Question by Midnight: Elderly Relative With Food Addiction +Type 2 Diabetes–HELP?
My grandmother has recently been put in our care, and she is a SEVERE type 2 diabetic and also suffers extreme food addiction. She often sneaks and stashes potentially fatal foods, and lashes out when her cravings are denied. She throws intense tantrums and fits, (despite a history of heart trouble, and resulting blood pressure concerns) she has disdain/disregard for all caretakers and medical professionals, and dismisses all health restrictions, she completely fails to take any responsibility of her condition. My grandmother is in utter denial of her diabetes and responds to all attempts to reason by flying into a defensive rage.

She will get caught red-handed with food, stashes, and high glucose levels, and still flat-out deny the obvious with defensiveness, denial, and rage. In these instances she will have blood glucose levels of 500-600. I’ve even seen it as high as 800+, which she takes no issue with. She refuses to acknowledge any concerns despite 2 diabetic comas and several previous hospital visits. She will lie, manipulate, and abuse in order to get what she wants from her loved ones. She often plays the prisoner card, and uses lines like “If you ever cared about me,” “I’m a grown woman” and often threatens to take off.

At this point, I’m worried if the sugar doesn’t kill her, her blood pressure and heart problems will. We’ve resorted to locking the cupboards and hiding the kids’ food. But with her strict diet and a large family, accidents are bound to happen.

I’m still new to this, and at a complete loss. We’ve always sworn we wouldn’t put her in a home, but have no idea what else to do. I can’t seek advice from her doc for a couple of weeks. So in the meantime, does anyone know of ANY resources for combating food addiction? (Informational sites, types of counseling, experience, advice/tips, etc?) I could really use some sort of guidance, as I’ve never dealt with this kind of thing before. I don’t even know where to start.

I appreciate your time, thanks in advance for any suggestions you may have. Serious responses only please.

Best answer:

Answer by Adair
I don’t know much about food addictions, but if it’s a sugar addiction there are a few things that you can do. Blood sugar and sugar addiction can make a person have mood swings. I’ve been told I get very angry very quickly when my blood sugar wacky. This is going to sound terrible, but have her checked for worms. Sometimes people with worms can crave sugar more because the worms crave it. Worms can also cause emotional distress, insomnia, and depression in their host. Give her MSM (methylsulfonylmethane) which is an organosulfur. It does so many wonderful things: it cures sugar cravings by killing extra yeast in the system, helps alleviate depression, builds connective tissue, builds collagen and helps hair to grow. Your granny will be happier, will be able to move better, and will look and feel younger. It can be found in the vitamins and supplements section of any drug store. Sulfur needs water to work, so give her plenty of water each day. If she’s eaten sugar, you can counteract it with cinnamon. Really! Cinnamon helps the pancreas make insulin AND helps muscles absorb it. Put two teaspoons or more into some hot tea- that’s how I usually like to take my cinnamon. It can be sprinkled on or mixed in various foods. Be careful how you use it because one can grow tired of the same flavor after awhile. I love it because it makes me feel instant relief and it’s sooooooo cheap. One container cost under $ 2 and last me for over a month. A-MA-ZING!! Cinnamon is still being researched as a treatment for diabetics and of course anything cheap and easy isn’t going to be easily recommended by doctors who are influenced by the drug companies. (Speaking of such, garlic greatly reduces blood pressure so when your grandmother is freaking out, cut up a clove of garlic and put it in her salad, a sandwich or just request that she eat it whole. Add fresh garlic to her diet.) There are cinnamon capsules but they’re expensive. Because saliva reduces it’s effectiveness, the capsule protects the cinnamon until it’s past the mouth. Be sure to get your grandmother out of the house so she doesn’t feel so trapped and won’t have access to your cupboards (of course she’ll have access to other things, but could easily be watched if someone is with her.) Give her as much freedom and choice as you can. Maybe she should have some responsibility in the house. Make sure to seek her for something she’s capable of helping you with. Good luck.

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Food addiction and eating disorders are extremely serious problems with severe health consequences and even though many people with an eating disorder may have relatively manageable lives or may not be in physical danger, food addiction is still a disease that is progressive and potentially fatal.

Eating disorders, ranging from compulsive overeating to problems like anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are conditions that will worsen over time to a point where those with a food addiction will need help as their lives and bodies begin to fall apart.

Common eating disorders

Many people who suffer from a food addiction have unhealthy eating behaviours, like compulsive overeating disorder. Compulsive overeating is an inability to control consumption of food despite the consequences.

Compulsive overeaters are generally morbidly obese and have major health problems due to the excess weight. Secretive behaviour around food and eating, such as stealing food, lying about eating habits and severe weight gain, are key symptoms.

Bulimia Nervosa is a disorder in which the sufferer will binge on food, and follow this binge with some kind of compensatory behaviour to avoid weight gain. This behaviour usually takes the form induced vomiting, use of laxatives, excessive exercise and fasting.

While most addictive behaviours involve habitual overindulgence in a particular activity, anorexia nervosa manifests itself in obsessive avoidance of food. Anorexics have an obsession with avoiding weight gain, owing to an unhealthy self-image.

Pretending to eat and hiding food, excessive exercising in secret, lying about weight loss and eating habits, wearing baggy clothing to disguise a thin body, distorted body image and excessive obsession with food and calories are all habitual tendencies of an anorexic.

Treatment for food addiction

Food addiction and eating disorders like anorexia, overeating disorder or bulimia, need to be treated by professionals.

People suffering from food disorders need the benefit of one-on-one counselling and group therapy. A qualified therapist can help a patient to work through obsessions and compulsions and to directly address the psychological problems underlying these behaviours.

Counselling is designed to deal with self-esteem issues, low self-confidence, body image issues, depression, and any other events in the patient’s past that may have contributed to compulsive behaviours.

As with other addictions, a 12 step recovery programme may be incorporated into the treatment regimen. This can be especially helpful with the self-esteem issues that are at the core of many eating disorders.

A holistic treatment regime for food addiction that includes exercise and other steps contributing to a generally balanced lifestyle can help patients to work through the treatment process. Holistic activities, such as yoga or meditation, have been found helpful in attaining balance and getting the most out of treatment.

Through treatment in a nurturing environment, it is possible for people suffering from a food addiction or eating disorder to become empowered to make healthy lifestyle choices in being able to manage their addiction and to live a healthy and productive life.

Find More Arizona Addiction Treatment Program Articles

Question by Cindy: How do I convince my husband that I need inpatient rehab for alcoholism? He insists that it won’t help me.?
Because I tried outpatient rehab once and didn’t stick with it, he is positive that “rehab” of any sort would be a useless waste of money. I keep thinking of all the money I currently spend on wine…. This has been going on for three years, ever since I had gastric bypass and could no longer fulfill my food addiction. I apparently just replaced that addiction with the addiction to alcohol. ANY help would be appreciated!

Best answer:

Answer by Nick
I’m not really sure about the difference between the two, but my dad used to be an alcoholic before he was told he wouldn’t make it past 39 if he kept drinking. He has to take liver pills now.

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Bulletin Board
Family Support Group, 5 p.m. third Thursday of the month at the June E. Nylen Cancer Center. For any cancer diagnosis. For dates and times, call (712) 252-9370. Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous, 7 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays at Hawkeye Club basement, …
Read more on Sioux City Journal

Talk of the Towns
Participants learn to accept addiction as a disease, to reduce family tension and encourage the drug user to seek help for his/her problem. Nar-Anon meetings take place Tuesdays, 7 to 8:30 p.m., Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, Meeting Room B. For more …
Read more on The Recorder

Columbia Digest
Food addicts recovery An Informational and support meeting for those suffering from food addiction, food obsession, obesity, bulimia or undereating will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. Sundays at Harper House, 5495 Cedar Lane, Suite 1. Free …
Read more on Baltimore Sun

by colros

Question by : How do you go from a binge eater to anorexic?
So I have a binge eatting disorder and a “food addiction”. I was wondering how I could go from that to anorexia to lose some weight. I know I’m asking how to go from one eating disorder to another on complete opposite sides of the spectrum but I really want this to work. Thanks

Best answer:

Answer by ClickMaster
Sorry. You don’t get to choose you mental illness.

• Anorexia is the most deadly mental illness.
• A study by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders reported that 5 – 10% of anorexics die within 10 years after contracting the disease; 18-20% of anorexics will be dead after 20 years and only 30 – 40% ever fully recover
• About 8 million Americans suffer from an eating disorder (does not include over eaters)
• 0.5% of American women suffers from anorexia.
• 2.5% of American women suffers from bulimia.
• 1.1% – 4.2% of females suffer from bulimia nervosa in their lifetime.
• About 10% of college women suffer from a clinical or nearly clinical eating disorder, including 5.1% who suffer from bulimia nervosa.
• Studies indicate that by their first year of college, 4.5 to 18% of women and 0.4% of men have a history of bulimia.

Here are some links you may find useful. The websites have loads of information for you.
• NEDA Helpline 1-800-931-2237 (9-5 Eastern Time Weekdays only)
• NEDA Website –> http://www.edap.org/
• NEDA Video –> http://vimeo.com/2567743
• ANAD –> http://www.anad.org/
• Nemours on ED –> http://kidshealth.org/teen/food_fitness/problems/eat_disorder.html
• Obsessed with dieting? –> http://kidshealth.org/teen/expert/body/diet_query.html
• What is BDD? –> http://kidshealth.org/teen/your_mind/body_image/body_image_problem.html
• Take an ED Quiz –> http://eatingdisorder.org/about_eating_disorders/resources/quiz.php
• Where to get help –> http://www.edreferral.com/
• More ED Videos –> http://vimeo.com/user638254/videos/sort:newest/format:detail
• Mayo Clinic on ED –> http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/eating-disorders/DS00294

Good luck and good health!!

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Emotional eating is not always “just” emotional eating. Sometimes, it is a full-fledged addiction with obvious-and very serious-consequences. Acknowledging this addiction is the first step. Just ask yourself how many people you know who have endangered their health through eating! The fact is, once food is “installed” in an individual’s mental computer as a way to deal with problems or stress, it can become so deeply embedded in his or her mind and so important that he or she would literally die to keep it.

It is hard to describe the intensity of this addiction because it is so commonplace and so easily disguised and blended into “just” eating. As one of my patients said so clearly, “Nothing is going to get between me and my eating. I am always ravenously hungry, and when the burrito stand is in view, I must eat.”

No one can stop me.

I don’t want to stop.

I can’t stop.

I won’t let anybody try to trick me into wanting to stop.

Stay away! This is sacred territory that I will defend with all of my strength.

These are the sorts of messages you receive when you just ask a person to consider their emotional eating patterns. This is what happens when you just suggest that maybe you are confusing emotional hunger with biological hunger. The resistance to dealing with this addiction at all is the strongest indicator of how much the addicted person is motivated to stay addicted. Yes, once you are addicted, you are also motivated to stay that way.

How Does One Become Addicted to Food?

The beginning of food addiction is a bit different for everyone because it can start at different ages. However, there is one universal theme. Somewhere along the lines you learned that eating can soothe the ordinary hurts in life. We all learn that, because it is true, has always been true an always will be true.

All addiction follows the same basic pattern. You are in a distressed state of mind, and the substance-whether it be alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, cocaine, or a cupcake-offers you almost instant, albeit temporary, relief from your distress. If it works the first time, you do it again and again. When it becomes the mechanism of choice, that’s when you become addicted. It is the short route to the resolution of personal unhappiness. But if you are addicted now, it means you became too dependent on this mechanism and you created a short circuit to feeling good that now works against you.

Food addiction is a short circuit in many ways. Literally, it is the fastest route to feeling better. But it is also a short circuit in another sense, the more you use this mechanism, the more you bypass some essential work of life and short circuit the new learning and new ways of managing your feelings that can make life more fulfilling and a lot easier. You are trading the short-term gain for a real long-term loss.

The more you use it as a short circuit, the more you avoid doing what is necessary to resolve the unhappiness in real life, in real time. The more you avoid, the less you learn about how to manage your mind and your life, or at least those critical parts of you that have not fully matured and have been brought under rational control. It’s a vicious cycle. The more you avoid learning, the more you need the cure, which makes you avoid learning all the more, which…makes you eat!

Why Can’t I Just Stop?

It is our contention that since this addiction is a learned pattern, you can unlearn it! It is not mysterious, even though it seems so because it is so powerful and so embedded in ordinary thinking patterns. That’s the good news.

While it is a learned behavior, we are not suggesting that the unlearning process is just a matter of education. No, once food has become installed as a primary way to regulate moods and emotions, it almost becomes an essential part of the person’s mind. That’s the bad news.

In cases where emotional eating has become food addiction, food is no longer food. The taste is largely irrelevant.  It’s the mental effect that is being looked for in the meal, not the calories or the flavor. Some have described their relationship between themselves and food as that of jealous lovers who want to possess, horde, hide and clandestinely have one another for their own.

There is a great deal of truth in that description, but it doesn’t quite get to the quality I hear in my patients. What I hear sounds more like the eating pattern has become a part of their mental selves the same way an arm is part of their bodily selves, and is defended similarly. You wouldn’t let anybody convince you to cut off your arm. In the same way, the person addicted to food won’t let anybody convince them to give up this mechanism of internal control.

The bottom line is that food addiction has the same imperative quality as addiction has in the heroin addict who has to have his “fix,” or the smoker who must have one more drag, or the alcoholic who must have one more drink. Food addicts can’t bear the thought of refusing themselves satisfaction through food.

Florence Williams, a mother, describes the incredible experience between mother and child during nursing, and reveals the primordial power of food addiction in this quote from a New York Times Magazine article on Sunday, January 9, 2005:

“…every time we nurse our babies, the love hormone oxytocin courses out of our pituitaries like a warm bath. Human milk is like ice cream, Valium and Ecstasy all wrapped up in two pretty packages. For a mother and child, nursing is perhaps the most intimate of acts. Evolutionary biologists call it matrotrophy; eating one’s mother. My daughter is not only physically attached to me; she is taking from me all that I can give her. Each time I lift my shirt, she pants and flaps her arms and legs as if it were Christmas. Then she settles in, both of us wholly reassured that this is the best, safest and most satisfying food she could eat.”

Although not all mothers nurse, this is still the prototypic experience of the kind of bliss that we seek to recreate, in one way or another, the rest of our lives-especially when turning to food for comfort. We seek the temporary pleasure and relief, the sense that for now at least everything seems all right, when moments before it seemed as if everything was all wrong. And when this natural desire becomes addiction, most people refuse to believe that they can continue to function if they give it up.