Category: Uncategorized

Thank you Sanctuary Magazine

Sara Somers is the author of Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction (She Writes Press) 
and a staunch advocate for those suffering from food addiction.

Your addiction started at the age of 9. Do you remember if you realized something was wrong as a young child?

I can confidently say that my problems with food started much earlier than nine years of age. By the age of nine, I knew, without a doubt, that something was seriously wrong with me and my life. But my non-cognitive brain was unable to make use of any information. I was extremely lonely, I was getting angrier and angrier at what I thought of as the injustice in my life and thought it was all my parents’ fault. My father had given me a small, blue diary because I was so taken with the movie The Diary of Anne Frank. In it, I wrote “Sara, what is wrong with you?” over and over digging in the pen so deep, it went through ten pages. Inwardly, I thought I must be defective or adopted or….Outwardly, I raged at my parents for being so “mean” to me.

It was only as a middle-aged adult and the discovery of the 12 Step programs that I was able to see that I was probably born with the addictive gene. I can’t say for sure when I crossed the line with food, but I was young. I was stealing, lying, and cheating by the time I was 14 in order to buy items with sugar and grains in them. I had become very defiant in order to numb myself from the loneliness, fear, and rage. It was only in moments of “quiet desperation,” like falling asleep, that I would think it was me that was the problem, but I was powerless to do anything. The rest of the time, I was raging at the world, at my family, at authority. I played the blame game for a very long time.

Toward the end of the book you write, “I believed I would feel deprived. What actually happened was that I felt a huge sense of relief and freedom.” Could you explain a bit?

I started dieting at 15, and, by the time I came into the rooms of GreySheeters Anonymous (GSA), I had probably tried every diet available. Most diets will tell you to hang in there, once you reach your goal weight, you can add back foods that were taboo during the diet. So there was something to look forward to. The “doing without” was short-term. Over the many years of dieting, I gained and lost hundreds of pounds by reaching goal weight and then gaining back all the pounds with the foods I “got back.” But it never once occurred to me that the foods I got back might be the problem.

By the time, I got to GSA, I thought ice cream should be one of the four main food groups. The disease was so entrenched in me that the thought of never eating ice cream again caused me many years of anguish and resistance to what I knew was the solution. When I finally reached ’the last house on the block’ and there was nowhere to go but dying, insanity or GSA, the future and the unknown seemed less terrifying than the hell I was living in. Plus, the members of GSA kept telling me I only had to do it one day at a time. It took a while for me to see the big picture but this is what happened: the black and white boundaries of GSA gave me a structure. The acceptance that I couldn’t have sugar or grains in either liquid or hard form finally made sense to me. I realized my body was like a distillery. If I put those ingredients in me, it all turned into alcohol and set off the cravings. I am completely powerless over cravings. With the structure of the GSA program and my acknowledgment that I had a severe allergy to sugar and grains, I dropped the struggle with the food, my weight and the 24-hour obsession for the first time in my life. That gave me hours of time to have a life, to learn new things, develop new hobbies, travel, to find out who I am and what I love. For many, many years now, I have believed and felt that what I gave up to get this amazing life is minuscule. But the nature of the disease informs me I can’t live without those things that I am allergic to.

The relief I felt was enormous. I never had to work so hard again to deny who I am. Yes, it was work to acknowledge the behaviors that would lead me back into food obsession, but I would have walked on my hands for a mile if you told me that was building a defense against the first bite. The freedom was genuinely freedom. I was locked in a prison of my own making – my life was a 10 x 10 cell. Being in GSA gave me the key to get out of prison and have a life beyond my wildest dreams. I know we often hear addicts in recovery say that but it is true. If I had dreamed up a life for myself, I could never have allowed myself to come up with something this rich and this rewarding.

Even today, with the Coronavirus raging throughout the world and most of us in some kind of lockdown or sheltering-at-home, I feel completely free. The program taught me to plan ahead, to build structure in my life, to feel gratitude for what I’ve been given every day, and to reach out to someone still suffering. I don’t have time to be anxious or scared. The program taught me that this too shall pass, and I believe it. I don’t know what the world will look like when we all emerge from our various states of stay-at-home, but I am sure that if I keep forging forward on my path, I will not overeat, drink or start any other self-abusive behaviors. I’ve been given the gift of self-care.

To get a copy of Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction, go to http://www.bookshop.org. This site supports indépendant bookstores. You can place your order, find you local bookstore and either have it sent to you or pick up curbside. Thank you

IF you have any questions or thoughts for topics, please write in the comment section. See you next week,

Sara

“Withdrawal occurs once a person stops eating any addictive food. Though abstaining from foods is a contentious subject in the scientific literature, there is no question that it will cause a level of discomfort that often drives addicts back to eating…

Feelings of deprivation, obsessions about food, and anxiety arising from unresolved trauma that was being ‘medicated’ by the addictive foods may appear like spectres that linger, worsening before they get better…” ― Vera Tarman, Food Junkies: The Truth About Food Addiction

Dr Tarman’s book. Available at your Indie Bookstore or Amazon.com

All my life, I was told that I just needed to get a grip, pull my bootstraps up, that discipline was the word when it comes to dieting. That I couldn’t diet or, if I did lose weight on some diet, wasn’t able to keep it off, caused me no end of shame and humiliation. It was reflected in every area of my life. I was known as the girl who could never finish anything. I would be gun-ho about learning to play the guitar and after four lessons, I was ready to give up. In my head, I had determined how much I should know after four sessions. It didn’t happen that way.

After I became a therapist, I started doing research on different drugs. I went to recovery centres, asked a lot of questions and took careful notes. One thing that stood out everywhere was addiction professionals telling me that sugar was harder to kick than heroin. I’ve never tried heroin so I can’t speak from my own experience. These people were speaking from experience of their work, having done brain research and talking to multi-addicted addicts. ‘Why didn’t people tell me this?’ I wailed internally, ‘How could they let me think that getting off sugar was easy or should be easy?’ More research and more talking revealed that the majority of people just plain didn’t know. Neither of my parents had a weight problem. They had nothing to go on except what they were told. Food was food. Why would anything be suspect of a hidden drug with the power of heroin. Alcohol and drugs were different. People my parents age had seen Days of Wine And Roses and Man with the Golden Arm. They were the real mccoy. Take sugar and grains away from a practicing food addict and you will see a similar type of withdrawal as to drugs. It is so uncomfortable and scary that, unless a person has been forwarned to expect a time of de-toxing, the compulsive eater will ran as fast as she or he can to the refridgerator or McDonalds.

If you are jonesing for sugar and flour and going through withdrawal without much support, which of these is going to be calling your name? Do food addicts have a chance?

How do we get educated? How do we help our families, ourselves, our students, our patients? First take an honest look around you. Obesity is on the rise at a deadly speed. Then ask people what diet they tried and how well it worked. 9.9 people out of ten will tell you they lost weight only to gain it all back. The only honest places to really get information is one of the twelve-step programs that deals with food. They make no money, they are just one person trying to help another person. One person who has suffered from weight-related issues, shame, humiliation, unable to work or can’t get a job because of their weight telling another person “I get it. I’ve been there too.“

I’ve heard it said that “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety/abstinence but is connectedness”. It’s easy for the disease of food addiction to ruin a person’s life. The fatter they get, the more shame they feel, the more they isolate. Reaching out to others who have the same problem, can tell you what to expect as you detox from the foods we are allergic to, brings one back to community. Wise people have known for centuries that a group of people can often do what is impossible for the single person to do alone.

Think about it.

Sara

Saving Sara

I am a compulsive eater, a food addict. What does that mean? That means that, similar to an alcoholic who cannot stop drinking once booze is in their system, I start bingeing once certain foods are in my system. Bingeing is the same. Bingeing is doing something excessively, having no on/off button, completely unable to slow a speeding train down even though you know it will end in tears, self-hatred and recriminations. I’m that kind of compulsive eater. The foods that set off the bingeing are sugar, grains and refined carbohydrates.

I have compulsively eaten since I was a young girl. I didn’t know what was wrong. I knew I was different than other people and it seemed a very bad thing. I didn’t seem to fit in with girls my age. I would watch them and not understand how they knew to get along. I was often in trouble with my parents usually for disobedience, daydreaming, not trying hard to be a part of the family unit. I stole food out of the fridge all the time. I say stole because I was always sneaky about it. I knew even at that young age, it was wrong for me in my family to eat all the ice cream and not leave any for anyone else.

By the time I was in my fifties, I had spent my life trying to get thin, trying to understand what was wrong with me, trying to be happy, trying to be loved and, in my judgement, failing at everything. When I was fifty-eight, I gave up the fight. I discovered a solution for me, for my kind of compulsive eating. After fifteen years of recovery in that solution, I wrote a book: Saving Sara; A Memoir of Food Addiction. It will be published by She Writes Press May 12, 2020.

I wrote the book to tell other food addicts like me that there is hope. I had spent thousands of dollars on therapists. I had tried every diet under the sun except stapling my stomach. I had joined encounter groups and therapy groups, taken dangerous medications because they were advertised as reducing my appetite, bought over the counter medications that did nothing but they had pretty people in their ads. I had had shots in my butt and I don’t even want to know what was in that cocktail. I had tried hypnosis and religion. All in the hopes that I could get thin. Getting thin to me was the promise of happiness, that all my problems would go away, that people would like or love me. By the age of fifty-eight, I was running out of hope that there was a solution for someone like me. Thank goodness, I persisted.

This is a blog about food addiction. This is a blog written by a recovering food addict to give hope and inspiration to people like me. People who can’t stop bingeing. People who can’t stop self-destructing with food. It is also for their families who don’t understand what is happening to the people they love. Why they are so angry all the time? Why they feel criticised if someone makes the simplest suggestion. This blog will be a work in progress. There are a lot of blogs out there dealing with the same issues. Most are sincere and helpful. I hope that by adding my blog, people will benefit from the wealth of information accessible to them so they can take an action towards Hope.

Each week, I will pick a theme to discuss. I invite feedback and suggestions. I have found that on my own I never could have succeeded at most of my life goals. I have found that together, bringing out the best in each other, we can achieve what we thought was impossible. I invite you along for the ride.

Sara