100 Pounds Ago...I Started Learning How to Love Myself More Than the Pleasure of Food by Charles A. Postma - HTML preview

Chapter 4

The Struggle with Food’s Grip on My Mind

Self-love, self-loathing, and addiction.

At some point I had to admit to myself that my weight issue was not about food and being mad at myself for my indulgences was not of any help. There was obviously a part of me that really wanted to end me. Committing suicide is the ultimate self-loathing act a person can do to himself. There are fast ways to do it and there are slow ways to do it. Abusing your body with food is a delicious and benign way to kill yourself, slowly. It is still self-loathing based on how I feel about it, since breaking that addiction. I remember what it felt like to plow my tongue into a white cream filled donut or let a chocolate truffle melt in my mouth. I would close my eyes and let the ecstasy of that moment satisfy my addiction demands. No matter what negativity was flourishing in my life that feeling was always there and available. It was reassuring to have a pantry filled with sweetness. I got the same feeling when I used to make wine and could look in my wine cellar and see 200-300 fifths of wine waiting for me. The challenge, as I came to realize, was either overcoming that need for comfort or switching it to something else less destructive. In retrospect, I did both and got two blessings for the price of one abstention. The first blessing was to switch from sweet to savory. The second was to start learning how to love myself more than food.

I still look back on those culinary moments with fondness in much the same way as I do for unrepeatable events in my life like watching my two children come from my wife’s womb and into a much larger world. Or my son catching a very large salmon during a fishing trip.

I am an adult. I can do what I want. I was an expert fudge maker, and nothing brought me more culinary pleasure than those squares of condensed sugar. Fudge to the sugar addict is like crack to the cocaine addict, is like spirits to the alcoholic. Oh, but I struggled! Gradually with each 5-7 day fast my addiction to sugar was pushed further and further to the back of the line of importance in my life. Do you have to do long fasts to break sugar’s addiction? I do not think so. That said, how many recovering alcoholics do you think there would be if they all had to drink just a little alcohol three times a day? Obviously, not many! It is interesting that the ethanol in alcoholic drinks is made from fermented sugar and grains, the two foods that, if abused, can kill us in any form.

Transitioning from a sweet palate to desiring salty, high fat fare helped immensely. I would still stuff my face occasionally, but it would not move the scale in the wrong direction. Nor did it leave me hungry for more like sugar did. It was satisfying in a way that sugar never was. However, regardless of sweet or savory, every bite brings insulin out of the pancreas and into the blood stream and eventually insulin resistance. Hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance are the precursors for a host of autoimmune diseases including diabetes.

In a Facebook group someone posted that fasting was an act of self-love because of the peace and health that it brings. I thought about that for a while and had to agree. So, if fasting is an act of self-love, then gluttony has to be a self-loathing act slowing committing suicide with the consumption of more food than we need to sustain ourselves or sweets which are just…fatal. I do not know if I got into this 11

fasting lifestyle because I loved myself more or not, I just wanted to stop killing myself. If you recall, I nearly did with a stroke.

I have read in both secular and religious writings that our love for others is dependent on how much we love ourselves. If you do not love yourself, you can’t love others. I have known several people who live with self-destructive behaviors, but clearly love others at least as much as they love themselves. In fact, I know of people who are alcoholics and as members of the military and law enforcement love others enough to risk their lives protecting people they do not even know. So how does this fit with self-loathing of a food addicted person trying to kill themselves. I think addiction is the link. All else is normal except that addiction is like a sperm cell looking for a weak spot attempting to penetrate an embryo. We have all seen microscopic images of squiggly sperm cells surrounding an embryo all looking for that weak spot.

A food addiction is both physical and mental. A gambling addiction is mental. People enjoy the exciting sensation while waiting for the slot machine tumblers to stop moving, the last card in Blackjack, or when the dice stop rolling. The physical and mental addiction of the alcoholic when the ethanol begins to alter consciousness to bring on a euphoric feeling and the energy for activity that it can bring. My wife is one of those people who enjoys everything in moderation. She eats what she wants, when she wants, has a BMI under 25 and at 73 enjoys the same perfect health that I now enjoy, but I really must work at it. For her it is effortless.

I can see fear in the eyes of some people when they consider for the first time never eating sugar, grains, or vegetable oils again. We use sugar added foods as a reward for our children and for celebrations of every description. The use of foods for celebration and to bring comfort are deeply imbedded in every culture. Transitioning from sweet celebrations to savory celebrations was gradual for me. Instead of cake and ice cream, make mine meat dipped in herb butter. For a couple years after I reached my goal weight, I would still eat the cake at the birthday celebrations of my immediate family, but now in the fourth year have given up even that. I just do not crave it nor miss it in any way. I do not have favorite restaurants anymore. They all have wholesome menu selections. I just eat the meat and vegetables and leave the rest on the plate. I bring my own olive oil if I need it because you can’t trust a restaurant to actually serve you the real thing.

I see sugar differently now. We use it for rewards and celebrations, but it destroys our bodies with inflammation and causes insulin resistance. “Everything in moderation” does not work for people like me and for others who struggle with sugar addiction and obesity. Recognizing that it is addictive I now see that it has a dark side that I fear. The dark side of sugar, to my way of thinking, is insidious. Fruit juice is one of the most lethal forms of sugar we can ingest due to its sugar concentration yet is touted to be so good for us.

It seems most of us need a wake-up call to make better choices with food and portion sizes or with any addiction. I know people who have had cancer and still do not care about what they consume. People are surprised to learn that sugar is cancer’s favorite food. They are even more surprised that this discovery, by Otto Warburg, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1931. 1931! To continue to eat sugar, enriched grains, and vegetable oils we are putting out a welcome mat to cancer. I had a brother who was a heavy smoker until he got lung cancer and then stopped smoking immediately. It was too late for him. If you need a wake-up call to live a better life, I hope you survive your crisis as well as I have survived mine.

12

Confidence will come with time. I too was afraid of losing and then regaining the weight back in a fasting lifestyle, but as the weeks and months passed I gained confidence one little success at a time. The crowning glory of that confidence came when I changed my goal weight to 10 pounds under my high school weight. My military draft card said I was 5’-9” tall and weighed 170 pounds on my 18th birthday in 1967. I decided that I would blast through that to 160 and lose an even 100 pounds. Doing so gave me the confidence to believably tell myself that I will never be obese again!

In retrospect, NSV’s, an acronym for Non-Scale Victory, gave me some optimism when the scale was not moving fast enough for me. Some people take their body measurements and keep track of inches lost. I recall going back to my list of medical issues to see if there was anything on it that was now gone. The day I just had to go out and buy some new clothes to wear to a semi-formal event because my fat clothes were just way too big to wear anymore was an NSV. The day I took my old military uniform to the dry cleaners as I was approaching goal weight was another. I never took measurements of myself, but the day I tried on my high school class ring, and it fit was a definite NSV. Speaking of rings, the day I lost my wedding ring that my wife gave me 30 years ago because the original no longer fit was an NSV. I later found it inside a glove I had worn. I simply started wearing the original 1969 wedding band again.

The day the scale said I was less than 200 pounds was both a scale and non-scale victory in that I was now in “Onederland” as they say in Facebook fasting groups. My biggest NSV came a few days after reaching my goal weight. I knew I would never be obese again, so I put all my old clothes and jackets in a bag and donated them on my way to buy a whole new wardrobe. That is an NSV I wish for everyone!