Category: Books

Hooked

Here in France, we are lucky enough to be able to watch Christiane Amanpour on CNN. The other night, there was an interview with the journalist Michael Moss. He has written a book entitled Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions. The book was launched March 2nd and already is a best seller.

From Amazon: “Moss uses the latest research on addiction to uncover what the scientific and medical communities—as well as food manufacturers—already know: that food, in some cases, is even more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Our bodies are hardwired for sweets, so food giants have developed fifty-six types of sugar to add to their products, creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying; we’ve evolved to prefer fast, convenient meals, hence our modern-day preference for ready-to-eat foods. Moss goes on to show how the processed food industry—including major companies like Nestlé, Mars, and Kellogg’s—has tried not only to evade this troubling discovery about the addictiveness of food but to actually exploit it. For instance, in response to recent dieting trends, food manufacturers have simply turned junk food into junk diets, filling grocery stores with “diet” foods that are hardly distinguishable from the products that got us into trouble in the first place. As obesity rates continue to climb, manufacturers are now claiming to add ingredients that can effortlessly cure our compulsive eating habits.” 

Any food addict who is in recovery from their addiction, will tell you, “I knew something was up. Food addiction is real. But this just validates everything we already knew. Now maybe big bucks will fight for us the way the tobacco industry was brought down.”

I’m very grateful that this journalist (he also wrote a book called Salt, Sugar, Fat, his first foray into the Giant Food business. The book won the Pulitzer Prize). I have not yet read Hooked but from the two interviews I’ve heard, it seems he is far more believable than those of us dying from food addiction.

I’m going to let others who have read the book speak. I want to get the word out that this book exists and not wait until I have finished reading it. So forgive me for quoting other voices.

From the New York Times: “And, wow, are the hard-wired instincts to eat these foods powerful — more so than those that push us toward addictive drugs like heroin and nicotine. Even seeing the pictures of certain foods can cause us to salivate. In unforgettable language, Moss describes how less than a second after you bite into a luscious chocolate or a glazed doughnut, flavor sensations derived from a combination of sugar and fat, as well as other smells and tastes, hit your brain, interact with memories and release a flood of neurotransmitters that stimulate and perpetuate fundamental cravings.

To trick us to eat more they also lure us in with low prices, dazzling packaging, convenience and trumped-up variety. One example among many: Differently colored M&M’s taste the same but dupe our brains to consume more than if they were all just brown. Perhaps most cunningly, Big Food has also acquired many major brands of processed diet foods like Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine. One has to admit it’s clever to make money helping us get fat and then profit from our efforts (usually futile) to lose weight.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/books/review/hooked-michael-moss.html

A portrait of Michael Moss, a New York Times investigative reporter who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for explanatory reporting and is the author of the best seller, ‘Salt Sugar Fat’, New York, August 8, 2013. Moss has been a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, New York Newsday and the Wall Street Journal.

From NPR: “Addiction is a spectrum, Moss says. Not every person with substance abuse disorder experiences tolerance — which is the need for more and more of the substance to feel its effects — or intense withdrawal symptoms. Some people, scientists have learned, are affected only mildly. The early part of the book is helpful for reframing addiction in this way but, even so, does it make sense to talk about addiction to processed foods as one would about addition to tobacco or heroin?

Moss says yes.

Repetitive behavior that’s difficult to quit and that causes harm — the most accurate definition of addiction — accurately describes what many of us experience when it comes to highly processed foods. In the U.S., the turn towards overeating these foods occurred in the early 1980s, and the subsequent rise in conditions like hypertension, heart disease, cancer and diabetes is linked to it.” https://www.npr.org/2021/03/03/972747664/there-are-so-many-flavors-of-potato-chips-hooked-looks-at-why

From the San Francisco Chronicle: “To define the term “addiction,” Moss quotes a now-retired Philip Morris CEO who called it “a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit.” Drawing parallels between Big Food and Big Tobacco, Moss relates how both industries manipulate our cravings for profit.

“Hooked” leads us into laboratories and courtrooms, kitchens and legislatures, and threads the complex and contentious arguments at the intersection of personal responsibility and corporate liability. The story opens with a Brooklyn teenager who, because of a daily diet of Big Macs, sodas, shakes and fries, is morbidly obese. She’s one of the first plaintiffs in what would become a series of lawsuits holding fast-food companies responsible for personal injury through the design of their products.

If knowledge is power, then” Hooked”  provides the facts we need to free ourselves from remaining unwitting conspirators in Big Food’s ruse. For too long, we’ve allowed this industry to exploit all the ways we’re drawn to their health-damaging products.

“Wrestling free of an addiction requires us to give up something that came to define our lives,” Moss writes. This is hard, he admits. “Enticement is the calculated business of those who make and sell processed food. They have nearly endless resources in knowing our vulnerabilities.” https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/review-in-hooked-how-big-tobacco-and-big-food-are-alike

Do you need more information to draw your own conclusion? Here from Publishers Weekly: “Food is a drug, and its manufacturers are tempting consumers into addiction, according to this contentious exposé by Pulitzer-winning journalist Moss (Salt Sugar Fat).” https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8129-9729-3

Most of you who suffer from the same disease that I do probably don’t need to read the book to know that what Moss has written about is true. We have lived it. So just know that the proof is starting to roll out to the world at large. There is sugar in everything, and it is there on purpose. Even your Weight Watchers bar that has x amount of points has the addictive sugar in it. If science is your thing, you will love this book. It is easy to read.

The main idea in the book is: Kick the sugar…..forever. Don’t take a vacation from abstaining from it. Don’t think of it as cheating–who are you cheating? I, personally, am of the belief that if I were to eat sugar today, I don’t know if I could kick it again. I believe it is that addictive and now I know that the ante has been upped 1000%.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly.” The Funhouse Mirror

When Alice ate cake and tripled her size, it didn’t seem like much fun to me. And I should know. If I were to eat cake, I’d become obsessed by a compulsion so powerful, it is terrifying. Not only would I double or triple my size, but Dr. Hyde would come out of hiding and drag me straight to hell on earth. So, I ask you, what is fun about a funhouse mirror? Is it truly possible for someone older than five years of age to look at their body totally distorted and have a genuine laugh without judgement? Or is the fun when you get out of there and realize with total relief that you are exactly the same size as when you went it. The Gospel according to Vogue has most of us in it’s grip. For over sixty years, I’ve tried to drink the Kool-Aid, swallow the message that true beauty is on the inside and is so much more important than how I look on the outside.  The thing is that may be true but one’s insides are not first impressions. 

In the house I’m staying at in Brittany, there is a large wall-sized mirror in almost every room.  I’m sure the objective is to make the place lighter and brighter but….people like me have to walk by them. Talk about a funhouse mirror. Depending on what I am wearing, I look thin or fat or frumpy or gorgeous. Is it the mirror or is it my eyes?  And what, I ask, is fun about this?

I know that Lewis Carroll didn’t have anything against people like me who struggle with body dysmorphia, and that his story of growing and shrinking and falling down rabbit holes had more to do with finding one’s way in the world of adults than making children like me frightened of black magic that can change our bodies so quickly.  But Lewis Carroll was a man, and he wrote in the 1860s. Who knew that food addiction was a disease back then? Did it actually exist?  We know alcoholism raged through the world, but I don’t think there were many mirrors. Women got married young, had children young and lost their looks, their bodies and it was deemed normal.

Of course, I’m wrong!  I want what I think is true to actually be the truth.  Mirrors, as we know them today, were invented in 1835 by Justus von Liebig, a German chemist. His invention consisted of depositing a thin layer of metallic silver onto glass through the chemical reduction of silver nitrate.  “Author Ian Mortimer argues that, before this invention, the concept of individual identity didn’t exist: “The development of glass mirrors marks a crucial shift, for they allowed people to see themselves properly for the first time, with all their unique expressions and characteristics,” writes Mortimer in an excerpt from his new book Millennium: From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization Has Changed Over a Thousand Years.” [1] Perhaps for the normal person (is there such a person?), it was possible to see oneself properly. 

The handheld mirror that was encased in a beautiful setting was popular well into the 20th century. One couldn’t see one’s whole body – just the neck and above. That was always my favorite pose.  For most of my life, I didn’t exist below my neck as far as my eyes were concerned.  I concentrated on what I considered my ugly nose, my too short forehead that made it impossible to wear bangs like my friends could. I even would practice pressing my lips together, so they were less full, looking more like my mother’s thin lips. Who knew that full lips would be the fashion for so much of my adult life, being much sexier? Not me. I was habituated to looking at what was wrong with me – the distortion of the Funhouse mirror.

There is so much to heal from when one is a recovering food addict.  It isn’t just losing weight. In fact, many food addicts don’t have much weight to lose.  For Anorexics and Bulimics, the dysmorphia is far more serious. It is a constant. Every mirror becomes a funhouse mirror. Every projection (seeing oneself through someone else’s eyes) is a distortion of what is true. When a food addict asks how they look, it is easy to think that they might be angling for a compliment. Perhaps they are but the truth is, most of us have no idea how we look.  We cringe if you say something unflattering because what you say might be our worst fear.  We smile if you say something flattering.  We really don’t believe you but are so grateful you aren’t telling the truth

[1] Charlie Sorrel; Fast Company, 11-15-16

Is sugar addiction less “real” than alcohol addiction?

I recently received an e-mail from an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) related app entitled Why are Sugar Addiction and Alcohol Addiction similar. I was really pleased as alcoholics, in general, are quite resistant to accepting the idea that sugar addiction is real. For one thing, it’s recommended in many places in the AA literature that newly sober alcoholics eat sugar to calm down their alcohol cravings. Many meetings have sugary treats next to the coffee for just that reason.

The e-mail went through some of the brain chemistry that is similar in both addictions. But then said “sugar does not alter the brain exactly like alcohol and drugs,” but that it can cause chaos. By the end of the article, it implied that yes, one does need sugar to get through the alcohol cravings but that it is important not to become dependant on sugar. “AA recognizes that having some candy or an energy drink is a better option than relapsing into one’s addiction.” So, in the end, even though the title gave me hope, it was just another article saying sugar is not nearly the killer alcohol is and that one should control it and not become dependant.

I am a recovering alcoholic. I’m a recovering food addict. I would never say that one is more ‘real’ than the other. But it is much harder to get totally abstinent from sugar intake (I’m including carbs and anything that turns to sugar quickly in the body), fructose and dextrose intake than it is to get sober from alcohol. As I sit in AA meetings, I look around me and the percentage of overweight and obese people in meetings is roughly the same as in the US in general. In other words, it’s high. Are alcoholics so resistant to admitting that food addiction is real because they don’t really want to look at themselves and tackle another addiction? I don’t know the answer, I only have opinions.

I do know that I am often asked the question “What do you do when you want to celebrate your birthday or get married or it’s Valentine’s Day?” I think the underlying question is, ‘Is it possible to have fun and celebrate without food, especially sugar?’ I find that question very, very interesting. In my life, eating a birthday cake was never fun. The sight of it would trigger my compulsion and, of course, I would eat a piece and then, when I thought no one was looking, I’d eat the whole thing. I never found that fun. By my thirties, the sight of that kind of sugar caused me to stop breathing and want to disappear. Until I discovered the twelve-step programs, I thought I was the only person in the world who was terrified of a piece of cake yet couldn’t not eat it. I thought I was possessed. I remember seeing a “Star Trek” movie when I was in my thirties. The bad guys put some kind of horrible insect or animal into a good guys ear. Once inside, it killed the person by eating all his insides. To me that was real. I was sure that something evil had entered my being, possessed me and I couldn’t stop bingeing, couldn’t say No to anything that had sugar, grains or refined carbohydrates in it.

That was me for years and years and years. As a friend of mine told me after she got abstinent from sugar, grains and carbos, “I was just lying on the couch waiting to die.” I wrote Saving Save A Memoir of Food Addiction because it has been many, many years since I was held hostage by my food addiction. I strongly feel that if I can do it, anyone can do it. I found a twelve-step program called GreySheeters Anonymous that works for me because it is so much like Alcoholics Anonymous. It is a No Matter What program. We don’t eat those poisons no matter what. It isn’t the answer for everyone but for people like me who thrive with structure, need boundaries because I broke every one that was ever imposed on me. My hope is that my story will resonate with others. One woman who read my book and then went to a meeting with me, said “I didn’t know people talked out loud about things like this. I thought I was the only one.” There is hope for people like me. There is a solution. Don’t ever give up.

Food Junkies Podcast

Readers of this blog know that I’m a big supporter of the work of Dr. Vera Tarman, author of the book Food Junkies: Recovery from Food Addiction. She runs a Food Addictions Institute called Addictions Unplugged. Her book is on my resources list on this site. I was recently invited to speak on a podcast that she and two other women, Clarissa Kennedy and Molly Painschab, started at the end of 2020. The Podcast is called Food Junkies and can be found wherever you listen to your podcasts. I have been listening to the podcast – there are now 6 of them – and wanted to tell all of you about this informative and wide-ranging broadcast about many different ways to look at and approach food addiction. Many of us have gotten our information by doing years of research of bingeing, vomiting and a multitude of other ways of abusing food. A number of the episodes are focused on how the science of food addiction is catching up with our human experience.

Dr Tarman, Clarissa and Molly, also moderate a FaceBook page called Sugar Free for Life Support Group: I’m Sweet Enough. Is that a great name? I’m Sweet Enough!! Something all of us food addicts have to face in order to truly recover: there is enough, I am enough, you are enough.

Since I wrote my book Saving Sara A Memoir of Food Addiction, I’ve been lucky enough to learn how much is going on in the field of food addiction. They will tell you it is not nearly enough. And they are right. Food Addiction needs to get into the Mental Health bible, the DSM-V, and these three women are on the leading edge of making that happen. To me, however, who retired as a psychotherapist 12 years ago, it’s astounding how much is going on.

Some of you won’t be interested in the science that is backing up what we already know: Food addiction is real; it’s a killer disease, and it is akin to living in hell. But many of you will be interested and the podcast is a great place to start. Besides myself, who has no scientific background, you will hear researchers, nutritionists, Yoga teachers, and addictions specialists. What is really impressive is the patience and open-mindedness of Dr. Tarman who does the majority of the interviewing. I could feel myself get huffy when someone was explaining something that truly felt like old news to me. Give the podcast a listen. Let them know what you think. This is a field that needs to know there is a lot of support and encouragement to know as much as possible.

I do not know the date my episode will be available but stay tuned……

Stay safe and stay healthy. We are still in a pandemic that is very bad. Use this quiet time to reflect on your physical and mental health. You may never get this kind of opportunity again.

Sara

Follow Vera:

Website: https://www.addictionsunplugged.com IG: dr_vera_tarman FB: Sugar-Free for Life Support Group: I’m Sweet Enough Twitter: @addunplug Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drveratarman/

Follow Clarissa: Website: https://foodaddictionhelp.ca Email: crissy_kennedy@hotmail.com IG: @reinventyourblisspoint

Follow Molly: Website: unsugaredyou.com Email: molly@mpainschab.com IG: @mollypainschab

“The content on our show does not supplement or supersede the direction of your healthcare provider. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified mental health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition, substance use disorder or mental health concern.” Molly and Clarissa

Join me in a discussion of Food Addiction with Judy Collins, singer and author of Cravings

A virtual “Evening with an Author” hosted by the American Library in Paris featuring a conversation between Judy Collins and Sara Somers about food addiction and recovery to celebrate the release of Sara’s new book “Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction.” Filmed via Zoom with a live audience on 18/11/2020.

For nearly fifty years, Sara Somers suffered from untreated food addiction. In “Saving Sara,” she offers readers an inside view of a food addict’s mind, showcasing her experiences with obsessive cravings, compulsivity, and powerlessness regarding food, with the hopes of educating her readers and promoting life-saving conversations between loved ones and those suffering with addiction. “Saving Sara” chronicles her addiction from childhood to adulthood, beginning with abnormal eating as a nine-year-old. A raw account of Somers’ decades-long journey, “Saving Sara” underscores the challenges faced by food addicts of any age – and the hope that exists for them all.

available anywhere books are sold.

Since childhood, legendary folk singer Judy Collins has had a tumultuous relationship with food. Her issues with overeating nearly claimed her career and her life. For decades she thought she simply lacked self-discipline. She tried nearly every diet plan that exists, often turning to alcohol to dull the pain of yet another failed attempt to control her seemingly insatiable cravings. Today, Judy knows she suffers from an addiction to sugar, grains, flour, and wheat. She adheres to a strict diet of unprocessed foods, consumed in carefully measured portions. This solution has allowed her to maintain a healthy weight, to enjoy the glow of good health, and to attain peace of mind. Alternating between chapters on her life and those on the many diet gurus she has encountered along the way, “Cravings: How I Conquered Food” is the culmination of Judy’s desire to share what she’s learned—so that no one else has to struggle in the same way she did.

Thank you and look forward to any of your comments,

Sara

“Now that I don’t binge, I have more time to read.”

Email from a reader:

Food addiction is REAL. Sweet foods are potentially more addictive than heroin or cocaine. It’s going to take more than 50 years to reverse the tide of the global obesity pandemic. How do I know this? Well – years of personal experience as a food addict and sugar junkie apart, over the last few months I have been reading Brownell and Gold’s Book “Food and Addiction”. I sit down and read it for fifteen minutes each day over my delicious abstinent (for me, being abstinent is not eating sugar, grains or starchy foods, eating only three meals a day and I do this every day without exception) breakfast. The book is subtitled “A comprehensive handbook” but it is so much more than that. This book is an extensive academic research compendium laid out as a series of academic papers (two columns per page, Vancouver-style referencing) containing 66 articles in seven parts. 

This may sound off-putting to the casual reader but in reality, this is one of the most compelling and fascinating books I have read for a long time. And it’s one of the few books that I have ever read that – when I had finished reading it – made me want to turn back to page 1 and re-read the whole book again!

The sections take the reader on a journey – starting with the neuro-anatomy, neuro-biology and psychology of addiction, through to clinical approaches to and implications of addiction and obesity via research on food and addiction and ending up with public health approaches and legal and policy implications for the global obesity pandemic.

This book’s great strength is its impartiality. There are so many other books out there about the gut, diet, just about any food group….…. as a food addict  struggling to control my compulsive behaviour around food I have read many of them, and I always feel slightly uneasy that the author is only really representing the research that supports their hypothesis and the inevitable “eating plan that is going to change your life” at the end.

In this book, if there is no research then that is not ignored or padded out with some obscure paper reporting small numbers.  It is just stated.  Where a food addiction research vacuum exists, there is discussion as to how the available research might apply to food addiction and what further research needs to be done.

So – what did I learn in reading this book? Several key themes emerged:

1–There is an awful lot of very elegant research that has been carried out on sugar, addictive behaviour, reward neuro-circuitry, how these interact and what influences them. OK – so much of the research for that was carried out on mice but – bearing in mind we share 60% of our DNA with a banana – mouse behaviour and brain structure ain’t that far away from humans – especially around behaviour as fundamental as reward, addiction and food intake regulation. Where comparisons are possible, the human research is clearly analogous to what they are finding in rats and mice. 

2–The idea that a lot of our reward circuitry is hard wired not only from a young age but also during fetal life made a great deal of sense to me. Hell – if  whale blubber or mammoth is/was the only item on the menu, and that’s all your Mom ate when you were in her womb – then you had better be born with a preference for the major food source in your community. It’s simple survival.

3–The concept of control of weight and body shape through delicate and intricate internal balancing (homeostatic) mechanisms which have evolved over millennia versus loss of control of weight and body shape through hedonistic (pleasure) eating – particularly highly refined carbohydrates and sugar was a new concept for me. Since food is needed for survival, it is likely to have complex and interconnected mechanisms for making sure that we are motivated to find food, remember those sources and to protect them. This all takes place in the parts of our brain associated with reward, emotion, and memory, to say nothing of the feedback via the enormous communication highway that exists between our brain, our gut and our gut bacteria. 

4–We are hard wired to like sweet flavours. Sweet foods are more likely to be energy dense – which is clearly advantageous when life was hard and food was seasonal and scarce – but does not serve us well in our current food environment. Imagine – millennia of evolving higher functions around eating for survival laid waste by just reaching out and putting a single tub of Ben and Jerry’s in my shopping basket!!

5–The food/sugar lobby is more powerful than the tobacco lobby and we have to eat. There is evidence that the food/sugar corporations are using the same tactics that the tobacco lobbies used back in the day so I expect that it will take as long, if not longer, if ever, for per capita obesity levels to show a similar fall to tobacco consumption (Figure 1). 

Figure 1:  Adult per capita cigarette consumption and major smoking and health events – US, 1900 – 2017. Sources: Adapted from Warner 1985 with permission from Massachusetts Medical Society, © 1985; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1989; Creek et al. 1994; U.S. Department of Agriculture 2000; U.S. Census Bureau 2017; U.S. Department of the Treasury 2017.  

So – why did I read this book? As a recovered alcoholic and food addict I wanted to explore more about the dis-ease that I suffer from. Coming from a scientific/academic sort of mindset and being a bit of a nerd, this book appealed to me on many different levels. But even for those that don’t have that  background, this is a great book for just dipping into when the interest takes you.

It helped me to understand my part in my story and also to understand more clearly why this dis-ease wasn’t just going to go away after a few months of eating abstinently. It also helps me to accept myself as a person whose brain just happens to be wired in a different way – a way that makes me prone to addiction and addictive behaviour……. but also a way that qualifies me for a life in addiction recovery and all the benefits and rewards that that brings. 

Susanna R

Oxford University Press, 2012

Election Sanity vs Binge Eating

As part of my self-care program to keep my food addiction at bay, I meditate. And, as everyone who participates in any kind of social media knows, once I started asking questions or downloading any thing to do with meditation, I began to receive many invites in my e-mail. One of the best that I have discovered is 10% Happier–an app that had its beginnings with the book of the same name by Dan Harris of ABC Television. This no-nonsence, down to earth approach and aid to meditation is a wonderful way for anyone to get started on meditation as a daily practice.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail from 10% Happier inviting me to partake in the Election Sanity Challenge. Of course my mind went on Tilt. No such thing as sanity and election in the same sentence. Elections in the USA have grown more and more insane as the years go by. But, in theory I thought, great idea, sign me up. Each Monday, a talk arrived in my mailbox that addressed one of the four nobel truths of Buddhism: Loving Kindness/Friendliness; Compassion/Giving a crap; Sympathetic Joy/the opposite of schadenfreude; Equanimity/Keeping cool. The second label is Dan Harris’ way of making these truths accessible to all of us. It works.

Why am I telling you all this? This week, I realized that as the election is 7 days away and I have no idea what will happen, this is the kind of worry or anxiety that I would eat over. The more I got involved with something that I feel great passion for, the higher my anxiety got as I realized that I had no control over the outcome. That kind of anxiety is terribly uncomfortable and I would always eat/binge when I was at any level of discomfort. Preferably–my drug of choice ‘ice cream’, which I thought would cool me down. Of course, the quantities that I consumed would knock me out, make me numb, and while numb I might sign up for yet another round of activity with my political party of choice. When the food/drug wore off, there I was: neck-deep in craziness, powerlessness and not knowing. Three quarters of the way towards another binge.

Radical Self-care is the assertion that you have the responsibility to take care of yourself first before attempting to take care of others. It’s necessary to fill your cup first, then to give to others from the overflow. This is what gives you the capacity to heal and to move forward into your next chapter of life.

This is a week of ultimate need for radical self-care. Dan Harris anticipated this and, for the last month, has been preparing us and our active minds to think in terms of kindness–to ourselves and others. He offers a daily mediation challenge through next Tuesday. You can sign up on the app 10% Happier. I find that I need to consciously acknowledge where I can go with this sense of wanting to control the outcome of the election. The first thing is to accept that I cannot control it. This morning, I asked myself if I was pleased and satisfied with all the actions I had taken to participate in this election. As a voter from abroad, I had the extra challenge of making sure I got my ballot in time to get it returned in time. I did. Check. Have I participated in physical actions to get out the vote? Yes, Check. Since my time zone is not conducive to making phone calls all day to make sure people voted, I donated money. More than I ever have in any previous election. Check. But I don’t want my mailbox filled with requests, solicitations, some even shaming me for not doing enough. So this morning, I unsubscribed to every single one of them. I didn’t feel guilty. I felt strong that I wanted to survive this election time abstinent from compulsive eating, abstinent from crazy, insane, powerless thinking, abstinent from the adrenaline rushes I used to get from the highs of sugar misinterpreting that energy as creative energy.

No matter what happens next week, I still have to live with me. I still have to wake up each morning and feed my cat, do my work, write my blog, talk to friends. Do I really want to wake up having thrown away years and years of abstaining from the substances that will kill me? Go back to living in hell praying to the God that I don’t understand to help me stop binging? Having to face all of you and say “I didn’t make it through this election.” NO I DON’T. No election, no political party, no person (other than me) is worth throwing away the life I live today; a life of mostly sanity, a life I have chosen that I love.

What are you going to do this week to take care of yourself? If you have a horse in this race, how can you detach from the outcome today and one moment at a time, abstain from the substances and the negativity that once ruled you and your life. You are worth it. Vote for yourself, for your happiness, for freedom from the food from this moment forward. Then listen to 10% Happier!! It just might give you some new and well needed tools.

Here’s to freedom from Food Addiction, one day at a time.

Sara

When you have finished your meditation, take a look at my memoir–how I went from fat and bingeing on a daily basis to recovery from my food addiction. If you identify, there is hope, I promise. Available at your favourite bookstore, bookshop.com and of course, Amazon.

In the April issue of Recovery Today magazine, p.46 Confessions of a down and dirty, rock bottom food addict. Their title not mine. But it says what it needs to say.

I got sober on June 1, 1998. I was an alcoholic, but alcohol wasn’t my bottom line addiction. Food was. I was a down and dirty, rock bottom food addict who couldn’t ingest sugar and grains in either liquid or hard form. I first went to AA in an effort to learn what the 12-step programs were all about, after coming from Overeaters Anonymous where I had been dazed and confused.

I was so ashamed of my food addiction that I never spoke of it to my sponsor or friends. In private,
I tried to make AA solve my food issues. Such an irony: I knew that AA was a WE program, that connectedness was the antithesis to addiction. I knew that telling like-minded people how I’d used and abused my drugs of choice brought it all out in the open, gave me another 24 hours to keep the disease at bay. But my shame of eating, of my body, was so huge that I found it impossible to share with others. In my memoir, Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction, I once and for all detail how my food addiction progressed and became more unmanageable over the years. I found OA in 1979 but was too arrogant to let go and try it someone else’s way. Then I was introduced to  GreySheeters Anonymous in 1983. I knew immediately it was the solution I had been looking for. But being a hard core addict, hard- wired to do self-destructive things, I felt sure that I could fix myself on my own.

It took me another twenty-six years to crawl back to a GSA meeting, broken and beaten up.
I was seven years sober at that time. I had been sitting in AA meetings wondering why I wasn’t happy, joyous and free. I had done the steps a number of times. But I always kept my dirty secret to myself: I couldn’t stop binge eating. Now, fifteen years later, I have been abstaining from sugar, grains and refined carbs. It helped to accept that I could only deal with food addiction with other food addicts. No matter how much my AA friends loved me, since they didn’t eat like I did, I felt they couldn’t understand. On top of community, what GreySheeters Anonymous gave to me was structure. If I did what my sponsor said, I had a good chance of arresting the bingeing. I weighed my food at every meal and ate the same amounts as the day before. GSA knew I had a life and death disease and that was what the GSA boundaries treated. Since food addiction isn’t discussed as often in our society, I hope Saving Sara will open the door for much needed conversations to arise.

See you next week,

Sara

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Am I a food addict if I can’t stop eating?

In new memoir, Sara Somers reflects on her hard-won battle with food addiction

Steven Winn July 8, 2020Updated: July 8, 2020, 8:24 pm

Friday was her favorite day when Sara Somers worked at the American Red Cross in Alameda. It had nothing to do with the weekend coming up and everything to do with sugar and grains.

When the weekly donation from Mother’s Cookies arrived, Somers would help herself to a plateful. And then another. And another after that. Finally, as she writes in “Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction,” she’d steal the cookies that were left and smuggle them home for more bingeing.

Today, 43 years later and 11 years “abstinent” from the addiction that dominated her life for decades, Somers regards herself as a “walking miracle.”

“The percentage of the food addicted who can stay abstinent over the years is pretty small,” she told The Chronicle by phone. “It’s very hard.”

Scores of books, a dizzying array of therapies and diets that propose everything from the Christian faith to a potato-only regimen testify to the extent — and difficulty — of the problem and sufferers’ desperate search for help. Somers, 72, a longtime Bay Area resident who now lives in Paris, tried one approach after another: hypnosis, encounter groups, Weight Watchers, amphetamines, promises to friends, the Atkins diet, a macrobiotic diet, SlimFast and many more.

Even when she was introduced to a system that would ultimately work for her — GreySheeters Anonymous, which involves weighing everything one eats — it took Somers another 14 years before her recovery took hold.

“Saving Sara” was released in May, and Somers is scheduled to have an online conversation about the book with Jacquelyn Ekern, founder of the organization Eating Disorders Hope, on Saturday, July 11. In her frank and forthright memoir, Somers recounts not only the dashed hopes and doomed follies along the way, but also what she sees as the tormenting question behind them. “What,” she kept asking herself, “is wrong with me?”

Twenty pounds overweight at age 9, she was an angry, quick-tempered child and young adult. “I always wanted more,” she writes. And when she didn’t get something she craved, whether it was food or clothing, her longing was intense. It could be ice cream or a pair of Frye boots worn by a svelte stranger. “Deep in the recesses of my crazy mind, I thought if I had those boots, I would be attractive like her.”

The daughter of a caring but doctrinaire father and a “perfectionist” mother, Somers had attended 13 schools by the time she graduated from high school. (Her father’s hopscotch career as a college professor accounted for the moves.) After her own college years, Somers traveled in Europe, moved to Berkeley in 1971 and eventually found her way to graduate school at Cal State Hayward (now East Bay) and became a therapist.

“Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction” by Sara Somers.Photo: She Writes Press

Through it all, her relationships with men kept imploding. Related in unsparing detail, the stories of boyfriends coming and going from her life are touchstones of flailing need and self-sabotage. There’s Eddie, the earnest Dutchman who has another girlfriend. And Dmitri, a handsome Greek who “changed his mind.” For Coop, an unrequited college crush she met again in Berkeley, Somers fell hard. But even as she got control of her eating for a while and started grad school, Somers flirted with other men, took drugs and failed to recognize her partner’s depression. The unhappy end was inevitable.

“I was mostly interested in being loved,” Somers said. “That’s why I wanted a boyfriend. But that I was to be a good girlfriend — that never occurred to me.” What’s true about addicts of all sorts, she believes, is that “we are self-centered, self-pitying, and we blame other people for our problems.”

Somers assesses her own experience, both in the book and in conversation, with honesty, modesty and a sense of purpose. Her own story isn’t important, she said. Her goal in writing the book was to demonstrate by example that recovery is possible and to help others find the way.

While Somers found professional fulfillment as a therapist and enjoyed the work, she has some cautionary notes about therapy and addiction: “I think therapy can be a good companion to 12-step programs, but that can be limited.”

Treating addiction is about behavior modification, she explained, “and then the feelings will follow. Often in therapy, you have the insight first and then make the changes. That can end up discouraging addiction recovery. People think, ‘If the therapy didn’t work, what am I going to do now? It’s all about addressing the behavior first.’”

Somers, whose life never lacked for drama, lost her home in the 1991 Oakland hills firestorm. She rebuilt a house she loved but spent the next six-plus years addicted to alcohol. It led to a bottoming-out, including a stay at the Hazelden recovery center in Minnesota. A chance meeting with an old friend from Overeaters Anonymous reopened the door to GreySheeters Anonymous, the program Somers has followed ever since.

Somers retired from therapy in 2008. Struck with the idea of learning French, she started making periodic visits to Paris and moved there full time in 2014. While the French think it’s “sad” that she can’t enjoy alcohol or the bounty of a boulangerie, Somers says Parisian waiters don’t bat an eye when she pulls out a scale to weigh her portions.

Another discovery is public transportation, which Somers rarely used in the Bay Area. In Paris she rides the Metro all the time.

“I think I’m a more interesting person over here,” she said with a laugh. “Who knew a subway could be so much fun?”

“Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction”
By Sara Somers
She Writes Press
(235 pages; $16.95)

Sara Somers: Read the author’s blog at www.savingsara.home.blog.

GreySheeters Anonymous: Learn more about the weight-loss therapy program by visiting www.greysheet.org