Tag Archives: food addiction

There was a lot of great feedback from my last blog post.  Thank you for that.  Who knew that me talking about my stretch marks would interest anyone!

Fitness is my passion.  I love that a body can change.  I love that you can get noticeably stronger within a week of being diligent with exercise; that is a big deal people!!!  Re-read that!  You can get noticeably stronger within a week of being diligent with exercise.

I love being a part of everyone’s journey.  I love, I mean I LOVE seeing someone start boot camp who hasn’t worked out in a while and within weeks is churning out push-ups.  People that could only walk when they started are running in a short period of time.  I love that I get to be a part of that.  I get to be a part of that transformation.

ADDICTION: When one cookie is never enough

My journey in health is an ongoing one.  Here is something that I have never talked about….I am an addict.

I didn’t get to 225lbs as a teenager because of some medical condition….I ate my way there. When I got pregnant the first time,  I ate my way to a 60lb weight gain…and then repeated that (and then some) when I was pregnant with the twins.

My addiction?  Food.  I have a food addiction.  There I said it, in print.  I’ve tried to be cute about it.  I have called myself a “foodie” or “food expert”.  Oh yeah, expert.  If you do enough of anything, you can call yourself and expert and I ate enough of everything and anything!

Here is the thing with a food addiction; you can’t get away from it.  You need food to survive.  Drugs, alcohol, and other addictions, (even the creepy ones from that show Addiction on TLC-which by the way I am oddly fascinated by) can be taken out of your life and you live.  You can’t do that with food.  Take food away and the result is really dramatic, death.   So everyday, and I mean everyday, it’s a challenge for me to make good decisions.  I know what to do and I do it but boy some days I do struggle.  When I say, I know how you feel, I really do.  I battle my addiction hourly.

I don’t keep junky food in the house, because I will eat it.  Recovering crack addicts don’t leave crack on the counter, stretch analogy I know, but junk food is my crack.  Think of it this way, food is everywhere.  I have to go grocery shopping a few times a week.  I go a list in hand, focused on the goal;  To get in and get out with what is on the list.

Think about Costco…..oh lord….Costco, how I love you but once I walk in I have to go into a trance like state.  If it’s not the nice ladies offering food samples at every friggin’ isle, then it’s that bakery making their ginormous muffins. (*shaking my fists*, dang you Costco and those ginormous muffins).

If you are a crack addict, you have to go looking for crack.  It is not readily available, it is not in your office (hopefully). People don’t bring it to your house (again, I hope they don’t).

Food is everywhere and so many things are focused around it.  Weddings, birthdays, new job, new house, baby, newly pregnant and on and on.  And just when you think you’ve celebrated everything possible with food, people look for more ways to celebrate things with food.  Ever been invited to a pre-kindergarten graduation party??

“HELLO!”, food addict here, could we find a way to celebrate around something that doesn’t scream at me?  How about a nice buffet table of, I don’t know…floral arrangements?  All the self-talk I have to do to get thru some of these “celebrations” is tough.

The question I get a lot is “what do you eat?”  If not that question, it is the statement “I bet all you eat is vegetables”.

Listen, you put a red velvet cupcake within arms length of me, watch out….I can have that sucker inhaled in seconds when my willpower is at a zero.

Some foods are my kryptonite, scratch that…one thing is my kryptonite….sugar……sugar brings me to my knees….cold sweats, internal negotiating, justifications, the shakes…..it is quite exhausting.

One thing that helps me, is knowing (and remembering) how absolutely crappy it felt to be 225.  I hated everything, and how every time I squeezed into size 18/20 pants it destroyed a little piece of me.

All the candy or red velvet cake in the world will never be worth going back to being bigger, or the feelings that brought about.

If you take away anything from this, take this……I have more energy and I am happy because I am at a healthy weight.

I also think about my family.  I LOVE my husband and my kids more than anything…and I don’t want my health or my addiction to affect my life with them. I want to live a long life.

So if you are struggling with your weight and you justify having that cake, the extra glass of wine or the fries…your body will never change.   You will always be tired and have lower energy then you could otherwise have.  You will always be looking for that next diet, magic pill, potion or lotion.  It’s really that simple.

If I can do it, you can do it too, believe that!!