Fifteen Years of Curbing an Addiction to Food

Part of a weekly look into the adventures of Lisa Chin

Oh, the memories!

Fifteen years ago, I was an obsessive binge eater that would put any food challenge host to shame. My appetite was well known amongst past my peers to even some of their relatives. The parents of my best friend had an endearing name for me which was whatever Arabic word translates to “Garbage Dump.”

I was that person staring lustfully at your plate wondering if you were finished. By the time I left your house, somebody had to go grocery shopping. The only reason the parents of my friends tolerated me was because they were hoping some of my math skills would rub off onto their progeny. I wasn’t constantly pushing my consumption envelope to win a contest or impress all of the “normal” people around me, I was just extremely hungry all of the time.

Here is a sample of daily food items my OCD self had to have almost every weekday before dinner:

• One (1) package of Ramen with an egg (a.k.a. THE Asian breakfast, lunch or dinner depending on the time consumed, and I had it almost every morning for ten years) – 536 calories
• 5 – 7 cans of Pepsi Original, one for every hour approx. and not the diet stuff – 900 calories
• 2 – 5 small bags of chips, pretzels, chocolate or whatever else was in that lovely glass enclosed crack machine outside of class next to the soda machine – 600 calories
• A small pint of chocolate chocolate chip Haagen Daz iced cream from the Arab deli – 1200 calories
• Packs of gum to hold me in between snacks
• Two slices of pizza with extra cheese and mushrooms – 1000 calories
• 3 16oz. bags of Ruffles potato chips (One for the walk to my friend’s house, another for consumption at her house, and the last for the bus ride home. If you had a glass of ice cold water handy, you could down an entire bag in five minutes. Didn’t know that, did you?) – 7680 calories

I probably would have eaten more if I wasn’t constricted to droll things such as class attendance and the fact that I had to open these noisy crinkly bags very slowly every time the teacher would turn in the other direction. Still, I think I made do with my limitations.

Of course this wasn’t the entirety of my daily consumption but I was at least up to 12,000 calories before the sun went down. My night foraging would make my days look modest by comparison. I would eat dinner at my friend’s house, then boyfriend’s house, then parents, then sometimes late night snacking at another friend’s house. The last friend on my calling list shared a fun past-time with me called the “what’s next” game. I think you can figure out how this game is played. I’m sure I got close to 30,000 calories by the time the day was done. I’m not even sure how I did it back then now when I tally the numbers up.

Silly teenage metabolism.

Those that knew me best in my late teens to early twenties can attest to these statistics. You can ask them or one the chefs at Ruth’s Chris, who felt compelled to meet my husband and I after our meal. He said, “I just had to see the two people who ate all of that food. Man, you guys rock!”

From sun up to sundown, I was this endless vacuum for greasy deep-fried salty carbs.  Life was so awesome but we all know things like this can’t last forever! I’ll never forget the cold wintery day when a friend walked over and quietly said under his breath, “Uh, I don’t know how to tell you this but…you’re getting kind of fat. Just thought you’d like to know.” My mind was reeling. What changed? My metabolism had jumped the shark, skipped the theaters and went straight to video. This change coupled with a lack of movement in the winter had turned my former svelte self into a full-time lard production engine.

I was devastated. I had somehow managed to gain thirty pounds in one month without the production of a single infant.  Something had to be done but I was so far into the habitual nature of eating that I didn’t even know where to start. I had to shift something… but who likes change? Everything lazy inside of me was rebelling. I told myself, “Okay Lisa, you’re a big girl now (pun intended). Time to face facts, you’re going to have to give up on a lot of the things you love. Lisa, put down that potato chip!” (Most conversations with myself end like this.)

Now, the big question was, how do you stop a lifetime of addiction? A lot of trial and error… fifteen years worth to finally gain some self control.

Here is what I learned so you can possibly be more efficient in your own journey:

Lesson Number One: If there are three steps to complete the action you regret taking, attack the first step. Focus fully on it and try not to think past it.

The first thing I was successful at was to change my habit of buying the foods I didn’t want to eat later. My obsession with large bags of Ruffles was one of the biggest and hardest habits to break. If only I could force my feet to walk past the 7-Eleven and not into the store where all of those terrible temptations awaited. I used to tell myself, just walk faster past that part of the sidewalk. Don’t think about the blurry glowing memories of the friendly clerk smiling in slow motion, telling me how grateful he was that I visited and that I should come again.

NO!

It was pretty difficult at first, I felt this pang in my gut as if I was robbing myself of some extreme pleasure. This crappy feeling lasted for quite a while, until something shiny passed in front of me and I got distracted. Each day I passed the store, the spasm of discontent dulled more and more, and after a year, I was able not to obsess over the fact that I wasn’t eating three bags of chips a day. A YEAR.

Actually, I take that back, it probably took over ten years to really not obsessively think about eating potato chips.

Actually, I take that back again, I still miss them. You see how dramatic this is. I can manage not to buy them though and that was a huge win.

Lesson Number Two: Exercise isn’t the way out, but it helps.

I was never the type of person to exercise so I figured that once I started, miraculous things should happen by default.  I was uneducated about nutrition and in complete denial. I figured if I exercised enough and did tons of cardio, I could simply burn it all off and continue eating whatever I wanted. The trainers used to tell me all of the time, the gym is 85% diet. I looked at them with skeptical doubt because THEY didn’t know me. They didn’t realize that I was new to this moving around thing, that the rules of physics didn’t apply to me and that my body will react with some type of results producing shock.

After five years of little change (despite the fact that I reduced my intake drastically to probably 6,000 calories a day), I started to think those guys might be onto something. Think about it. You completed some impossible mission of fighting indescribable boredom and discomfort on the treadmill for an hour, and all you got for it was three or four hundred lousy calories? So what does it take to actually lose weight over time?

Let’s do some math. A woman around my height burns only 2000 calories a day, at best. If I wanted to lose a pound a week, that gives me a calorie budget of 1200 a day. That’s pretty much a decent sized lunch for me. It takes a deficit of 3000 calories to lose ONE pound? Plus the whole homeostasis thing your body likes to do when it gets used to one thing and you try to change it. Oh, you lost five pounds? I’m going to make you extra hungry for a long time to see if I can change your mind. I thought I was starving myself at six thousand calories a day but when I became a little more educated about how the body works, I realized I would have to start running marathons as a morning hobby to truly eat what I felt was a minimal normal amount of food.

Lesson Number Three: I had no idea what a proper amount of food even looked like.

Around ten years ago, my coworker talked me into doing Nutrasystem with him. I was pretty open to the whole idea. I had never truly dieted before, but I’m easily peer pressured so I agreed without much argument or concern. I carefully put my six month order together of delicious looking lunches, breakfasts and snacks. I was pretty excited about it actually.

Then the food came. Granted, a lot of their meals were absolutely tasty in a preservative kind of way but they were nothing compared to real food. The best way I can describe most packaged meals is the difference between freshly cooked green beans and the ones that come in a can. They’re both edible if you’re ravenous so, yay, hunger was finally on my side! I remember holding this microwaveable miracle in my hands, just gazing in amazement. I was in awe that it fit into my hands, my small girly hands!  This fluid cup of processed nutrients was supposed to last me three hours until my pre-approved 90 calorie snack?

It felt as if I was just seated at a table for dinner after waiting anxiously for an hour in the lounge area famished. After I get to the table, the waiter gingerly drops a small buttered roll on my dish and tells me he’ll be back for my order. Then everybody runs out, locking me in the building with nothing else to eat until the next morning. Sure, you’re supposed to supplement the meals with servings of fruits and vegetables but who has time for that. For the first month, when others are saying grace, I would just stare at my plate in disbelief of how small each meal was. What looked like decent sized dinner boxes later revealed themselves to be half empty trays of meat floating loosely in a lot of gravy. They were lucky I like gravy, but usually accompanying something besides more gravy.

I clearly recall licking the plate in desperation after every serving. The novelty kept me going for a few months. I lost ten pounds the first month and my appetite shrunk considerably. Without the constant sugar spikes, or actual enjoyment of food, my terrible cravings faded to a level where at times, I almost felt too lazy to eat. It was wonderful. I consider it to be the first real breakthrough in my binging dilemma.

The problem is you can’t eat these things forever. I probably lasted more than most at six months before I weaned myself back onto real food. The real benefit to the whole ordeal was that it forced me to break my routine long enough to view a different reality. Now I had a visual and physical idea of the amount of food it takes to make weight loss happen and more importantly, my stomach and mind were more ready to accept additional upsets because they were beaten so cruelly into submission.

Lesson Number Four: Calories are hiding EVERYWHERE.

Now that I was unsupervised, it wasn’t long before my denial slowly crept up on me and I was back to gaining. I noticed it about ten pounds in and knew I didn’t want to go back to paying for diet food. I decided to become my own nutritionist with the aid of the mobile app LoseIt.

What a great app. I would say this was the one thing that gave me the self awareness and education me towards control over where I want my weight. I’d pay them money but since I’m on a budget, I’ll just speak well of them in this article. The app itself is a simple journal of your calorie intake and loss. You plug in your weight, your goal and when you want to reach this goal. It then calculates a daily budget for you.

The difficult part is remaining honest to yourself and becoming aware of food measurements and hidden calories. For the most part, I used images from the internet to gauge what six ounces of meat or one cup of pasta look like.  Then I bought a food scale and could see first hand what I should be placing on my plate. I wanted to become so visually familiar with what my dinner and lunch plates should look like, that I could stop thinking about it.

The toughest part was being diligent about recording everything, especially all of those things you don’t think you have to. You just put some sugar into your coffee? How much was that? Three teaspoons? Were those teaspoons generously rounded? Then that means it was more like five.

The first shock I went into was discovering all of the small areas in between meals that I was sneaking calories in. Sure, sunflower seeds are healthy, but when you’re eating half a bag of them that’s almost 300 calories.  That’s your breakfast and snack budget combined. The second shock was whenever I compared my prepared food calories totals to listed amounts of similar items eating out. How the hell did Applebee’s get that meal up to 3000 calories? How is that small chunk of brownie at Starbucks 400 calories, it’s only a third the size of a real brownie. You start to recognize the relationship between richness of taste and the generous amounts of butter that got it there.

Sure, you could make equally delicious meals at home but you would never dare slap half a stick of butter into the frying pan like some of the favorite cooks you frequent. Besides educating me on the intricacies of the items I so quickly shoved into my mouth, keeping track did something unexpected, it kept me working out as a way to cheat the app. No matter how hard I tried to pare down my diet to the point where I couldn’t give up any more, I could never seem to reach my goal. I was always over by two to five hundred calories. If you fell flat on your goals, you felt like you failed that day. If you went way over, you felt even worse. Now you had a week’s chart to stare at and had to try to make it up. That’s when I decided to start exercising to close up the gaps. Everything was laid out neatly and mathematically. No more magic voodoo. If you were honest about the caloric intake, and how many you burned during an exercise, you’d see the weight drop off accordingly. That in itself felt like magic.

Over time, you become more and more aware of how everything is intertwined and you realize, you have a lot of power. If you want to eat that bag if chips, you know what you can do to make it up. Knowing this information first-hand is a necessary way to getting to this point in my mind. To be able to set a weight goal and know how to get there is so freeing.

Lesson Number Five: What you eat can make life easy or difficult…but you can choose.

If you’re like me, you absolutely must have your carbs and junk food, and I can. I just have to have them in conjunction with my total calorie sum for the week. Luckily for me, that’s no longer complicated. I have allowed myself to gain and lose often enough to know when I’m going over or under my budgets and can either reduce my food intake or up my physical activities to compensate. Knowing all of this subconsciously is fantastic because I have too many other things to actively think about.

There is a small condition however:  What you eat determines how easy or difficult it will be in the future to keep your appetite under control.

If you decide to go out one night and eat a huge load of pasta, you better do so with the understanding that you will be noticeably more hungry tomorrow than if you just kept it at a cup of carbs. I am totally fine with that cost and am disciplined enough to deal with it. You can also choose to make your life easier. Consuming a diet full of vegetables and protein not only makes you feel satiated and energetic, it also makes you want to eat less the next time. You can moderate these levels according to your personal level of masochism.

Lesson Number Six: The overwhelming benefits of a good diet and exercise are an incredible amount of motivation, if you recognize and keep your focus on them.

As a person who has let her weight fluctuate between 120 and 170 several times, I have clear insight into what an extra fifty pounds does to you. Why do I work out and eat healthy? Sure, there are the superficial reasons:

• Clothes fit better, your cheekbones are lovely when exposed, people tend to treat you nicer everywhere. Those are minor to me compared to all of the other full time advantages of being at a certain weight that help you every day with everything else.
• No chronic knee pain. At 170, it was so extreme that I actually had to use the hand railing at the train to go up the stairs. Placing any pressure at all on my knee cap would feel like you were pushing your finger roughly into a bruised area. Now it is 95% gone.
• I can breathe. I have exertion-induced asthma and thalessemia minor which basically translates to, my body is not great at making oxygen. After working out for several years, it is slowly getting better. I still have slight asthma spells during the first twenty minutes, but it used to last forty minutes and bring me to a grinding halt.
• These days I can mostly power through it with hopes of it improving even further.
• I have around five times the energy.  I don’t have that feeling where I don’t want to get off the couch anymore.  I don’t mind hopping up the stairs. As a mother with two toddlers, I look forward to running and skipping around with them. At 170, I wanted to turn the TV on for them and nap.
• No more insomnia.  For most of my late teens to mid twenties, I probably slept anywhere from 1.5 to 3 hours a night.  Working out definitely helped me regulate whatever was off balance.
• Easier mornings.  As a natural night owl, I would dread having to wake up.  Perhaps due to my terrible circulation, I always wake up in pain and it takes a while before my muscles feel normal and not sluggish.  These days, I have to wake up at 5:15 AM and quite honestly, it’s not that difficult anymore.
• Better mental alertness.  Having this much oxygen circulating through my body helps me concentrate when I have to.  In general, the more active I get, the clearer my head feels.

My perception of how difficult everything is has definitely changed. When I am physically in shape, I feel like I actually have the energy available to do anything I can focus on. The feeling of helpless lethargy was a big obstacle in the past. I barely get depressed these days. I have a tendency towards self rumination whenever restless for too long. When I’m active, I feel my emotions are generally more positive and stable. Endorphins are a wonderful way of naturally keeping serotonin levels high. Including physical activity in my day keeps me too busy to idly stew in my own negative thoughts. I’m more concentrating on what my next five or ten minutes look like. It may be busier but I feel happier overall.

Loving the things that you have to do makes doing it so much more effortless.

I couldn’t imagine loving all of these benefits more. They have made everything in my life so much easier.  It always feels illogical to me that the more energy I expend into physical activity, that the more energy I get back… but hey, I’m not complaining. So that’s my story… and it’s far from over. Now that I have the power to change, I’d like to see what the next level looks like.

Maybe it’s a triathlon, or just being able to run 8 mph for a mile. Who knows? I just hope that somebody will read this, and it will help them succeed in their own personal journey. I am very optimistic about that.

Thanks for reading!

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Lisa Chin is a Senior Interactive Director at SNAP Interactive and the newest columnist for Wika Magazine. You can check out Lisa’s online portfolio here.