OMG, I'm poisoning myself!!!

That was my initial thought after I watched Hungry for Change. I went to my kitchen and looked in my cabinets and fridge and nearly had a heart attack. Everything, literally everything, was bad for me! But, seriously, when you find out that you need to drastically change your eating habits, you kind of have this panic attack that says, "What the heck am I going to eat?" And then, instantly, you're starving. We are now, suddenly, at risk.

This is addiction.

Remember our little assignment from yesterday? I hope you had a chance to watch the movie and make a list of triggers. Now, "trigger" has become a buzz-word of late. I've noticed that kids in my office will just throw the word "trigger" around like confetti. "The teacher asked me to write an essay, and I was triggered." Or, "that girl from choir looked at me in the hall with that face, and I was triggered." These are not really triggers. If you're going off of these instances, LIFE is a trigger. And it is, but in order to use our triggers to help us progress, we have to define specifics. Therefore, a trigger is going to be defined as follows:

trig·ger
/ˈtriɡər/

verb
1.
cause (an event or situation) to happen or exist.
"an allergy can be triggered by stress or overwork"

Based on this definition and our goal of eating healthy foods, a trigger is something that specifically causes, in this case, relapse. What makes you go after food? It might be some of the following:

• Extreme school stress
• Commercials on the TV for pizza
• When you fight with your boyfriend
• Long periods of idle time

These are only examples, but you see where we are going with this. This might take some thinking. As you go through your day today, take stock of when you eat. Are you eating alone? Are you genuinely hungry? What happened right before you walked into the kitchen to grab your snack? What were you thinking about? What were you reading? What was someone saying? These might be your triggers.

After we understand our triggers, we need to write them down. Then we need to write down our thoughts after we are triggered. I've created a little worksheet for this. You can download it here. So, these are some examples:

Trigger: Food ad on TV.

Thought: "I want to bite into a burger right now."

Trigger: Boyfriend and I have a fight.

Thought: "I'm so angry at him/mad at myself/so sad."

Trigger: Drive to work traffic.

Thought: "I want a Starbucks right now, do I have time to stop before work?"

Make a little journal of these things. Maybe you'll start to notice a pattern. We'll use this information later. 

Why is this important? Because addiction isn't logical. Does it feel better to eat good food? Of course it does. Does it feel good to have a hangover? Absolutely not. We've all had that morning after having one or five too many, being sicker than a dog and thinking or foolishly saying, "Never again."

Bullshit.

Because alcohol addiction doesn't care how bad you feel. The same is true of food addiction. One very sad fact is that "food addiction" hasn't really been defined as a thing yet. You won't find it in the DSM-5. Why? Because it is so very, very hard to separate that which nourishes us from that which poisons us. We don't have to make excuses, though. We know what we eat makes us feel like total trash. We are just powerless to fight it.We're not eating our food, our food is eating us.

Something else to take into consideration is that food is like alcohol in that it is a social engagement. Food used to be about survival. Now it's the number one way to socialize. We go out for dinner. We meet for coffee. We use food to accompany nearly everything. Some of your triggers might be social patterns. 

The purpose of this exercise is to compile the information we need to reduce the risk of relapse after we have started eating well. If we just jump into another diet, what's to keep us from dropping it again? How does a recovering addict prevent relapse? He has support, and he has a plan. We are going to create both a plan and a support network before we change our eating habits. That way, after we implement change, we are more likely to succeed. On that note, I will see you all tomorrow. 

As always, if you're struggling with self harming thoughts, please reach out to the Suicide hotline (1-800-273-8255). 

We're in this together.

Jess