Real Talk: I’m Addicted to Junk Food
A strange thing happened to me when I was anorexic. I became addicted to junk food. I ate “whatever I wanted,” but ate very little. My best friend just reminded me the other day of my diet: black coffee, Pop Tarts, and Advil. If you care to read about how I got into recovery from my eating disorder, you can do so on this site. Among the myriad challenges I faced in learning how to eat like a normal person, one was essentially completely resetting my palate and eating foods that would nourish my body. I hadn’t always been obsessed with Sour Patch Kids and pepperoni pizza.
I became a vegetarian at age 12—I think because of Lisa Simpson—but ate in a way that prompted my mother to call me a “pizza vegetarian.” I was basically a vegetarian who didn’t eat vegetables. When I moved to New York for college I suddenly became a health nut, (and also began partying like a maniac…can’t really follow the logic there…). I became a vegan and mere months later, started following a macrobiotic diet. I was straight up turning down fancy dinners with my friends’ parents because “there would be nothing for me to eat there.”
The macrobiotic diet is based on a weird yin and yang philosophy with food and more. Here are some highlights: don’t eat any food grown more than 500 miles away from where you live; chew each bite a minimum of 50 times and sit up straight during meals; only cook with pots and pans made of natural materials; and brown rice makes up 60% of your diet. I kinda came to my senses—no disrespect to macros reading this—after a few months but still was into all sorts of holistic stuff and remained vegetarian, dragging friends to endless raw food restaurants until their GI tracts just couldn’t take it anymore. Then I got sober three days before my 21st birthday and flew to Hawaii to see an ex-boyfriend I hadn’t seen in two years. The first night we went out to dinner I ate a burger. Surf culture out there includes getting up at 6 AM, surfing for 4 to 5 hours, then drinking Corona (none for me, of course) until you take a nap and go out for another session. You’re damn right I had skittles and potato chips in hand at all times.
My therapist calls it “switching seats on the Titanic.” I put down drugs and alcohol and picked up the eating disorder. Thankfully, I’m now in remission with that as well. But in the beginning of my recovery, learning how to eat healthy was really, really, really hard. I had the help of a nutritionist from my out-patient program. The suggestions she gave me can help anyone reading this whose diet sucks and wants to kick the addiction to junk. Even if junk isn’t negatively affecting your weight, your brain, mood, sleep, stomach and overall health are suffering. Here are some tips for restructuring your diet. (One note: If you can, see a professional. He/she can really get you on the right track and work with your specific dietary habits and health needs.)
1. Don’t overdo it. One glance at diet-related info out there (and the accompanying fitness regimens) leads us to believe that drastic measures are totally necessary and effective: the weight will fall off on a 14-day juice cleanse, you can “lose 20 lbs in 20 days with these three simple steps,” and on and on. I know we’re not talking about weight here, but the message with which we’re inundated is that changing the way we eat must be drastic or, the other extreme, is simply a matter of cutting half a dozen foods from your diet.
Many times I fell victim to extreme resolutions and often felt pretty pumped to start them once Monday rolled around. But every time, literally every single time, I began following a food plan that cut out, for example, all sugar, I failed. Not only did I go back to my old ways of eating, but I’d return with a binge, out of desperation and crankiness. Whatever you do, resist the urge to make radical changes to your eating habits. Avoid any meal plan that eliminates a certain type of food—sugar, fat, carbs—completely. If you’re eating processed food throughout the day, can you eat a baked potato instead of French fries with one of those meals? Can you get a slice of pizza with tons of veggies on it? If you’re a soda junkie, can you limit your intake from three to two and taper from there? I think you get the picture.
2. Watch a couple documentaries about food. I like Food Inc. and Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. Both were real wake-up calls for me. I also watched a 60 Minutes segment called “Is Sugar Toxic?” (this one really scared me). Docs like these offer information that’s hard to accept—because I love Doritos—but ultimately we need to know what we’re doing to our bodies when we eat processed foods. And by the way, none of these filmmakers want us to stop eating junk completely. They’re realistic and advocate eating junk in moderation, which I found comforting.
3. Start experimenting with food and be patient. You may think you hate healthy food, but that’s just because you haven’t found your zone. This is a very important part of the process! Remember, Tony Romo’s wasn’t built in a day. It’s going to take time—for me, several months—before your habits shift and you actually come to crave healthy food. (Since everything from my sleep to my skin improved, I definitely developed an incentive to eat well.)
4. Beware of “diet food.” Vegan ice cream sandwiches? Agave? Evaporated cane juice? Your body can’t tell the difference between those and regular table sugar.
5. Learn about food. Maybe the reason why you hate healthy food is because your idea of healthy food is steamed everything, no fat, a.k.a. a cardboard sandwich. Did you know that fat is not the poison it’s cracked up to be? We’ve known that healthy fats—olive oil, nuts, avocado—are a completely necessary part of a healthy diet. But now there’s research showing that even saturated fats are a necessary staple—in reasonable amounts. If something is fat free, it’s usually full of sugar to compensate. I once read something that said don’t eat anything with ingredients you can’t pronounce; your body knows what to do with butter, but it doesn’t know what to do with all the weird chemicals in margarine. (Hey, margarine is harder to pronounce than butter!)
Keep your chin up! The end result of transitioning to a healthy diet is so so so worth it. Patience, perseverance, and lots of distractions when cravings hit…
Do you have experience with giving up unhealthy eating habits? Please share your stories (and your nachos)!
