Obsessed with Food

[jld141]

Hi Everyone!

I have a problem. Recently I've seem to become OBSESSED with food. All I do is think about food. What I'm going to eat, when I'm going to eat it, how much I'm going to eat. How many calories are in each food, if it is healthy if it is not. This is really starting to drive me crazy. I'm constantly looking up ways to lose weight. I've "made up my mind" a million times that I'm finally going to lose weight and do it right by diet and exercise but I always only last a few days and then fail again.

I think my obsession with food started when my mom became really strict about what I was allowed to eat and when I was allowed to eat it. She is constantly watching me and how much I eat and yells at me when I eat something unhealthy or eat too much of something. She always talks about calories and good for you bad for you type stuff. I know I shouldn't blame her, but she's been like this for the past few years and I never remember myself being as obsessed with food like I am now before she started being so restrictive. I know she just wants me to be healthy, but I think it might be making it worse. Now every time she's out of the house or out of the room I'll eat a ton, even if I'm not hungry at all. We don't even keep any junk food in the house so I just binge on crackers and bread because that's the closest thing to junk food that we have.

I just want to be like a normal person and eat breakfast lunch and dinner with the occasional dessert and not THINK about it at all. I don't want to be just sitting around thinking about food 24/7--thinking about when my next meal will be and how I'm going to sneak a snack when my mom isn't looking or when I'm by myself. If I'm eating lunch with a group of people and there is a plate of desserts on the table, I'll have one like a seemingly normal person but then after everyone is done eating and the rest of the desserts are still sitting there, I can't even focus on the conversation because I want to eat another one. Even though I've obviously fulfilled my need to eat it because I had one!

I'm not extremely overweight but I'd like to lose a few pounds. I'm 140 lbs at 5'3'', my goal weight is 110 lbs. I've gotten down to 130 before but it's getting harder and harder when all I can think about is eating. There has to be more to life than meals and food!

Can anyone help me with this problem? I feel like NoS will help but sometimes I make my meals way too big and even when I'm on NoS I'm still constantly thinking about what my next meal will be. I don't want to be this way I just want to think about food like a normal person

Any advice?? :(

[NoelFigart]

This will not work for everyone, but it works for me.

I love food. I love to cook, and I love to experiment. I love junk food and I love gourmet food. I love to eat. One of my hobbies revolves around food, for heaven's sake.

I decided it's okay for me to be into the experience of eating as long as I keep it contained. I mean, come on, there are plenty of cultures were delicious food is considered one of the great pleasures in life, where food is deeply enjoyed, but don't have a culture of overeating.

Frankly, I think it's a lot of puritanical bull to consider food an enemy, and GOD what a line of crap we've been fed in the US with THAT one.

[Cindybrians]

i completely agree with her^^

[wosnes]

This will not work for everyone, but it works for me.

I love food. I love to cook, and I love to experiment. I love junk food and I love gourmet food. I love to eat. One of my hobbies revolves around food, for heaven's sake.

I decided it's okay for me to be into the experience of eating as long as I keep it contained. I mean, come on, there are plenty of cultures were delicious food is considered one of the great pleasures in life, where food is deeply enjoyed, but don't have a culture of overeating.

Frankly, I think it's a lot of puritanical bull to consider food an enemy, and GOD what a line of crap we've been fed in the US with THAT one.

I agree, too. I think food is my hobby. I don't necessarily love to cook, but I love to eat and cooking is the means to the end.

I've posted this here before, but it seems appropriate now. This is from Chic & Slim by Anne Barone. Maybe a little tongue-in-cheek.

Blame it on the Puritans. If you wonder why the French, the most food-obsessed people on the planet, can eat all that cream, butter, and egg yolks and struggle far less with excess weight than Americans who dutifully take home shopping bags of sugarless and fat-free, the answer is: the Puritans. The French never had any; the Americans did. The French had Joan of Arc, Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles de Gaulle, and Brigitte Bardot.

But no Puritans.

Back in 1620 when the Puritans stepped of the Mayflower, they brought with them the intellectual baggage that if something feels good and makes us happy, it is bad. Discomfort and sacrifice are good. The more uncomfortable and unpleasurable something is, the Puritans thought, the better for you. Of course this Puritan philosophy grew out of strong religious conviction.

The French were also religious -- in their own fashion. When they wanted to give thanks to God, they built -- by hand, no less -- huge, architecturally magnificent Gothic cathedrals. The construction of Chartres, no doubt, burned more calories than all the Jane Fonda workout videos ever sold.

For Thanksgiving, the American Puritans fixed a big dinner and ate it. Our annual reenactment of this feast kicks off that part of the year when the average American gains six pounds.

The Puritan legacy was still strong three centuries later when I was growing up in the 1950s. In that small Bible Belt town, drinking alcohol was a sin, smoking was a sin, playing cards was sin, dancing was a sin, and going to the movies was a sin. Any effort to improve your appearance was viewed with suspicion. Once I arrived at a friend's house to find her grandmother in a rage. Pointing a damning finger, she demanded, "What do you think about a girl who would go against the will of God?" My friend, it turned out, had straightened her naturally curly hair.

In that Bible Belt milieu, sex outside marriage put you on the fast track to Hell. As for sex in marriage, you weren't supposed to enjoy it. The only sanctioned pleasurable activity was eating. I have witnessed church family night dinners that were food orgies that would have shocked the un-Puritanical French right out of their socks.

The French seek equal pleasure in a well-prepared meal as in a session of passionate lovemaking. Actually the French favor alternating one with the other. But everything in moderation. The French, after all, coined the phrase la douceur de vivre, the sweetness of living. Americans coined the phrase "No pain, no gain." The way this works, you go through the pain of dieting. Then you gain it all back.

THE NOUVEAUX PURITANS

In recent decades American Puritanism has undergone an evolution. Activities no longer prohibited for religious or moral reasons, are now on the no-no list as unhealthy. This has given the Puritan mentality an in-road to spoiling our previously okay pleasure in eating. The rules are simple: Anything that tastes good, like grilled steak, cheese enchiladas, fresh-brewed coffee, or Key lime pie, are poisons, guaranteed to kill us. Foods such as tofu, bean sprouts, and plain low-fat yogurt are cure-alls promised to put the medical profession out of business and make us all live to 110.

Most new products the food industry has put on the shelves recently carry some (mostly overhyped) health claim. And whatever the fad health food, they add it to everything. During the oat bran craze about the only products on the supermarket shelf without this gritty little addition was laundry detergent and disposable diapers.

These Nouveux Puritans have studies to back up their claims. But my faith in "studies" is weak. I remember one study that concluded that wearing lipstick caused cancer. However, to ingest as much lipstick as they had pumped into those poor little research mice, a human had to eat 90 tubes of lipstick per day!

Across the Atlantic the French hear the results of the American Nouveux Puritan food studies, pause a moment from eating their pate de fois gras, cut a bite of bifteck, sip their Beaujolais, and contemplate the cheese tray as they shrug and say, "Il sont fous, ces Americains." They're crazy, those Americans.

Food is to be enjoyed. I think about it a lot. I rarely think about whether or not it's healthy or how many calories are in food. My definition of "healthy" has changed quite a bit over the last few years. While I definitely have a thing for potato chips, I make most of my junk food. That automatically limits how much of it I eat.

[Nicest of the Damned]

Can anyone help me with this problem? I feel like NoS will help but sometimes I make my meals way too big and even when I'm on NoS I'm still constantly thinking about what my next meal will be. I don't want to be this way I just want to think about food like a normal person

Any advice??

Remember: thinking about food is not really the problem. That's not why you weigh more than you would like to. Thinking about food cannot make you gain weight. Eating too much food is the only thing that can do that.

You may have the problem of a vicious cycle in your thinking. What happens there is, you really don't want to think about something, in your case food. You start thinking about food. Then you start thinking about how bad it is to be thinking about food, how normal people don't do this, does this mean you can never lose weight or be normal because you're thinking about food, and so on and so forth.

One thing you might try doing is a technique from mindfulness therapy for anxiety disorders. I'm not saying you have an anxiety disorder, just that a technique that is used for people with them might help. When you notice yourself thinking about food, just mentally step back from it. Say to yourself, "I'm thinking about food again." Just kind of watch the thought being there in your head. Don't try to get rid of it. It will go away on its own eventually, as all thoughts do. Just knowing that about the anxious thoughts that I get was really helpful. Maybe tell yourself, "I'm doing it again". (If you've ever seen Shakespeare's Skum, who perform at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, I say this to myself in the voice that Gertrude in Leave It To Hamlet uses when she says, "Claaaaaudius! He's doing it again!" Saying this to yourself in a silly voice sometimes helps.)

Another technique would be to redirect your thoughts about food to doing something useful. There are studies showing that people who plan meals in advance tend to eat healthier than people who don't. When you start thinking about food, use that to plan some meals for the coming week.

Another thing to do would be to not spend time around food when you don't need to. Don't watch TV in the kitchen. Don't hang out at the dining room table. Spend time in the kitchen only when you are preparing meals, eating meals, or cleaning up after meals. Don't keep snacks around when you're doing something else (like watching TV or going online). Seeing food makes you want to eat- this is the whole idea behind the multibillion-dollar food advertising industry. Don't have a plate of desserts on the table after everyone has finished eating. Clear them off the table when everybody else is finished having theirs. Maybe hang out after the meal somewhere other than the table. I prefer to go into the living room- there is no food there, and the chairs are more comfortable than dining room chairs.

[Jennifer24747]

I'm sorry to hear that you're having a hard time with your mom. It's a situation that I can relate to, and it definitely led me to become similarly obsessed with food into my early adult years.

When I was in high school, my mom didn't really tell me what to eat or what not to eat, the way it seems like your mom does. Instead, she kept close tabs on whether or not she deemed me "too heavy." I was the heaviest I'd ever been when I was a sophomore in high school, and that was when she started to tell me outright that I was fat. She started to tell me things like how I needed to stop being so lazy and to stop "shoving junk in my face."

It was hurtful, and it definitely made me extremely wary of what I was eating. It also made me look at my body in ways I hadn't before, and made me start juding myself in ways that hadn't crossed my mind. Also in ways that haven't left me yet, and I'm almost 26 now.

The next year, I ended up joining my school's color guard and lost a lot of weight, but I can't remember ever really changing my eating habits. I do remember becoming extremely self-concious about my looks and I got into nutrition and calories and weight loss, and THAT's what led to my obsession with food. Now my mom tells me that if I lose more weight I'll "look anorexic," even though I think I'm at a healthy weight - 5'9", 155lbs.

My point is this: block her out. Do what's healthy for you. Eat when you are hungry. Don't stuff yourself full of sweets or what she deems "bad" food because you feel like you won't get an opportunity for it. The truth is, there will be many, many opportunities outside of her house. She is not inside your body; only you truly know what you need and what you like, and she can't control the foods you enjoy. When you do get the opportunity to make your own food decisions, savor them. Enjoy them. It's a treat.

While you're living in her house, though, you do have to respect her rules, which sucks, especially because it seems like she's not respecting you or your emotions. But remind her, gently, that a small indulgence won't hurt you. Tell her you've taken her advice--which may or may not be the truth--but you'd still like to treat yourself every now and then. Maybe even tell her that she's making it hard for you to have a healthy relationship with food, and that she's going to have to trust you to make healthy choices. She's clearly armed you with the information, but the more she tries to pound it into you, the more you don't want to listen.

And there's no shame in fantasizing about food. Heck, I do it all the time because I love to cook and come up with new, healthy recipes...and desserts. I agree so much with all of the advice everyone's laid out in this post, like keeping it contained, acknowledging your thoughts, and letting them go away. But dealing with a stressed-out, overbearing parent is another thing entirely. You can't ignore it. But you can help her to realize the mature adult you've become--or are becoming--sorry, not sure of your age--and it might make her worry less.

[oolala53]

I think I know what you're talking about. You're not thinking about food in a casual way but feeling more driven about it.

Not to get too psychoanalytical about it but I have found that just as we often eat to avoid other things, we can think about food to avoid thinking about other topics. But it's just a habit, like eating. Be gentle with yourself and just see it's a strong habit that will take several weeks or even months to decrease. Sometimes "normal" people forget about food for hours and sometimes it floats in and out of their minds, too. Try not to see it as a sign that something is wrong but at the same time, acknowledge the thoughts and then gently direct your attention to another topic, preferably to a pleasurable or productive task at hand. Humans think tens of thousands of thoughts a day and most of them are actually relatively repetitive and often irrelevant to what they're doing at the moment. You can always come back to the details of your task in the present moment. And it's been shown to be physiologically good for you.

Just as a person might make a list of alternate activities from eating, you can actually have a few topics you might want to divert to, or songs or even a pretty poem, as alternate fillers.

[Nicest of the Damned]

Don't be too hard on yourself. You have no way of actually knowing how often most people think about food. You can't put a meter in someone else's head that will tell you how many hours out of the next 24 they spend thinking about food. You can know how often people think they think about food, how often people say they think about food, how often people talk about food, or how often they eat, but none of those are the same thing as how much they think about food.

Do you have something else you can distract yourself with when you start thinking about food? Another interest or hobby, one that doesn't involve food, might be helpful here.

Have you told your mom that discussing food with her bothers you? Have you told her that you find yourself obsessing over food and binge eating since she started restricting what you eat? You should, if that's something you would feel at all comfortable doing.

If you're an adult, is moving out an option? (I assume from your post that you live with your mom) It might cost more money to live somewhere else, and mean you wouldn't live in as nice a house, but there may be a cost to your mental and physical health attached to staying. The costs of mental and physical health problems are not cheap, as anyone who follows the health care debate in the US at all knows.

[Blithe Morning]

Practice saying "Mom, thanks for your concern but I am old enough to make my own decisions about what I eat." Repeat as necessary.

If she keeps on, then give her the book and tell her that from now on you are going to refer all food related conversation to the book. Assure her you know the difference between healthy and non-healthy food. Practice what I call the shut down gaze where you don't engage the other person in conversation but just look at them with a glazed over look.

[M's sick of dieting]

I'm so sorry your going threw this, I do the same thing. You have what I call "Diet Head", I feel like it's like being anorexic without the starving. It's food and skinny obsession. I can't tell you how many Diet books I own, I'd be embarrassed to tell you. I've started so many diets gone grocery shopping so many times cause "this time it's gonna work!!". Sometimes I'd only make it till noon, and decide "I can't do this". And I eat till Sunday, cause that's when the next one starts.

I honest to goodness believe that I'm 30lbs. Overweight from dieting. I start one get sick of it, and eat and eat. It's a visious cycle that I still struggle with. The staying up till midnight reading about ways to loose weight, I've been there, still do it sometimes.

I feel like people like us who struggle with dieting demons need to learn to let it go. That's why I keep doing No S, cause it helps quiet my obsession and hopefully let it go.

My Mother's best friend was trying to loose the weight she gained during her pregnancy. She did not snack, ever, still doesn't. However she doesn't "diet" either. She would always say "Grazing is a habit, just like nail bitting, if you give it up for a few weeks you won't need it." She's in her mid-sixties and a size 4 too by the way:) My advice to you is try, to stop dieting ( dieting only ever made me fatter!!) but stop snacking. It'll get easier and you'll feel more content and in control of the whole situation. I hope this helped you.

[Sinnie]

Everything that M's Sick of Dieting said. That is me exactly. The advice on snacking is (above sweets and seconds in my opinion) is so precise.