and/or breads and cereal products with sauces, protein and fats. And I could have dessert, as long as it was made with whole grain flours and natural sweeteners, like honey, raw sugar, agave nectar, brown rice syrup or molasses.

Wow, where was Overeater’s Anonymous when I was suffering through that contemptible Armed Forces Diet! I would have been saved from all that agony! OA was, indeed, a miraculous program. The prospect of being able to lose weight without going through the horrible deprivation, mood swings and stomach growls, not to mention being able to eat food that actually tasted good, was extremely appealing to me.

“I lost weight WITHOUT dieting!” I heard some of the ladies in OA enthusiastically proclaim that, year after year. I believed them; they were living proof. But there was something very faulty about the way I translated those words while applying them to working my program. So I ate my three large feasts a day with nothing in between, avoided all refined white flour and sugar, went to Overeater’s Anonymous meetings faithfully each week, and waited for the miracle to happen.

To my dismay, I gained more weight. My body became overwhelmed with the very serious health consequences of carrying over 200 pounds of excess weight. After while, I could no longer work because walking for more than two feet at a time caused daggers of pain to sear through my lower back and left hip. I became wheelchair bound and mostly dependent of my family to get me around town for shopping and medical appointments. I came to realize that the three meals-a-day-without-anything-in-between and eating unrefined sugar and flour was not working for me. But what else could I do? I had tried everything, Weight Watchers, hypnotherapy, protein diets, liquid fasts, Nutri-System….you name it; I’ve done it. I even had Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery in 2002. That did work for a little while. But I began re-gaining the weight after I was one year out of the surgery. At that point, I became severely clinically depressed and placed on very strong anti-depressants under the care of a psychiatrist.

Another aside: My unofficial pre-gastric bypass weight is 400 lbs, which I can't statistically verify. At the time, I refused to get on a scale, and most bathroom scales didn't register weights over 300 lbs anyway. However, I was massive enough to bust the zipper on a pair of size 54 waist jeans, which I paid big dollars for from Irene's Sport Shop on Arden Way, Sacramento. Irene's is a specialty clothing store for large women that carries up to a size 8x. I wore a size 5x, and I was still attending OA meetings during this time. When I entered Kaiser Permanente's gastric bypass program a year later, I had lost about 30 lbs through CEA-HOW, which was another 12 step for people with food issues. In order to qualify for gastric bypass surgery, I had to lose another 10% of my body weight, so I went a strict vegan diet and lost 30 pounds. I weighed 331 pounds on the morning of my surgery, which July 11, 2002. My lowest post-operative weight was 235. I entered my current recovery program in October, 2007 weighing 306 pounds. I now weigh 183 pounds.

It has been one hell of a journey, but I’m no longer on that road spiraling downward. I'm now working a 12 Step program that addresses my particular brand of total insanity around food. I thank Overeater’s Anonymous for introducing me to the 12 Steps, but I am too far gone to work a loosely structured program like that. It works for some who don’t have the completely bizarre mental twists that seem to justify destructive eating behaviors, like filling up a dinner platter to an overflowing capacity and considering that mountain of food a “moderate” meal. And I thought I would lose weight by eating that way! Only an insane person would hold onto such delusional thoughts.

There are a lot of people like me who live every day of their lives in the same kind of delusions. They are FOOD ADDICTS.

Hi, my name is Angela, and I am a low-bottom, gutter level food addict.

Little Girl Addict

A "discussion" on Twitter about whether parents should allow their children to eat sugared cereals became pretty heated today. First of all, mothers go on the serious offense if they perceive that another woman has something negative about how she is raising her children. Add to the mix a disagreement over what is "good nutrition" for children, and whoa...ladies, ladies, ladies! Let's break it up and go to your separate corners, all right!

Well, I happen to agree with the moms who feel that feeding refined sugar and flour products to children is not only nutritionally unsound, but it is also setting them up for some serious issues with food addiction. It may not happen while they are children--they might get to their 30s or 40s before the weight starts piling on. But it's a lot more complicated than "oh, I'm getting older and my metabolism is slowing down." It's all about craving the good stuff--the hot,fresh French bread slathered with butter, deep dish pizza with loads of oozing extra cheese and pepperoni, mountains of nachos dripping with cheese, salsa, sour cream and guacomole--are you getting the picture here? And all of those delights are usually introduced in childhood.

Now, mothers do not know how their children will react to this food. They have no idea that the first bite of Ben Jerry's ice cream at two years old will be become two pints before bedtime at age 45. And that's in addition to the Claim Jumper family size lasagna that Mommy's former sugar pumpkin had for dinner. No, there's no crystal ball that can predict a morbidly obese future for Mama's lil' darlin'. But Mom can certainly keep the odds favorable by keeping the fresh veggies and fruit on her sweetie-kin's plate, and putting a permanent moratorium on all refined flour and sugar products. If you don't give it to them, they won't develop a taste for it, at least not on your watch. They can (and will) do whatever they want once they are grown. But you will breathe a lot easier knowing that it won't be because you piled that poison into their systems.

You don't think it's poison? An occasional treat is not going to be harmful? All right, you don't have to believe anything I say. Just check out what the good Dr. McDougall has to say about it:

Food Processing Raises Insulin Levels and More

When people consume significant quantities of unhealthy foods for prolonged periods of time their bodies show signs of distress, usually a rise in one or more risk factors—such as an elevation of blood sugar, cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, and/or insulin. These values are called “risk factors” because they are associated with heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and obesity. The association is not one of “cause and effect,” but rather rich foods cause them to rise and concurrently cause people to become sick.

The refining of plant foods commonly results in elevations of insulin levels. When whole grains are ground into whole flours nothing is added or removed, yet the properties of the food have changed. The physical structure has gone from a nugget to a powder—as a result the surface area of the food exposed to the intestinal lining has increased and the natural fibers of the food have been disrupted. This simple grinding process results in a greater elevation in the insulin levels in a person’s blood after eating, than that which is caused by the whole grain.1 During the next step of purification the whole grain flour is sifted to remove the chaff, thereby eliminating dietary fiber, vitamins, minerals and other important nutrients. The end product of this purification is white flour, which causes an even greater rise in insulin than the unrefined flour.

A classic experiment reported in 1977 showed similar effects on insulin production from the processing of fruit.2 After eating an apple, subjects showed a small rise and fall in blood sugar (glucose) and a small rise in blood insulin levels. Applesauce, made by simply grinding the apples, caused a greater rise in insulin and subsequent fall in blood sugar. The juice, made by removing the pulp, caused the largest rise in insulin and fall in blood sugar levels. These kinds of studies demonstrate that consuming grains, vegetables and fruits in their unprocessed form is healthiest for the body.

Look, there's no doubt that my mother loved me. She had no idea that I had a very dangerous propensity to be addicted to flour, fats and sugar(probably genetic, since most of my family members are addicts of one sort or another). There's nothing wrong with giving a little candy to a pretty little sweet, quiet and well-behaved child, is there? My mother told me about how some Japanese women thought my sister and I were living dolls, and they gave us handfuls of rice candy. I was about a year and a half, my sister was six months old. Later, I remember being intoxicated by the smell of my mother's homemade oatmeal and raisin cookies, and feeling crazed with anticipation for the second they came out of the oven. I was four, not yet fat.

But in two short years, I was chubby. By eight, I was fat. At age ten, I was obese. And my addiction to flour, sugar and fat spiraled beyond any measure of control. I weighed 301 pounds after I gave birth to my son in 1982. I was 24 years old. My mother was almost in physical pain every time she looked at me when I was at that weight. Little did she know that I would weigh 100 pounds more by age 42. But at least she didn't have to be tormented with guilt by the sight of me at that time. She'd had several heart attacks and a major stroke, and the result was she was far too ill to take note of my double-wide body.

It wasn't my mother's fault. She didn't know that sugar and flour would cause an unbelievably strong reaction in my body, creating intense cravings and total mental obsession with getting more and more food. My mom wanted a much better life for me. But those powerful drugs, flour and sugar, were more powerful than my mother's unconditional love.

I would like for the reader to watch the excerpt from the TLC (The Learning Channel)series "Inside Brookhaven Obesity Clinic" and consider this--all of those super morbidly obese people were just like me. They lost control of their addiction to flour and sugar products, and they had been condemned to an unhealthy, tortuously hellish existence that is isolated from most people and normal activities. And I'm sure their mothers didn't want them to be food addicts any more than mine.

Thoughts about Brookhaven Obesity Clinic

There are a lot of problems, as I see it, with Brookhaven's program. They claim to have a high sucess rate, but compared to what? Only 3% of all dieters ever get to their weight loss goals on their own. And out of that 3%, most of them will re-gain all of their weight plus more within the next five years. I know; I've lived it.

But if Brookhaven calls itself a facility that treats food addiction, then they better start doing something more than snatching the addicts' food away, and telling them that in exchange for eating 15,000 calories, they get to(woohoo, what fun when you are defying gravity with every step) exercise and talk to a shrink. Terrific. How motivating. That makes ME want to sign up! Luckily, I don't qualify for their program anymore! (Actually it's all due to my Higher Power, and yes, I'm referring to the 12-steps. It works for me. Nothing else, INCLUDING gastric bypass surgery, has.)

Look, anytime you take away a substance or behavior away from an addict, they become angry, depressed, pathetic, irrational, and totally unable to conceptualize the long term benefits of changing their lives. Losing 200-700 pounds seems like a fantasy, an unattainable goal filled with pain and frustration. (You should have seen me when I was de-toxing from flour and sugar. I would have scared the Incredible Hulk!) No wonder they sneak food into the hospital. The short term satisfaction of eating their binge food becomes much more desirable than that distant future of "someday I will be thin and normal."

And Brookhaven's food looks pretty disgusting. So what do these patients have to look forward to each day? Not much. There you have it. Relapse city. Not only that, they allow them to eat flour products as part of their daily food plan. Sorry folks, for food addicts, bread is NOT the staff of life--it is EVERYTHING in life, their love, their comfort, their joy! And it is addictive. One piece of bread is never enough. Why do you think they keep ordering delivery pizza? The addiction to flour has been triggered by the bread they eat in the hospital, and they want more!

The down side of taking away an addict's favorite binge food is dealing with the addict. Without their fix of flour and sugar, you have some pretty surly patients on your hands. Unless they are given, like me, spiritual and emotional support and a way to feel good about themselves. A diet feels like punishment. Exercise feels like punishment. In fact, LIVING feels like punishment to a food addict, even though the thought of dying is terrifying. But even the threat of death won't keep a hardcore food addict out of the pizza. My suggestion? Start some 12 step meetings that focus on recovering from food addiction in the hospital, and require the patients to attend at least one a day. Make sure that the speakers for the meetings are people who have lost at LEAST 100 pounds, preferably more, and have kept it off for more than a year (preferably five years or more). The patients won't like it, but they don't like what they are doing now. But they need to hear stories of hope and recovery from people who know exactly what they going through on a daily basis, and develop a network of support that will help them when they return to their homes.

Most people underestimate the fact that flour products are highly addictive (and toxic, but I won't get into that). Normal eaters (and food addicts in denial) can't understand it, but it's true. How many times have we seen in the series Brookhaven patients ordering in pizza? It's ALL about the bread: buttery, flaky croissants, an extra-large deep dish Chicago-style pizza smothered in extra cheese and pepperoni, mountains of fried chicken served with buttered biscuits and/or cornbread, mashed potatoes and rich, creamy gravy. Flour and fat--a food addict's dream. Without daily spiritual and emotional support from understanding people who have been down that addiction path, that "dream" will kill them. And more often than not, it does.

Top off the flour/fat combo with the sugary stuff for dessert, and the cravings and compulsion to eat and eat and eat even more becomes unbearably overwhelming. Next stop--face down in the food, around the clock. Trust me. I've been there. I didn't get to 400 pounds by eating fresh fruit and salad. That's what I eat now,now that I'm more than 200 pounds down from my highest weight. And I resisted eating the vegetables most all. I tolerate them now, but in exchange for eating food I'm not too crazy about, I have a much clearer connection to my Higher Power and other people on a daily basis. And life is better. It just takes a very long time for a food addict like me to see that. And I couldn't do this on my own. I have NO willpower. The best way for me to keep eating healthy is to never put any flour or sugar products in my mouth, ever. That may seem harsh to some, but it's the truth.

I had nearly die three times, have Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery (July 11, 2002), lose 150 pounds and re-gain 85 back, and once I got into recovery, complain bitterly about the nasty tasting food until I finally surrendered to this program. I was severely hard core addict sinking deeper and deeper into the food. I didn't know about Brookhaven when I was deep into the addiction, but I doubt if my outcome would have been much different than the patients in the series. At 400 pounds, in excruciating pain and confined to a wheelchair, I was a quarter step away from the life those super morbidly obese patients have been doomed to live. And that's a tortuously horrific living death.

Recurring hernia rupture, toothaches, life

I have three types of hernias--umbilical, incisional and epigastrica. The first two have ruptured. I'm hoping the third won't.


Things that a post op gastric bypass patient SHOULD NEVER DO: a) Eat any flour products of any kind. You WILL stretch your pouch. And if you have a lap band, ask yourself how many times do have to have that thing tightened; b) eat more than the recommended amounts of food that your surgeon and primary care physician advises for you. This is for the same reason listed in a); c)In fact, you should do everything your doctors tell you to do as if your butt's on fire and you're about to turn to cinders if you don't follow instructions; d) DO NOT, EVER IN THIS LIFE OR ANY OTHER, EAT GOMASIO AFTER ANY FORM OF WEIGHT LOSS SURGERY!

Why am I saying this? Well, first of all, many people don't know what gomasio is. Here's a formal definition from About.com's Macrobiotic Cooking section: Gomasio is sesame salt. It is made of toasted sesame seeds and sea salt, and is rich in calcium and iron. Sounds good and healthy, right? Something that a recovering food addict should have as a healthier alternative to salt, right? Yep. It is healthier, unless you have had Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery, which means that little pouch your surgeon made out of your stomach cannot process sesame seeds. In fact, sesame seeds tears very nasty holes in that little pouch, which is what happened to me last week. The funny thing is, the same thing happened to me around this time last year, too. It was for a different reason, but once you have an abdominal wall hernia, it's REALLY easy to have one of those holes open up in another spot. And that's what happened to me, which is what I realized as I lay in my hospital bed.

First of all, I had been breaking my abstinence, which means quite simply that I had been eating things that were NOT part of my food plan, AND I was eating amounts of food that were larger than what I had committed to my sponsor. So let's add up all the elements here--eating bread (a definite no-no for someone who's had weight loss surgery), pasta, cheese, cookies, trail mix, cashews, almonds, crackers, bagels, peanut butter, peanut butter-filled preztels, croissants...if I could have possibly lived on bread alone, I would have. Bread and cheese. That's all I wanted, all day long. I'm sure eating that stuff opened the hernia even more than the gomasio.

Here's Wikipedia's explanation of a hernia:

By far the most common hernias develop in the abdomen, when a weakness in the abdominal wall evolves into a localized hole, or "defect", through which adipose tissue, or abdominal organs covered with peritoneum, may protrude. Another common hernia involves the spinal discs and causes sciatica.

Hernias may or may not present either with pain at the site, a visible or palpable lump, or in some cases by more vague symptoms resulting from pressure on an organ which has become "stuck" in the hernia, sometimes leading to organ dysfunction. Fatty tissue usually enters a hernia first, but it may be followed by or accompanied by an organ.

Most of the time, hernias develop when pressure in the compartment of the residing organ is increased, and the boundary is weak or weakened.

* Weakening of containing membranes or muscles is usually congenital (which explains part of the tendency of hernias to run in families), and increases with age (for example, degeneration of the annulus fibrosus of the intervertebral disc), but it may be on the basis of other illnesses, such as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome or Marfan syndrome, stretching of muscles during pregnancy, losing weight in obese people, etc., or because of scars from previous surgery. (Angela's note: I had the last two conditions.)

Thank God I stayed away from doing a lot of sweets. I did some, but that dumping thing that happens to post op gastric bypass patients puts a damper on a "good" time. The splitting headaches, cold sweats, shaking, feeling faint--no thanks. Sweets, as weird as it seems considering my eating history, were things that I ate in moderation. (Hey, I said it's weird!) So,I did not go buck wild with the sweet stuff. Why not, you ask? Sensible question, considering that I was already messing myself up my weakened abdominal wall with all that pouch-swelling bread; why not go all the way? Why not spend a day at the Cheesecake Factory, or at Freeport Bakery, where they make some of Sacramento's most sumptuous pies, cookies, cakes and tarts? I have no logical answer for that one, except that in the deep recesses of my food addicted-brain, I acknowledged that what I was doing wasn't very wise, and that I was already risking another hernia rupture. The very nasty complications from eating too much sugar would have put me in my final resting place. I narrowly avoided it this time. God must have a plan for me, but I know I can't keep doing this to myself.

Now, here's the low down and dirty deal--I have been obese since age 9, morbidly obese since age 25. I'm now 51. All those years of dieting and gaining weight over and over again has stretched my abdominal wall to breaking point, or as my surgeon told me, "it has been severely compromised." I created the first hernia the night I had binged beyond human capacity, which I described here in an earlier blog.


So that umbilical cord hernia was sewn up; I went home and within months, forgot about it. Forgot that once the abdominal wall, that precious muscle tissue that keeps essential organs like the intestines, the colon, the bladder, becomes toilet paper thin after years of abusing food, there is a high risk of having another weak spot will break open. When that happens, those precious organs are displaced and sometimes burble out of that little hole in the wall. That event is known in medical circles as organ incarceration, or as I wrote in last years blog, "jailed guts". Last year, it was part of my large intestine that tried to escape through the hernia opening. This year it was a section of my colon. That was not good. Not good at all.

My surgeon, the calm, cool and collected Dr. Mortensen, informed me during our pre-op talk (actually, she did a lot more talking than I did because I was just a whisper away from shrieking in pain) that they would do some exploratory procedures first with two laproscopic cameras. If I wasn't hurting so badly, I would have geeked out and said, "Cool! Go for it!" Even now, I really think the idea of having tiny cameras inside of me taking pictures of my innards is pretty awesome.(Yes, I know I'm weird.)

"If we go in and find infection(in or around your colon), we may have to surgically remove part of it," she told me.

I didn't react to that at the time because the morphine was just beginning to kick in. But what I didn't realize was I could have been wheeled out of the operating room equipped with a brand-spanking new colostomy bag attached to me. Now, that right there is not cool. Exposing the world to the product of my elimination system is a very unflattering look, even for a fashion dud like me.

Luckily, that didn't happen. I was fitted with a synthetic mesh to keep the hernia from opening again, sewed and stapled up. I do have a drain attached at the incision site, though. That will be removed this Thursday at my follow-up appointment with the calm, cool and collected Dr. Mortensen. I have a third hernia, located much higher than the other two. It hasn't opened up yet, but the good doctor is obviously concerned that it might. We will talk about this when we meet again.

A week prior to this surgical event, I had a massive toothache. Turned out to be a very deep gum infection. I'm in need of a root canal, scheduled for May 4, 2009. And the wreckage of my addictive eating past just keeps piling up.

My problem is that I have underestimated the power of the dark side. Being a food addict means that if I'm not 100% diligent about working my recovery program, I will die way before I'm supposed to. Slow suicide, plain and simple. And I'm not ready to go, not like that. So I'm abstinent, today. And I have been since the surgery. Have I learned my lesson? I can't say. Look at what's happened to me in the course of a year. If nothing else, I've learned it doesn't matter that I very much dislike the way my food in this program tastes. I just have to endure it for one meal at a time so I can live one more day, and pray at night that I can wake up in the morning and do what I need to do to remain alive another day. That's what it is for me right now. And I refuse to think about it any other way. I'm not happy, joyous and free yet. But I'm alive, and still able to raise a little hell while I'm in this realm of existence. For today, that's enough.

Breaking real bad...

Flour products and fat. That's what kills abstinence for me. Forget cake, ice cream, cookies...I'll eat 'em, but I CRAVE bread and cheese. In almost any form.

Detox sucks butt. Seriously. I got into a really, really bad space that more than likely began months ago: "So what if the protein isn't EXACTLY 4.0 ounces? It's not like I'm going to gain any weight if it's 4.05!" "Dammit, I don't feel like making outreach calls right now. I wanna read my book (or watch a movie)! I'll make six calls tomorrow!" "I'm too tired to read the Big Book! I've read it about 100 times already!"

Not EVEN a slippery slope. Try fast-moving mudslide down the mountain that ends with a big dirty mess at the bottom. That's what breaking my abstinence has been like for me. And denial? Angela bright and cheery: "No, I'm o.k.! Everything's fine!" I slid down that muddy mountain hand in hand with Ms. Major Denial. I'm puddling deep in the Valley in the Shadow of Death. That's what breaking my abstinence means to me right now.

There is a rather worrisome snag in doing this life-saving program--I hate the food, meaning, the food I have to eat for recovery. It's healthy, nutritious and all that, but it's not very tasty. ESPECIALLY breakfast--plain yogurt, plain oatmeal (and I do mean PLAIN, as in no milk, butter, natural or artificial sugar)and a serving of fruit. Of course, I only like the fruit. The rest is tortuously disgusting. But apparently, a low bottom, gutter level food addict like me has to learn to eat for nutrition only. Taste has nothing to do with it. If it tastes good, I'll want to eat more. And more. And more. So I grimly tolerate the stuff. I used to put artificial sweetener on the yogurt and oatmeal, but I can't do that anymore. It just leads me back to my addictive eating. So right now, I loathe breakfast. And it used to be my favorite meal of the day.

This is where I am right now. I have to be honest because pretending to be Ms. Mary Sunshine about the food just got me into lying about what I was really eating, and a seriously dangerous break in abstinence. With that in mind, I end this post by saying this to get out what I am truly feeling right now:

IT SUCKS!!! IT SUCKS;IT SUCKS; IT SUCKS!!!!!