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Overcoming Eating Disorders
Stephen Lau
Stephen Lau
Related Articles by Stephen Lau
Published in Online Journals
Copyright © 2007 & 2008 Stephen Lau
Why Are You Addicted to Sugar? (published on 1 March 2008)
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Lau
Like many people, you may think you are addicted to carbohydrates, such as bread, cakes, cookies, just because you like eating them. However, truthfully, you may be addicted to sugar - the sugar in these carbohydrates.
For example, eating a donut loaded with sugar will cause a blood sugar spike in your bloodstream, giving you the "feeling good" experience that might make you want to reach out for yet another donut. The explanation is simple: your sudden blood sugar spike giving you that "feeling good" sensation is almost immediately followed by a blood sugar drop that drives the craving to experience that sensation again.
Sugar triggers the release of opiates (addictive substances) from your brain, causing a magnetic effect on you, which may be the beginning of sugar addiction. Food manufacturers have found out that adding fat in food will further enhance the effect of food seduction on a consumer. In other words, fat and sugar complement each other in increasing your food addiction, making you want to consume more, and that is why sugar and fat are main ingredients in most processed foods.
Consumers are often misled into thinking that carbohydrates make them fat. No, good carbohydrates, such as bread, pasta, and rice do not make you fat. For one thing, healthy carbohydrates, being modest in calories, may fill you up before you can eat more. For another, even if you do overeat occasionally, those extra calories are most likely stored as glycogen for your energy use, or dissipated during exercise or any vigorous physical activity.
It is the sugar which is often added to carbohydrates - such as jam in bread, sugar coating in a donut - that makes you fat. Remember, sugar is concentrated calories. A 20-ounce soda may have 250 calories of sugar. On the other hand, a cup of rice has fewer calories than a cup of soda. Drinking a cup of soda will not assuage your hunger, while eating a cup of brown rice may fill you up.
Sugar is addictive. Sugar is one of the common toxic foods. In addition to causing blood sugar imbalance as previously mentioned, too much sugar may also overburden your pancreas, rendering it incapable of clearing sugar from you blood efficiently, and thus potentially leading to diabetes.
Too much sugar may cause anxiety, irritability, nervous tension, and even depression due to depletion of your body's B-complex vitamins, especially for women progressing to menopause.
Too much sugar may suppress your immune system and upset your body's mineral balance, making it more acidic, which is the underlying cause of many diseases.
Sugar is hidden in most commercial processed foods and drinks, such as salad dressing, ketchup, mixed sweet drinks, and sodas, among others. Sugar may come in many different forms: corn syrup (made from cornstarch, composed mainly of glucose), high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)(modified form of corn syrup with increased level of fructose), and aspartame (a low-calorie artificial sweetener).
Look at all food and drink labels before you consume them.
Also, avoid all sugar traps that may look "healthy" to you.
Organic brown sugar, made from cane sugar, is only slightly better than white table sugar. The word "organic" is not synonymous with "healthy."
Unrefined brown sugar is no more than white sugar dyed with molasses. It is still highly processed. Do not be misled by the term "unrefined." Brown sugar is mostly sucrose.
Honey is no more than "expensive" sugar with little nutritional value. That liquid honey does not spoil is due to its high sugar concentration, which kills bacteria by plasmolysis, and this fact may often give people the impression that honey is good because it does not spoil easily. However, honey is still sugar. Costing more does not make it any better or healthier.
White table sugar is the worst form of sugar because it is highly processed with zero nutritional value.
A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) survey revealed that the average American consumes the equivalent of 160 pounds of sugar a year - that is something like over 50 heaped teaspoons of sugar per person per day. If this is not too much, then what is?
Sugar addiction is mainly due to the standard American diet (SAD), which is high in protein, dairy, and salt.
If you have an insatiable sugar craving, your body system is most probably toxic, if not already unhealthy. To stop sugar addiction, you must consume more healthy carbohydrates, such as bread, pasta, and rice, instead of meat and animal products. The reason is that your body needs fiber so that you will eat less, and decreased intake of salt and fat will also eliminate the sugar addiction.
Why Are You Addicted to Cheese? (published on 21 February, 2008)
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Lau
Cheese is a part of the American culture. Americans enjoy eating cheese, and some are even addicted to it.
Is there such a thing as cheese addiction? Is it an overstatement that you, in fact, could be addicted to cheese?
In the 1980s, scientists already discovered a trace of morphine in milk and dairy products, in particular, cheese.
Morphine, which is an addictive opiate, was found to be present in cow. Specifically, casein, a milk protein, releases opiates upon digestion. Cheese contains much more casein than is found in milk from either cows or humans, because cheese is concentrated protein with water and lactose sugar extracted. Accordingly, eating too much cheese may result in cheese addiction.
Is cheese addiction bad for your health? Well, once you stop your cheese addiction, you may reap substantial health benefits.
Cheese is concentrated protein: a 2-oz serving has about 15 grams of fat, most of which are saturated, giving you bad cholesterol and blocking your arteries. Stop eating cheese may help reduce your bad cholesterol level.
Too much cheese may give you arthritis and migraine attacks. Research showed that cheese triggers migraines in many patients, and that cheese is also implicated in 50 percent of rheumatoid arthritis due to its high-fat content.
Research also showed that cheese increases insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), which is an aggressive promoter of cancer and abnormal cell growth.
Milk products may play havoc with your absorption of vitamin D, which is derived mainly from exposure to sunlight and which has to be activated by the liver and the kidneys. However, too much calcium from dairy products may suppress instead of activating the vitamin D in your body. Insufficient vitamin D increases the risk of prostate cancer.
In addition, cheese, which is rich in animal fat, increases the production of testosterone, which is linked to prostate cancer.
Cheese has much more casein (a protein that breaks down during digestion to form opiates - addictive substances) than is found in milk, ice cream, butter or other dairy products. Therefore, cheese, which has 70 percent of its calories from fat, is not only addictive due to the presence of opiates, but also fattening. Yes, cheese makes you fat!
Cheese addiction may lead to high blood pressure. A 2-oz serving of cheddar cheese has about 350 milligrams of sodium, and a cup of low-fat cottage cheese has over 900 milligrams of sodium - and sodium is a critical contributing factor in high blood pressure.
The dairy industry has colluded with fast food restaurants to add more cheese to their foods to trigger your cheese craving. A case in point, SUBWAY signed a contract with the industry in 1996 to include cheese in some of their sandwiches.
The cheese industry may be promoting all the health benefits of cheese because it wants you to be hooked on to cheese.
Stop your cheese craving!
Eat a healthy breakfast every morning with no animal products, such as milk, eggs, bacon, ham or meat sausages, and, of course, cheese. Only time will and can change your taste buds (it takes no more than several weeks).
Eat a fiber-rich diet, such as grains, fruits, and vegetables. A high-fiber diet controls and regulates your blood sugar level to stop your cheese craving.
Boost your appetite-controlling hormone (leptin) through eating enough calories (in other words, no dieting to reduce your caloric intake), a low-fat diet, and exercising.
Learn to cope with stress to reduce the propensity to use cheese eating as a solution to your emotional problems.
Motivate yourself to get out of cheese addiction with daily affirmations of the health benefits of not eating cheese, such as lower blood pressure, a healthier heart, and stronger bones, among others.
Too much cheese is not good for you!
Why Are You Addicted to Chocolate? (published on 13 February, 2008)
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Lau
Many find chocolate irresistible - including myself. We crave chocolate, we savor it, and we enjoy it. There comes the passion for chocolate - or rather the chocolate addiction.
What is the chemistry inherent in this passion or addiction? How does it make so many of us become addicted to chocolate?
The reason is simple: chocolate is an addictive drug. Scientists have found that naloxone, an opiate blocker, reduces chocolate addiction. This is strong evidence that chocolate is addictive, just like any other drug. However, chocolate is only a very mild version of addictive drug - but enough to have the brain effect that creates the real, compulsive attraction.
In addition to caffeine (although not nearly as much as coffee), chocolate contains other chemicals, such as theobromine and phenylethylamine, that create marijuana-like effect on the brain. Such chemical effect of chocolate on the brain is significant and substantial, especially when the chocolate seduction is reinforced by the smell, taste, and texture of chocolate.
But the chocolate industry would like you to believe that chocolate is good for your health.
Chocolate is good for you because it comes from a fruit tree, which contains antioxidants with beneficial heart benefits, especially dark chocolate. According to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, chocolate reduces your body's absorption of fat. In addition, chocolate contains flavonoids more potent than vitamin C in reducing your bad cholesterol.
But, is chocolate really healthy for you?
The truth of the matter is that if you absolutely love chocolate, you would like to believe anything - especially what you want to believe.
Firstly, most scientific studies on the health of chocolate are funded by the industry - a valid reason to take every positive finding with a grain of salt.
Chocolate is made from cocoa beans from a fruit tree. Almost all plants contain antioxidants. If you really love antioxidants, then go for vegetables and fruits, not necessarily chocolate. The problem with chocolate is that coca beans are so bitter in taste that loads of fat and sugar are added to make chocolate taste good and sweet. As a result, chocolate is loaded with calories, sixty percent of which come from fat, which contributes to cholesterol increase and weight gain. One ounce of chocolate contains as much as one-hundred-fifty calories with forty to fifty percent fat. M&M semisweet baking chocolate contains a whopping almost four hundred calories, over ten grams of saturated fat and more than forty grams of sugar! Do you honestly think these ingredients are healthy for you?
In addition, chocolate, which contains caffeine, not only irritates your kidneys and thins your blood, but also changes your mood.
Chocolate is unhealthy due to its unhealthy ingredients, which may cause headaches, obesity, heartburn, and emotional problems. If you must eat chocolate occasionally, go for quality ones, not the cheap ones which are mostly sugar, trans fats, artificial colorings, flavorings, and preservatives. Read the label! Watch out for additives and added fats! Or simply resist the chocolate temptation, if you can!
Eat chocolate just because you like it, and not because it is healthy!
If chocolate does not make you any healthier, does it make you happier?
A study of self-confessed chocolate addicts found that chocolate could give them a sense of contentment. However, the pleasure was accompanied by a sense of guilt, which could trigger an eating disorder. Worse, chocolate cravings were not driven by hunger: they binged on chocolate even when they were full.
If you crave chocolate only occasionally, you need not be overtly concerned. However, if you binge on chocolate, it could spell trouble down the road. Chocolate can do a lot more than just packing on the pounds if the addiction intensifies. The addictive effects differ from one person to the next. So it is of paramount importance that you pay attention to how chocolate affects your mood.
Binge Eating - A Component of All Eating Disorders! (published on 30 January, 2008)
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Lau
Binge eating is a critical component is all eating disorders, including anorexia and bulimia. Understanding binging is the key to resolving all weight-related eating disorders.
What is binge eating? Do we all binge occasionally? Is binging synonymous with love of food?
Binge eating is uncontrolled eating, often accompanied by shame and guilt. In other words, it is an act with full awareness as well as helplessness. Binge eating episodes occur quite frequently - often at least once or twice a week.
Shame and guilt often propel the resultant purging, which is getting the excessive amount of food out of the body system. Purging out of fear of weight gain is a critical component of bulimia, which is a disorder alternating between binge eating and purging.
Binge eating plays a pivotal role in any eating disorder, which is a psychological disorder using food to cope with disturbed emotions.
Many people have emotional problems, but they may not have an eating disorder. So how does one develop binge eating, or who are more vulnerable to this disorder than others?
Binge eating often begins with having an unhealthy abnormal food relationship. If you eat normally, you have reduced risk of binge eating even if you do have emotional problems.
Any dieting is abnormal eating. Initially, an individual may want to control weight through dieting, but without much success. Then that individual may try one diet after another with no substantial solution to the weight problem. It is this feeling of deprivation of food (feeling the unfairness of being deprived of the joy of eating), accompanied by despair and frustration (feeling the inability to lose weight despite the efforts), which may ultimately turn the individual from dieting into binge eating. As a result, cyclical eating problems develop and persist, indefinitely perpetuating the eating disorder cycle.
Binge eating, a self-deprecating eating disorder out of subconscious fear of not being able to stop eating voluntarily, may begin in the formative years of an individual who already has unhealthy eating patterns, or in young adulthood as a result of incapability of handling emotional, social, and environmental stress. Binge eating may also have a physiological connection with depletion of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, leading to unbalanced brain chemistry. Interestingly, many depressive patients are vulnerable to binge eating, often turning to foods to calm their nerves.
To confront someone close to you with binge eating may result in relentless control battles. It is important to understand the importance of disengaging yourself from food issues, and that striving to control someone's eating behavior, in spite of your good intentions, may only aggravate the problem and interfere with the patient's capacity to change.
Accepting your own limitations and removing yourself from the problem are critical to disengaging someone from binge eating. The eating-disordered individual is responsible for the consequences of eating behavior, such as over spending on food, or cleaning up the mess from vomiting. Do not make excuses for the eating-disordered individual. It is important for the individual to learn to take responsibility for the consequences of the eating behavior, which is critical to recovery.
Do not proffer advice or opinions. Remember, an individual with an eating disorder is looking for approval, often a sign of anxiety or insecurity. Your reassurances or suggestions may at best provide only temporary relief. The individual must learn to develop his or her own judgment and perception of self-worth - which are often absent in an eating-disordered individual. Just be supportive and demonstrate your love and care. Don't play the role of a therapist!
Quite often, an eating disorder may be due to an unfilled void in one's life. Something may be missing in one's life, and that void needs to be addressed in order to pave the way for recovery.
Develop a healthier relationship with the eating-disordered individual through better communication, establishing responsibilities, and respecting rights (the right to grow up, and the right to take full responsibility for one's actions, among others).
Gradually, the eating-disordered individual will see the abnormal eating behavior patterns, and make the necessary changes or to seek professional help. Yes, this takes patience and perseverance. Don't forget that it takes time to develop the binge eating disorder; accordingly, it may take a while to disengage oneself from that eating disorder.
Fad Diets and Eating Disorders (pulished on 9 January 2008)
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Lau
Eating disorders are abnormal addictive behaviors, which cause food addiction problems. Many are suffering from food addiction because of fad diets.
What are fad diets?
Fad diets are the popular diets touted to make you thin or to cure a certain health problem you may have. Fad diets come and go. Examples of fad diets are the Atkins Diet, the Weight Watchers Diet, and the South Beach Diet, among many others.
Nearly all of these fad diets base on the principle of calorie restriction - which essentially means depriving yourself of food or eating only certain types of food, while avoiding others, and following diligently some set of rules of eating.
Unfortunately, many of these fad diets failed for two reasons.
Firstly, many individuals fail to adhere to these dieting plans. They do not have the discipline to follow through the set of rules of eating dictated by each fad diet plan. They succumb to the urge of eating. Who would blame them? After all, normal eating is a normal instinct in any individual. To force oneself to eat abnormally is against human instinct. Abnormal eating creates behavioral problems, which often lead to addictive behaviors and food addiction problems, such as anorexia and bulimia.
Secondly, dieting impairs your body's metabolism, which ultimately will turn back on you. Diets, even the relatively healthy ones, are only short-term solutions to your weight or health problems. Down the road, these fad diets will create more problems than what they have purported to solve.
For years, many nutrition experts have warned against going for fad diets, which often promote unhealthy preoccupation with food, instead of normal eating. Abnormal or unhealthy eating behaviors play havoc with your body's metabolism, which is the rate at which you you’re your calories. Your metabolic rate holds the key to weight loss. When you go on a fad diet, you are in fact "starving" your body, which, out of its natural instinct for survival, will automatically reduce its metabolic rate. As a result, you are not exactly losing the weight you so desperately wish to lose. The initial weight loss from any fad diet may be only the loss of water due to the sudden change in your eating patterns, not the extra pounds you want so desperately to shed. Worse, when you stop dieting, you metabolic rate goes up again, but not to where it originally was; in other words, yo-yo dieting (on-and-off dieting) may lead to malfunctioning of your body's metabolism until it can no longer burn calories efficiently. The implication is that your body has learned to maintain its weight with fewer calories. In other words, your effort in dieting has been a waste of good intentions. The net result is ultimate weight gain for you, not the weight loss you had hoped for.
Dieting is only a temporary weight control solution. According to dietitians, unless you change your lifestyle, or can adhere diligently and persistently to your chosen diet regimen for the rest of your life, losing weight permanently is almost impossible.
The danger of embracing one fad diet after another is that your overt preoccupation with your weight and appearance, such as counting calories, carbohydrates, and worrying about fat content of you food, may turn into an obsession, which will develop into eating disorders down the road.
A fad diet is not for any healthy individual.
Your Psychological Food Relationship and Your Health (published on 30 December 2007)
Copyright © 2007 Stephen Lau
Your physical food relationship bases on your eating habits and food preference, while your psychological food relationship relates to how you think about food and its effect on your weight and body image.
Your psychological food relationship begins to dominate when you succumb to eating to satisfy your appetite instead of your hunger, which is a physical need to supply your body with nutrients.
Your appetite, not your hunger, is in control when you decide to eat a to-die-for dessert even though you have just finished eating a hearty meal. Indulging your appetite to satisfy your eating pleasure rather than your physical hunger is an unhealthy psychological food relationship.
What make you form a psychological food relationship in the first place?
You may remember a pleasant experience with a specific food, thereby triggering your appetite. In addition, your emotions, positive or negative, can trigger your appetite. For example, an occasion for celebration may induce you to indulge your appetite and eat for sheer pleasure; isolation, loneliness, and depression may lead you to overeating.
It must be understood that self-defeating thoughts and unhealthy eating behaviors only perpetuate unhealthy emotions and bring on another food-addiction episode, thereby forming a vicious cycle of uncontrollable eating. Unless you recognize and acknowledge the trigger, which is often the emotion itself, you will continue to overeat.
So, how do you resolve your problem of having an unhealthy psychological food relationship?
Seek a positive solution to your negative emotion, instead of comforting yourself with food. Admittedly, it is not an easy task.
If you are bored, you would most likely keep on telling yourself that you are bored until you eventually become part of your belief system; it is like a self-fulfilling prophesy. To keep yourself occupied, you begin to eat for the pleasure of it. However, the pleasure soon dissipates, and you become bored again. Remember, comfort food is never comforting. To alleviate the boredom, you resort to eating. Before you know it, you have become a food addict who has developed an unhealthy psychological food relationship.
The solution to the eating-addiction problem is to find something to do other than eating to overcome your boredom. Of course, that requires some discipline and determination.
In addition to boredom, another common emotional trigger of overeating is anger. You may be angry with yourself or with someone else. Anger is a response to fear, frustration or pain. You unwittingly use food to suppress your emotion. After indulging yourself with food, you may become frustrated with yourself for overeating, and you may end up eating more to deal with the emotion of frustration, and thus forming a vicious cycle of emotional eating. Do not use food to distract yourself from feelings of anger; instead, learn to deal with your anger head-on. Never hold in anger because it will turn back on yourself. Neither should you internalize anger, for it may lead to depression. The key is to release your anger instead of suppressing or ignoring it.
Other than boredom and anger, stress is another food-addiction trigger. Contemporary life is stressful, and part of the stress stems from within yourself. Life stressors can initiate your emotional appetite, and thus creating an environment for overeating. Once you respond to stress by overeating or giving up on yourself through self-defeating behavior, you are allowing yourself to develop an unhealthy psychological food relationship.
The solution to the problem of stress-related food addiction is to identify your stressors and change the way you respond to them. Remember, the stressors are always out there, and it is the way you respond to them that makes a difference in your life.
Did you know that fear is also an emotional trigger of unhealthy food addiction?
Fear could be an underlying emotion that precipitates your unhealthy eating behavior. You might be afraid of eating a normal amount of food out of fear of getting fat. Or you might be afraid of not reaching your weight loss goal. Your subconscious fear often turns you into a food addict. Remember, some food addicts are not overweight, but they are so obsessed with their body image that they form an unhealthy relationship with food. They incessantly count fat grams and calories, and they weight themselves all the time.
The only way to change your unhealthy food relationship is to change the way you think about your body image. If you are a woman and a perfectionist, you will always be unhappy with your weight and body image, and you will have an increased risk for developing an eating disorder during your lifetime. Remember, your self-worth should be tied up with who you are, not with what you see in the reflected mirror, which is often grossly distorted.
From time to time, we all eat for emotional reasons. However, emotional eating becomes a problem when it interferes with your health and well-being. Improving your psychological food relationship may prevent emotional eating from developing into an eating disorder.
Food Addiction and Your Longevity (published on 10 December 2007)
Copyright © 2007 Stephen Lau
Food addiction is a disease of the mind, affecting both physical and mental health. Food addiction is an enemy of longevity. It affects not only your physical health, but your overall well-being. All centenarians have a moderate diet, and they never overeat.
Luigi Cornaro was one of the most celebrated centenarians, who lived from 1464 to 1566 AD. He was famous for his longevity wisdom on the art of living long related to calorie restriction. By his standard of daily consumption of only twelve ounces of solid foods and fourteen ounces pure grape juice, very few of us would become centenarians because many of us simply overeat.
Yes, we are living in a generation of food addiction.
So, what is food addiction?
Food addiction is an unhealthy relationship with food. This unhealthy eating behavior interferes with your health, happiness, relationship, and your life - food addiction is detrimental to your longevity.
Why are many of us addicted to food? Or why do we overeat?
Well, you may overeat if you are not happy with your body. You don't like how you look, so you use diet as a controlling factor to achieve your ideal body shape. You begin to be addicted to certain types of food that you think may help you achieve your goals.
You may feel guilty about who and what you are, or something you have done. Your guilt precipitates in your food addiction.
You may feel lonely, unloved, or frustrated. This initiates your addiction to comfort foods.
You may be obsessed with fad diets to control your weight. Fluctuating between weight loss and weight gain may lead to your switching from one diet to another, and subsequently eating and avoiding certain foods. The imbalance in body and mind may tip you over to food addiction.
You may have emotional problems, which cause chemical imbalance of dopamine, a brain chemical responsible for regulating your appetite.
You may have too much stress in you life (but who doesn't?). Your failure to cope with your stress may cause your serotonin (neurotransmitter) level to decline. In order to elevate its level, you body needs to eat, and you become addicted to food.
You may have genes predisposed you to food addiction, such as sharp sensory response to food. The sight and smell of food simply raises your level of dopamine.
You may have preference for certain types of food and drink, which induce addiction, thanks to those food manufacturers who have ingeniously ingested food flavorings, taste enhancers, and other emulsifiers into their products. Unknowingly, you become a victim of food addiction.
You may have set unrealistic expectations for yourself, and your inability to live up to those expectation lead to frustration, which is often a recipe for the development of food addiction.
You may have guilt about eating. Such imbalance in thinking and behavior often sets off a vicious cycle of food addiction and eating disorder.
Food addiction is common, especially in the affluent western world, where there is always an array of foods to satisfy the most discriminating taste.
Food addiction is compulsive eating - that is, eating when you are not hungry.
Food addiction often leads to binge eating, which is eating large quantities of food, and often without remembering what one has eaten.
Food addiction is a complex mental disease. It is a reaction to your emotions, to your distorted thinking. If you have food addiction, you need to admit that you have the problem. Denial will only aggravate your food addiction problem.
You may have a food addiction problem if you have the following: eating too much and too often; eating at night; binge eating; vomiting; and food fixation (i.e. always planning what to eat next, anticipating eating).
Food addiction has everything to do with your mind. To control your mind, or to let your mind control you is the issue with food addiction. Your obsessive thoughts and behavior about food have very little to do with food; surprisingly, they have everything to do with "control." Ironically, if you are addicted to food, you may strive to control your eating to compensate for the lack of control you may feel in other areas of your life.
Stop your food addiction and live a long life!
Return from Published Articles By Stephen Lau to Home Page.
Published in Online Journals
Copyright © 2007 & 2008 Stephen Lau
Why Are You Addicted to Sugar? (published on 1 March 2008)
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Lau
Like many people, you may think you are addicted to carbohydrates, such as bread, cakes, cookies, just because you like eating them. However, truthfully, you may be addicted to sugar - the sugar in these carbohydrates.
For example, eating a donut loaded with sugar will cause a blood sugar spike in your bloodstream, giving you the "feeling good" experience that might make you want to reach out for yet another donut. The explanation is simple: your sudden blood sugar spike giving you that "feeling good" sensation is almost immediately followed by a blood sugar drop that drives the craving to experience that sensation again.
Sugar triggers the release of opiates (addictive substances) from your brain, causing a magnetic effect on you, which may be the beginning of sugar addiction. Food manufacturers have found out that adding fat in food will further enhance the effect of food seduction on a consumer. In other words, fat and sugar complement each other in increasing your food addiction, making you want to consume more, and that is why sugar and fat are main ingredients in most processed foods.
Consumers are often misled into thinking that carbohydrates make them fat. No, good carbohydrates, such as bread, pasta, and rice do not make you fat. For one thing, healthy carbohydrates, being modest in calories, may fill you up before you can eat more. For another, even if you do overeat occasionally, those extra calories are most likely stored as glycogen for your energy use, or dissipated during exercise or any vigorous physical activity.
It is the sugar which is often added to carbohydrates - such as jam in bread, sugar coating in a donut - that makes you fat. Remember, sugar is concentrated calories. A 20-ounce soda may have 250 calories of sugar. On the other hand, a cup of rice has fewer calories than a cup of soda. Drinking a cup of soda will not assuage your hunger, while eating a cup of brown rice may fill you up.
Sugar is addictive. Sugar is one of the common toxic foods. In addition to causing blood sugar imbalance as previously mentioned, too much sugar may also overburden your pancreas, rendering it incapable of clearing sugar from you blood efficiently, and thus potentially leading to diabetes.
Too much sugar may cause anxiety, irritability, nervous tension, and even depression due to depletion of your body's B-complex vitamins, especially for women progressing to menopause.
Too much sugar may suppress your immune system and upset your body's mineral balance, making it more acidic, which is the underlying cause of many diseases.
Sugar is hidden in most commercial processed foods and drinks, such as salad dressing, ketchup, mixed sweet drinks, and sodas, among others. Sugar may come in many different forms: corn syrup (made from cornstarch, composed mainly of glucose), high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)(modified form of corn syrup with increased level of fructose), and aspartame (a low-calorie artificial sweetener).
Look at all food and drink labels before you consume them.
Also, avoid all sugar traps that may look "healthy" to you.
Organic brown sugar, made from cane sugar, is only slightly better than white table sugar. The word "organic" is not synonymous with "healthy."
Unrefined brown sugar is no more than white sugar dyed with molasses. It is still highly processed. Do not be misled by the term "unrefined." Brown sugar is mostly sucrose.
Honey is no more than "expensive" sugar with little nutritional value. That liquid honey does not spoil is due to its high sugar concentration, which kills bacteria by plasmolysis, and this fact may often give people the impression that honey is good because it does not spoil easily. However, honey is still sugar. Costing more does not make it any better or healthier.
White table sugar is the worst form of sugar because it is highly processed with zero nutritional value.
A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) survey revealed that the average American consumes the equivalent of 160 pounds of sugar a year - that is something like over 50 heaped teaspoons of sugar per person per day. If this is not too much, then what is?
Sugar addiction is mainly due to the standard American diet (SAD), which is high in protein, dairy, and salt.
If you have an insatiable sugar craving, your body system is most probably toxic, if not already unhealthy. To stop sugar addiction, you must consume more healthy carbohydrates, such as bread, pasta, and rice, instead of meat and animal products. The reason is that your body needs fiber so that you will eat less, and decreased intake of salt and fat will also eliminate the sugar addiction.
Why Are You Addicted to Cheese? (published on 21 February, 2008)
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Lau
Cheese is a part of the American culture. Americans enjoy eating cheese, and some are even addicted to it.
Is there such a thing as cheese addiction? Is it an overstatement that you, in fact, could be addicted to cheese?
In the 1980s, scientists already discovered a trace of morphine in milk and dairy products, in particular, cheese.
Morphine, which is an addictive opiate, was found to be present in cow. Specifically, casein, a milk protein, releases opiates upon digestion. Cheese contains much more casein than is found in milk from either cows or humans, because cheese is concentrated protein with water and lactose sugar extracted. Accordingly, eating too much cheese may result in cheese addiction.
Is cheese addiction bad for your health? Well, once you stop your cheese addiction, you may reap substantial health benefits.
Cheese is concentrated protein: a 2-oz serving has about 15 grams of fat, most of which are saturated, giving you bad cholesterol and blocking your arteries. Stop eating cheese may help reduce your bad cholesterol level.
Too much cheese may give you arthritis and migraine attacks. Research showed that cheese triggers migraines in many patients, and that cheese is also implicated in 50 percent of rheumatoid arthritis due to its high-fat content.
Research also showed that cheese increases insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), which is an aggressive promoter of cancer and abnormal cell growth.
Milk products may play havoc with your absorption of vitamin D, which is derived mainly from exposure to sunlight and which has to be activated by the liver and the kidneys. However, too much calcium from dairy products may suppress instead of activating the vitamin D in your body. Insufficient vitamin D increases the risk of prostate cancer.
In addition, cheese, which is rich in animal fat, increases the production of testosterone, which is linked to prostate cancer.
Cheese has much more casein (a protein that breaks down during digestion to form opiates - addictive substances) than is found in milk, ice cream, butter or other dairy products. Therefore, cheese, which has 70 percent of its calories from fat, is not only addictive due to the presence of opiates, but also fattening. Yes, cheese makes you fat!
Cheese addiction may lead to high blood pressure. A 2-oz serving of cheddar cheese has about 350 milligrams of sodium, and a cup of low-fat cottage cheese has over 900 milligrams of sodium - and sodium is a critical contributing factor in high blood pressure.
The dairy industry has colluded with fast food restaurants to add more cheese to their foods to trigger your cheese craving. A case in point, SUBWAY signed a contract with the industry in 1996 to include cheese in some of their sandwiches.
The cheese industry may be promoting all the health benefits of cheese because it wants you to be hooked on to cheese.
Stop your cheese craving!
Eat a healthy breakfast every morning with no animal products, such as milk, eggs, bacon, ham or meat sausages, and, of course, cheese. Only time will and can change your taste buds (it takes no more than several weeks).
Eat a fiber-rich diet, such as grains, fruits, and vegetables. A high-fiber diet controls and regulates your blood sugar level to stop your cheese craving.
Boost your appetite-controlling hormone (leptin) through eating enough calories (in other words, no dieting to reduce your caloric intake), a low-fat diet, and exercising.
Learn to cope with stress to reduce the propensity to use cheese eating as a solution to your emotional problems.
Motivate yourself to get out of cheese addiction with daily affirmations of the health benefits of not eating cheese, such as lower blood pressure, a healthier heart, and stronger bones, among others.
Too much cheese is not good for you!
Why Are You Addicted to Chocolate? (published on 13 February, 2008)
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Lau
Many find chocolate irresistible - including myself. We crave chocolate, we savor it, and we enjoy it. There comes the passion for chocolate - or rather the chocolate addiction.
What is the chemistry inherent in this passion or addiction? How does it make so many of us become addicted to chocolate?
The reason is simple: chocolate is an addictive drug. Scientists have found that naloxone, an opiate blocker, reduces chocolate addiction. This is strong evidence that chocolate is addictive, just like any other drug. However, chocolate is only a very mild version of addictive drug - but enough to have the brain effect that creates the real, compulsive attraction.
In addition to caffeine (although not nearly as much as coffee), chocolate contains other chemicals, such as theobromine and phenylethylamine, that create marijuana-like effect on the brain. Such chemical effect of chocolate on the brain is significant and substantial, especially when the chocolate seduction is reinforced by the smell, taste, and texture of chocolate.
But the chocolate industry would like you to believe that chocolate is good for your health.
Chocolate is good for you because it comes from a fruit tree, which contains antioxidants with beneficial heart benefits, especially dark chocolate. According to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, chocolate reduces your body's absorption of fat. In addition, chocolate contains flavonoids more potent than vitamin C in reducing your bad cholesterol.
But, is chocolate really healthy for you?
The truth of the matter is that if you absolutely love chocolate, you would like to believe anything - especially what you want to believe.
Firstly, most scientific studies on the health of chocolate are funded by the industry - a valid reason to take every positive finding with a grain of salt.
Chocolate is made from cocoa beans from a fruit tree. Almost all plants contain antioxidants. If you really love antioxidants, then go for vegetables and fruits, not necessarily chocolate. The problem with chocolate is that coca beans are so bitter in taste that loads of fat and sugar are added to make chocolate taste good and sweet. As a result, chocolate is loaded with calories, sixty percent of which come from fat, which contributes to cholesterol increase and weight gain. One ounce of chocolate contains as much as one-hundred-fifty calories with forty to fifty percent fat. M&M semisweet baking chocolate contains a whopping almost four hundred calories, over ten grams of saturated fat and more than forty grams of sugar! Do you honestly think these ingredients are healthy for you?
In addition, chocolate, which contains caffeine, not only irritates your kidneys and thins your blood, but also changes your mood.
Chocolate is unhealthy due to its unhealthy ingredients, which may cause headaches, obesity, heartburn, and emotional problems. If you must eat chocolate occasionally, go for quality ones, not the cheap ones which are mostly sugar, trans fats, artificial colorings, flavorings, and preservatives. Read the label! Watch out for additives and added fats! Or simply resist the chocolate temptation, if you can!
Eat chocolate just because you like it, and not because it is healthy!
If chocolate does not make you any healthier, does it make you happier?
A study of self-confessed chocolate addicts found that chocolate could give them a sense of contentment. However, the pleasure was accompanied by a sense of guilt, which could trigger an eating disorder. Worse, chocolate cravings were not driven by hunger: they binged on chocolate even when they were full.
If you crave chocolate only occasionally, you need not be overtly concerned. However, if you binge on chocolate, it could spell trouble down the road. Chocolate can do a lot more than just packing on the pounds if the addiction intensifies. The addictive effects differ from one person to the next. So it is of paramount importance that you pay attention to how chocolate affects your mood.
Binge Eating - A Component of All Eating Disorders! (published on 30 January, 2008)
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Lau
Binge eating is a critical component is all eating disorders, including anorexia and bulimia. Understanding binging is the key to resolving all weight-related eating disorders.
What is binge eating? Do we all binge occasionally? Is binging synonymous with love of food?
Binge eating is uncontrolled eating, often accompanied by shame and guilt. In other words, it is an act with full awareness as well as helplessness. Binge eating episodes occur quite frequently - often at least once or twice a week.
Shame and guilt often propel the resultant purging, which is getting the excessive amount of food out of the body system. Purging out of fear of weight gain is a critical component of bulimia, which is a disorder alternating between binge eating and purging.
Binge eating plays a pivotal role in any eating disorder, which is a psychological disorder using food to cope with disturbed emotions.
Many people have emotional problems, but they may not have an eating disorder. So how does one develop binge eating, or who are more vulnerable to this disorder than others?
Binge eating often begins with having an unhealthy abnormal food relationship. If you eat normally, you have reduced risk of binge eating even if you do have emotional problems.
Any dieting is abnormal eating. Initially, an individual may want to control weight through dieting, but without much success. Then that individual may try one diet after another with no substantial solution to the weight problem. It is this feeling of deprivation of food (feeling the unfairness of being deprived of the joy of eating), accompanied by despair and frustration (feeling the inability to lose weight despite the efforts), which may ultimately turn the individual from dieting into binge eating. As a result, cyclical eating problems develop and persist, indefinitely perpetuating the eating disorder cycle.
Binge eating, a self-deprecating eating disorder out of subconscious fear of not being able to stop eating voluntarily, may begin in the formative years of an individual who already has unhealthy eating patterns, or in young adulthood as a result of incapability of handling emotional, social, and environmental stress. Binge eating may also have a physiological connection with depletion of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, leading to unbalanced brain chemistry. Interestingly, many depressive patients are vulnerable to binge eating, often turning to foods to calm their nerves.
To confront someone close to you with binge eating may result in relentless control battles. It is important to understand the importance of disengaging yourself from food issues, and that striving to control someone's eating behavior, in spite of your good intentions, may only aggravate the problem and interfere with the patient's capacity to change.
Accepting your own limitations and removing yourself from the problem are critical to disengaging someone from binge eating. The eating-disordered individual is responsible for the consequences of eating behavior, such as over spending on food, or cleaning up the mess from vomiting. Do not make excuses for the eating-disordered individual. It is important for the individual to learn to take responsibility for the consequences of the eating behavior, which is critical to recovery.
Do not proffer advice or opinions. Remember, an individual with an eating disorder is looking for approval, often a sign of anxiety or insecurity. Your reassurances or suggestions may at best provide only temporary relief. The individual must learn to develop his or her own judgment and perception of self-worth - which are often absent in an eating-disordered individual. Just be supportive and demonstrate your love and care. Don't play the role of a therapist!
Quite often, an eating disorder may be due to an unfilled void in one's life. Something may be missing in one's life, and that void needs to be addressed in order to pave the way for recovery.
Develop a healthier relationship with the eating-disordered individual through better communication, establishing responsibilities, and respecting rights (the right to grow up, and the right to take full responsibility for one's actions, among others).
Gradually, the eating-disordered individual will see the abnormal eating behavior patterns, and make the necessary changes or to seek professional help. Yes, this takes patience and perseverance. Don't forget that it takes time to develop the binge eating disorder; accordingly, it may take a while to disengage oneself from that eating disorder.
Fad Diets and Eating Disorders (pulished on 9 January 2008)
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Lau
Eating disorders are abnormal addictive behaviors, which cause food addiction problems. Many are suffering from food addiction because of fad diets.
What are fad diets?
Fad diets are the popular diets touted to make you thin or to cure a certain health problem you may have. Fad diets come and go. Examples of fad diets are the Atkins Diet, the Weight Watchers Diet, and the South Beach Diet, among many others.
Nearly all of these fad diets base on the principle of calorie restriction - which essentially means depriving yourself of food or eating only certain types of food, while avoiding others, and following diligently some set of rules of eating.
Unfortunately, many of these fad diets failed for two reasons.
Firstly, many individuals fail to adhere to these dieting plans. They do not have the discipline to follow through the set of rules of eating dictated by each fad diet plan. They succumb to the urge of eating. Who would blame them? After all, normal eating is a normal instinct in any individual. To force oneself to eat abnormally is against human instinct. Abnormal eating creates behavioral problems, which often lead to addictive behaviors and food addiction problems, such as anorexia and bulimia.
Secondly, dieting impairs your body's metabolism, which ultimately will turn back on you. Diets, even the relatively healthy ones, are only short-term solutions to your weight or health problems. Down the road, these fad diets will create more problems than what they have purported to solve.
For years, many nutrition experts have warned against going for fad diets, which often promote unhealthy preoccupation with food, instead of normal eating. Abnormal or unhealthy eating behaviors play havoc with your body's metabolism, which is the rate at which you you’re your calories. Your metabolic rate holds the key to weight loss. When you go on a fad diet, you are in fact "starving" your body, which, out of its natural instinct for survival, will automatically reduce its metabolic rate. As a result, you are not exactly losing the weight you so desperately wish to lose. The initial weight loss from any fad diet may be only the loss of water due to the sudden change in your eating patterns, not the extra pounds you want so desperately to shed. Worse, when you stop dieting, you metabolic rate goes up again, but not to where it originally was; in other words, yo-yo dieting (on-and-off dieting) may lead to malfunctioning of your body's metabolism until it can no longer burn calories efficiently. The implication is that your body has learned to maintain its weight with fewer calories. In other words, your effort in dieting has been a waste of good intentions. The net result is ultimate weight gain for you, not the weight loss you had hoped for.
Dieting is only a temporary weight control solution. According to dietitians, unless you change your lifestyle, or can adhere diligently and persistently to your chosen diet regimen for the rest of your life, losing weight permanently is almost impossible.
The danger of embracing one fad diet after another is that your overt preoccupation with your weight and appearance, such as counting calories, carbohydrates, and worrying about fat content of you food, may turn into an obsession, which will develop into eating disorders down the road.
A fad diet is not for any healthy individual.
Your Psychological Food Relationship and Your Health (published on 30 December 2007)
Copyright © 2007 Stephen Lau
Your physical food relationship bases on your eating habits and food preference, while your psychological food relationship relates to how you think about food and its effect on your weight and body image.
Your psychological food relationship begins to dominate when you succumb to eating to satisfy your appetite instead of your hunger, which is a physical need to supply your body with nutrients.
Your appetite, not your hunger, is in control when you decide to eat a to-die-for dessert even though you have just finished eating a hearty meal. Indulging your appetite to satisfy your eating pleasure rather than your physical hunger is an unhealthy psychological food relationship.
What make you form a psychological food relationship in the first place?
You may remember a pleasant experience with a specific food, thereby triggering your appetite. In addition, your emotions, positive or negative, can trigger your appetite. For example, an occasion for celebration may induce you to indulge your appetite and eat for sheer pleasure; isolation, loneliness, and depression may lead you to overeating.
It must be understood that self-defeating thoughts and unhealthy eating behaviors only perpetuate unhealthy emotions and bring on another food-addiction episode, thereby forming a vicious cycle of uncontrollable eating. Unless you recognize and acknowledge the trigger, which is often the emotion itself, you will continue to overeat.
So, how do you resolve your problem of having an unhealthy psychological food relationship?
Seek a positive solution to your negative emotion, instead of comforting yourself with food. Admittedly, it is not an easy task.
If you are bored, you would most likely keep on telling yourself that you are bored until you eventually become part of your belief system; it is like a self-fulfilling prophesy. To keep yourself occupied, you begin to eat for the pleasure of it. However, the pleasure soon dissipates, and you become bored again. Remember, comfort food is never comforting. To alleviate the boredom, you resort to eating. Before you know it, you have become a food addict who has developed an unhealthy psychological food relationship.
The solution to the eating-addiction problem is to find something to do other than eating to overcome your boredom. Of course, that requires some discipline and determination.
In addition to boredom, another common emotional trigger of overeating is anger. You may be angry with yourself or with someone else. Anger is a response to fear, frustration or pain. You unwittingly use food to suppress your emotion. After indulging yourself with food, you may become frustrated with yourself for overeating, and you may end up eating more to deal with the emotion of frustration, and thus forming a vicious cycle of emotional eating. Do not use food to distract yourself from feelings of anger; instead, learn to deal with your anger head-on. Never hold in anger because it will turn back on yourself. Neither should you internalize anger, for it may lead to depression. The key is to release your anger instead of suppressing or ignoring it.
Other than boredom and anger, stress is another food-addiction trigger. Contemporary life is stressful, and part of the stress stems from within yourself. Life stressors can initiate your emotional appetite, and thus creating an environment for overeating. Once you respond to stress by overeating or giving up on yourself through self-defeating behavior, you are allowing yourself to develop an unhealthy psychological food relationship.
The solution to the problem of stress-related food addiction is to identify your stressors and change the way you respond to them. Remember, the stressors are always out there, and it is the way you respond to them that makes a difference in your life.
Did you know that fear is also an emotional trigger of unhealthy food addiction?
Fear could be an underlying emotion that precipitates your unhealthy eating behavior. You might be afraid of eating a normal amount of food out of fear of getting fat. Or you might be afraid of not reaching your weight loss goal. Your subconscious fear often turns you into a food addict. Remember, some food addicts are not overweight, but they are so obsessed with their body image that they form an unhealthy relationship with food. They incessantly count fat grams and calories, and they weight themselves all the time.
The only way to change your unhealthy food relationship is to change the way you think about your body image. If you are a woman and a perfectionist, you will always be unhappy with your weight and body image, and you will have an increased risk for developing an eating disorder during your lifetime. Remember, your self-worth should be tied up with who you are, not with what you see in the reflected mirror, which is often grossly distorted.
From time to time, we all eat for emotional reasons. However, emotional eating becomes a problem when it interferes with your health and well-being. Improving your psychological food relationship may prevent emotional eating from developing into an eating disorder.
Food Addiction and Your Longevity (published on 10 December 2007)
Copyright © 2007 Stephen Lau
Food addiction is a disease of the mind, affecting both physical and mental health. Food addiction is an enemy of longevity. It affects not only your physical health, but your overall well-being. All centenarians have a moderate diet, and they never overeat.
Luigi Cornaro was one of the most celebrated centenarians, who lived from 1464 to 1566 AD. He was famous for his longevity wisdom on the art of living long related to calorie restriction. By his standard of daily consumption of only twelve ounces of solid foods and fourteen ounces pure grape juice, very few of us would become centenarians because many of us simply overeat.
Yes, we are living in a generation of food addiction.
So, what is food addiction?
Food addiction is an unhealthy relationship with food. This unhealthy eating behavior interferes with your health, happiness, relationship, and your life - food addiction is detrimental to your longevity.
Why are many of us addicted to food? Or why do we overeat?
Well, you may overeat if you are not happy with your body. You don't like how you look, so you use diet as a controlling factor to achieve your ideal body shape. You begin to be addicted to certain types of food that you think may help you achieve your goals.
You may feel guilty about who and what you are, or something you have done. Your guilt precipitates in your food addiction.
You may feel lonely, unloved, or frustrated. This initiates your addiction to comfort foods.
You may be obsessed with fad diets to control your weight. Fluctuating between weight loss and weight gain may lead to your switching from one diet to another, and subsequently eating and avoiding certain foods. The imbalance in body and mind may tip you over to food addiction.
You may have emotional problems, which cause chemical imbalance of dopamine, a brain chemical responsible for regulating your appetite.
You may have too much stress in you life (but who doesn't?). Your failure to cope with your stress may cause your serotonin (neurotransmitter) level to decline. In order to elevate its level, you body needs to eat, and you become addicted to food.
You may have genes predisposed you to food addiction, such as sharp sensory response to food. The sight and smell of food simply raises your level of dopamine.
You may have preference for certain types of food and drink, which induce addiction, thanks to those food manufacturers who have ingeniously ingested food flavorings, taste enhancers, and other emulsifiers into their products. Unknowingly, you become a victim of food addiction.
You may have set unrealistic expectations for yourself, and your inability to live up to those expectation lead to frustration, which is often a recipe for the development of food addiction.
You may have guilt about eating. Such imbalance in thinking and behavior often sets off a vicious cycle of food addiction and eating disorder.
Food addiction is common, especially in the affluent western world, where there is always an array of foods to satisfy the most discriminating taste.
Food addiction is compulsive eating - that is, eating when you are not hungry.
Food addiction often leads to binge eating, which is eating large quantities of food, and often without remembering what one has eaten.
Food addiction is a complex mental disease. It is a reaction to your emotions, to your distorted thinking. If you have food addiction, you need to admit that you have the problem. Denial will only aggravate your food addiction problem.
You may have a food addiction problem if you have the following: eating too much and too often; eating at night; binge eating; vomiting; and food fixation (i.e. always planning what to eat next, anticipating eating).
Food addiction has everything to do with your mind. To control your mind, or to let your mind control you is the issue with food addiction. Your obsessive thoughts and behavior about food have very little to do with food; surprisingly, they have everything to do with "control." Ironically, if you are addicted to food, you may strive to control your eating to compensate for the lack of control you may feel in other areas of your life.
Stop your food addiction and live a long life!
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