Alcoholics can stop drinking alcohol. But people can’t stop eating. It’s not possible. You cannot avoid all fat, sugar and salt like an alcoholic avoids alcohol.
You can’t stop drinking alcohol without medical assistance once you’re an alcoholic, or you will die.
It’s factually correct for people who have developed a physical dependency on alcohol.
Source: thousands of medical examples, studies, data, and decades of research.
That’s true for a certain percentage but misses part of the point here. Once an alcoholic has successfully detoxed, it is possible and highly encouraged that they do not partake any alcohol going forward.
That simply isn’t possible with obesity as humans require food to survive. So this is where the analogy with alcoholism breaks down as it is never possible for the obese person to be the equivalent of “sober.” Instead they have to learn moderation which is conceptually a different challenge than becoming a teetotaler.
That’s a good point. I read that a lot of morbidly obese people process food the same as normal people process drugs or vigorous exercise. Their body produces endorphins when they eat, which is what leads to the excessive eating. They’re literally addicts, getting high all the time. Is there any medication that can block the endorphin response to their eating, since it’s pretty much a chemical abnormality? Maybe something like naltrexone?
So true. Fasting is easier for me than eating some and then choosing to stop, but I know I can’t do that every day.
Just like an alcoholic has the problem, that he can’t just stop after a beer or two.
It’s the same mechanism.
Everything you use to cope with emotions can produce that.
Like nicotine itself isn’t hard to quit - not much of a physical addiction. But as one used cigarettes as little self rewards and uncomfortable situations, you can’t just give up your tool to manage your emotions.
The only way out is to face those emotions and solve the original issue. Else you’ll just be hopping through different “helpers”
Edit: maybe to give an even more extreme example:
Cocaine doesn’t produce any physical addiction, but because it gives you the feeling of being awake and you suddenly can handle the stress, you’ll fell completely lost and alone without it in those situations.
That’s why trigger situations are a thing.
With food, just like cigarettes, it’s even worse, because you use them for good and bad times.
So the association with feeling good is much harder to break.
As we need food, this addiction is probably even worse, because you can’t just stop eating all together and face your emotions. So you’re daily tempted with it.
I personally can’t relate with overeating/“food addiction”, but having spent a month tapering opiate teas (which I used to still be able to work during my burnout), I understand the feeling of constantly looking for an excuse to still do a bit more - just today…
Because this day was especially bad and I desperately need the crutch, or especially nice and I feel like I wanna celebrate it somehow.
this day was especially bad and I desperately need the crutch, or especially nice and I feel like I wanna celebrate it somehow
This is food for so many families. Having a bad day? Let’s go get some dessert to make you feel better. A good day? Let’s celebrate with a big meal.
So remove sugar, oil and salt from the diet? That sounds to easy.
Seriously, that video had a horrible ending, with no advice on how that might be feasible.
And it sounds worse to me than just being overweight and eventually getting diabetes and dying early (like most of my family)
I think that what you will realize if you do it is that other tastes become far more pronounced and you start to enjoy the medley of tastes that are inherent in food. And feeling better all of the time is a far bigger reward than a salty, sweet, oily taste just some of the time. At least that’s how it’s been in my life as I’ve improved on this continuum.
Interesting.
Although I’m sceptical about that working for me specifically: I have a very weak sense of smell and therefore taste, so sweet, salty, umami, etc is probably much more of my tasting experience compared to most people. Without that I think I’d be left with not much at all.
As an example, spicy (‘hot’) in food to me is pure pain. I literally can’t comprehend how there could be any kind of flavor to it that people not only enjoy, but so much that they actively seek it enough to build a tolerance to the capsaicin.
I have struggled with weight my entire life and it’s very much San addiction and not something you can just fix or stop doing.
I say that all the time. People look at an obese person and thinks “that’s disgusting you should be ashamed” and the same person will look at an anorexic peeson and think “oh poor girl hope she can recover from her eating disorder”
They are both eating disorders!
Let’s try to go pass our biases and see obesity for what it is, a eating disorder, not with disgust or shame.
Edit: I would just like to point out to the dumbdumbs that I am overweight and was obese for a while. I am a witness of how bad people will treat you without even knowing your background or problems that took you there. Not everyone is a suitable candidate for bariatric or ozempic, there are lots of different reasons and only a very small portion is caused by lazyness as toxic people like to call it. I am and will always be an avid defender of humans treating humans like humans and not “lazy fucks”.
The problem is people spent years trying to push a narrative that fat people are beautiful and we all need to love and worship how amazing it is.
No one ever says that shit about a meth head.
Majority of the world is overweight. We clearly are not doing enough to make it a negative train in society compared to its accepted or “beauty” status.
You took this to a whole other discussion. Yes there are some people that think fat “should be beautiful” and those people are fooling thenselfs more than the others.
But this is not the majority a neither has been pushed “for years”. This began with the woker culture trying to humanize fat people exactly because of how bad people are treated just because they are fat. But I can tell you I don’t know any fat person that thinks like that. Like most (not all) very skinny people have some eating disorder, most (not all) obese peoole have some eating disorder, this can be in consequence of depression, addictive personality or even in conquencence of medication that they need
That is why is so important to no judge someone without knowing why they are in this situation.
Apparently overeating/obesity has been categorized as a chronic disease since 2013. I was just talking to a weight management doctor who was explaining that there’s actually hormonal responses that differ person to person that play a huge role.
That’s what happened to me. I’m overweight myself and my doctor is a wheight expert too and In my case I was able to change my life with depression treatment but also with some hormonal replacement.
Important to note that the doctor is a chiropractic doctor (a practice based in pseudoscience) not a medical doctor.
