Discovering My Trigger Foods, Part I
Someone asked me recently how I discovered my food triggers. This is an insightful question. I will answer it in two parts.
At the end of 2019, I knew enough about food addiction to name it in myself. I knew, too, that the processed foods of the standard American diet caused problems for me.
At the time, I thought my understanding of food addiction was the capstone of what I needed to lose weight. In some ways, that was true. In other ways, that was just the beginning.
I know this is true: food addiction plays out in my body in the simplest, most predictable ways and in the most complex, challenging ways in today’s food environment.
Discovering My Trigger Foods Was a Process
Satiation: Discovering a New Sensuality
Satiation. I love this word and have only recently started to understand its meaning around my hunger drive.
Satiation is the pinnacle of what it means to fulfill the hunger drive, to eat when hungry. Satiation is the linchpin of my long-term success.
Discovering satiation was a confusing, complex process. I had lost half my weight and had maintained that weight loss for more than a year.
Yet, I was flailing and careening all over a razor blade even though the numbers on the scale held steady.
I was desperately trying not to fall into the abysses where one of my shadow selves ruled — either through the excesses of food addiction and binge eating, or the deprivations of anorexic restriction.
I had no idea how to maintain my success.
Meet My Hunger Drive: A Fact of My Life, Not a Self-Made Stigma
Since I first shared my story a few weeks ago, I have received a lot of comments about the stigma around food addiction and disordered eating patterns.
This stigma runs deep, and I am learning how people of all sizes, shapes, and genetics feel that stigma in different ways.
Even though I have lost half my weight, I spent most of my life experiencing this stigma silently in an isolated state of obesity or morbid obesity.
I never envisioned breaking my silence to speak about my food addiction – especially as publicly as I am doing now. But, life is full of surprises, and here I am.
I am speaking out because my self-understanding has profoundly shifted.
Re-Solve the Conundrum of Myself: A Re-Solution for the New Year
New Year’s resolutions. Start. Restart. Focus. Refocus. Set. Reset. Boot. Reboot. Charge. Recharge. Commit. Recommit. New. Renew. Renewal. Detox. Cleanse. Challenge. Promise.
These words comprise the language of the new year around health, wellness, weight loss, and self-improvement. These words energize and inspire me.
I love the idea of a fresh start, a new beginning, a way to change what causes me to act against my own self interests.
This is hopeful stuff — making myself better, being the person I want to be, improving myself without hating myself.
My hope is magnified this year because I have the privilege of hearing hopeful possibilities that others have for themselves through Transform Shadows.
Let’s Get to the Good Stuff
With New Year’s coming this weekend, the collective commitment to self-improvement provides a great moment to talk about the power of plants.
Moving to a whole, unprocessed plant-based diet is the most important action that I have taken for all aspects of my health, including weight loss and maintenance.
Most information around health and weight loss encourages eating plants in some way, so knowing the benefits of plants certainly was not news to me.
Still, I am stunned by the depth of what I have learned from delving into nutritional science. And, I am even more stunned by the differences in how I feel – once I got through the withdrawal from addictive foods.
Eating plants has transformed all aspects of my life.