Food Addiction? How to Break Free - Dr. Vera Tarman

so welcome everyone Lucas here Today's Show is called breaking food addiction and I'm joined here with Dr Vera Tarman Dr Thomas a food addiction expert she writes speaks treats people who suffer from all types of food addictions food recovery she's the author of a couple of books food junkies the truth about food addiction and also food junkies recovery from food addiction you can find all her work videos interviews and really lots of great resources online at Vera tarmin MD like medical doctorman md.com and we will link up in the show notes as well Vera welcome to the show yes uh thank you I'm delighted to be here to talk about this subject I always like to start with definitions and I know we mentioned food addiction and immediately people say yes I'm I'm completely addicted to the raspberry scone at Starbucks or whatever it is and in some cases maybe they are in some cases they aren't how do you define addiction so people can understand is this really an addiction or am I just you know eating things having cravings and things like this okay you know well first of all let me say that uh generally you because it I'm seeing people at sort of at the last resort and and uh early days when food addiction develops people usually just call it sugar addiction or processed food addiction and so there's a big thing in the debate about what should we call it so if anyone's thinking what is food addiction mean we have to eat all of us have to eat food um you know start with sugar addiction do you feel a compulsion to eat sugar and if you can say yes I do then you know that's what we're talking about so uh basically you know in a nutshell uh food addiction is you know the com or sugar addiction we'll start with that is the compulsive and uncontrolled um Behavior around sugar um meaning that you feel compelled to eat even if you're not even thinking about it um and uncontrolled amount you want to stop and you can't stop despite adverse consequences so I I mean there's there's a whole bunch of criteria of you know do you fit the criteria of food addiction but if basically if you if you find that you have a compulsion um an obsession around it I want this thing you know in two hours from now I'm gonna have my favorite treat or tonight I'm gonna have my favorite treat and if I don't have it I'll I don't know what I'll do you know that kind of thinking um despite Edward's consequences because addiction is when you want to stop but you can't and that's when we start saying well there's a problem here now you mentioned sugar is it not possible for somebody to be addicted to like Lay's potato chips or Haagen-Dazs ice cream and the ice cream of course has sugar but the the Savory the Savory thing gets some people too right absolutely and actually interestingly enough there is that there does seem to be a bit of a gender split in that women will be more likely to be prone to the sugary stuff and men to the uh you know the pizzas and the uh the chips and the and the the turkey or the or the barbecue stuff uh because there's you know in the barbecue stuff that's sugar I mean the macro ingredients are still sugar and flour basically refined carbohydrates um you know packaged into protein bits so that they look like you know chicken bits chicken nuggets well those are addictive but they're addictive because of the carbs that are put around them um but but basically it's sugar so that's the sweet but then uh you know if you think about how sugar is processed in our body metabolized in our body it actually um you know flower becomes sugar in five or ten minutes so for our purposes it virtually is still sugar and so it's addictive so so really it's sugar and flour and then gradually over time uh Dairy can become an issue nuts can become an issue fats can become an issue but they might not be initially they're stages the food addiction basically so I was a I'm in my mid-40s I was a teenager in the 90s and uh Eating Disorders were a huge problem in my generation and obviously there's still a problem but I mean it was like you know we were getting lectured in school constantly I had multiple friends who were hospitalized I mean it was a thing and um obviously you know Eating Disorders are still around embodied dysmorphia is probably worse than ever but somehow the conversation has shifted um or the I don't know the way we talk about things or something has shifted but anorexia bulimia specifically I mean when I was in high school we constantly you know mental health experts were coming to lecture and things like that yeah how do you how do you differentiate between food addiction and potentially or do you differentiate and something like anorexia bulimia are they similar the same difference yeah so so I have to say I'm actually delighted to hear that there's more attention paid now too or a little bit more um to the concept of addiction and I think that's just because there's more and more research showing that the food industry is making Foods addictive doesn't mean you're a food addict if you're if you're drawn to eating them but then it becomes a syndrome and then that becomes food addiction and the fact that you're saying it's a little bit more uh uh uh you know in our Consciousness means that my work is actually getting not just me but my my people are the people who are pushing this concept they're actually having some success but the concept of eating disorder and food addiction they look the same and and uh to some degree there's political will like in the 90s the the eating disorder world the clinical World Physicians uh medications that's where the focus was and it was not on the food industry but now the food industry is kind of it's gone over the top so you know now we're able to sort of point the finger to them as well but what is the actual difference is actually really hard to tell just by looking at the person if a person is uh eating all the time and overeating all the time you could easily say they have binge eating disorder or bulimia especially if they're trying to you know make room for more food by you know throwing it up basically purging um or you can be uh on what we now call intermittent fasting which I fear I really fear from an addiction point of view is just another version of some kind of condoned anorexia I I know that Vaseline has a medical value and I think it should be within the realm of medical coaching it should be with a medical professional somebody just doing it on their own I think they're walking into potential danger zone there I don't recommend that but anyway it because it can actually be another form of addiction so again how do you tell the difference it's really hard to tell the difference and that's part of the bane of the uh food addiction world is that we can't say we're different so that Physicians and and uh basically the the psychiatrists who who are designing the DSM-5 which is the diagnostic manual of all addictions or pardon me of all this um diagnosis they want to have some kind of evidence what's the difference and we can't really give it to them because it looks the same but there is a difference and I'll tell you what the difference is it's just it's hard to pick it up on a test there's no blood test and there's no real good question there but the the fundamental difference is um and so somebody can ask themselves who's listening um if you um the eating disorder model anorexia bulimia has the belief that there is some kind of psychic distress trauma in the past or um difficulty living life because of the disordered emotions and you use food to manage that you put all your focus and your anxiety and your your attention to fix yourself on your food or your weight um but if the psychic distress were resolved that stuff would no longer be necessary that's the eating disorder it's a psychological model and the food addiction model is one where it says um it doesn't matter if you're happy or sad or distressed or just just it's Christmas it's great let's eat you know or it's you know the football game let's see it doesn't matter what the psychic psychological state is is if you eat the food then you're going to want more because it's addictive it's like if I don't smoke a cigarette I don't want one but if I start smoking I'm gonna want one you know in 10 minutes or 20 minutes I we we develop a phenomenon of craving this is the language of addiction so how do we tell the difference well if you can say I'm going to go and see my therapist and then eventually what my overeating can be managed to just eating once in a while and I can do that I can have a you know a treat on a Saturday and that's it then you're probably in the eating disorder camp but even if you go to therapy for 30 years and and you discover that if as long as you don't have the treat you're okay but the moment you start having the treat you just want the rest of it and then you want some more tomorrow and if that starts to happen that's addiction and that's it's really you have to kind of experiment with yourself so if there's anybody here who's tried everything any kind of moderation and they've continued to struggle you're probably looking at an addiction model foreign with that in mind what do you think of the idea of cheat days a lot of popular diets promote you know Saturday Sunday or free days or Sunday is a free day what do you think about this idea that would be the same as if there's somebody yeah yeah if there's any smokers out there the ones who have really quick day on a Saturday no I mean we can even use harder language than that anybody uh can you imagine a crack addict who finally got clean can they have it no they can't and similarly with us uh who who identify with food addictions like no there's no sugar because what happens is you might get away with it that week but it's now in your mind that oh I can have it and you before you know it we call it like the 60 pound bite you have one bite and then 60 pound laters you're crawling back on your knees saying I gotta stop this stuff yeah so no there's no such thing as cheat days but if a cheat day works that means you're probably not yet on the pathway to addiction you're not an addiction sure that that makes sense you know people will say things like um you know I have a chemical imbalance or you know my friend or a relative who's struggling with weight has a chemical imbalance what what is the truth or the myth around chemical imbalance when it comes to an addiction obviously there's a psychological component but physiologically what's going on well that is I mean it would be fair to say it is a chemical imbalance if we want to use the language of science we could say it's a dopamine impairment you know so now chemical dopamine which is our excitement thrill flush of pleasure there's an imbalance of that but that doesn't mean therefore that you can say well that that's not there's nothing I can do about that it just means that what you're going to do is going to be different than the person who doesn't have a chemical imbalance you know you're not going to want to put more fuel on the fire because once you've got that chemical imbalance that's the whole point it's it's the chemical in the food or I mean the sugar which inspires dopamine that will then you know make that whole craving thing go so uh you have to recognize yes I do have a I like to I don't want to use the word chemical imbalancing I'm going to say dopamine impairments that's just or really if you want to if you're familiar with the term insulin resistance definition of diabetes we could say this is a dopamine resistance definition of addiction sure sure yeah weird situation I uh listeners to the show send me all kinds of messages some of which I can be helpful with many of which I'm totally unqualified for but I got a weird one the other day and a listener sent me a picture of his freezer which was filled completely filled with kind of this organic micro brand of ice cream and I I mean there must have been 75 pints in there it was a huge American freezer thing huge you know and his message was really interesting and what he said is I eat one of these every single night before bed I've done this for 18 months or something like that he's like I'm not overweight I don't have any health problems I've been listening to your show I'm just wondering is this a problem I didn't know what to say I didn't know what to say and um and two two questions one do you think how should this listener think about that and secondly what about the people for whom food addiction doesn't show up as a weight problem because there are people from whom they don't gain weight you know thank you for bringing that up that's so important six actually so that you know how many normal weight people do we have in our in our Canadian American population one-third only uh by the way so the Obesity is a huge issue and that I think is thanks to food addiction but definitely in the uh uh in the normal weight population we've got a lot of people with food addiction who are using a fasting they're using uh exercise they're using all sorts of things to maintain their weight but you know we actually have a higher level in the underweight population which could potentially be the anorexics that could be that could have a food addiction more than even the general population so uh weight actually it's just one symptom but it's not diagnostic by any means so thank you for bringing that up you can be totally normal weight uh and and be struggling because you're not going to tell people you know food addiction is like the last shame it's a lot of Shame it's it's in more shame you know there's a little bit of I I I don't know if you're going to agree with me but a little bit of Glory to being an alcoholic you know there's all sorts of Mythology around us literature authors yeah is there that for food addiction where people are eating out of somebody else's garbage like it's just it's so embarrassing nobody's going to talk yeah so you know it's super shameful nobody talks about their eating behaviors unless until they're finally in recovery and they get used through it you know then they've Let It Go um but uh the the first question about does your fellow have a problem um you know in this world of today we're in the Egyptian world you know we're no longer as cut and dried I would say in five years ago I would have said yeah he's got a problem um because he's he's uh but now I would be almost like well does he think he has a problem is this affecting his the rest of his diet is it affecting his day I would wonder if something were to happen you know if if his fridge broken it all melted and he couldn't have any that night how would he feel if he's got a dependence on it I'd start to worry about that but if he's if he's satisfied with that um and it's not causing any trouble fine you know fine um we could make the argument that uh there's probably some kind of sweetener in there not sugar but some kind of artificial sweetener that that's not very healthy I I generally uh when I work with people say that sweeteners are a nice Bridge they're like a harm reduction from eating sugar to naan and you know you can be in that bridge for a few years before you get off it's probably a good idea to get off why because you're still um fostering that need for sweet and and we don't actually need sweet you know one of the messages I hope to leave you with today is when you actually get off the sugar which takes successfully physiologically biologically that dopamine impairment piece it only takes about I don't know a month tops probably less than two weeks two weeks to a month until your your taste buds and everything kind of resort back to where they should be and and you don't need the suite because just blueberries is sweet enough yeah you know like my Facebook group that I'm hoping people will come to is called I'm sweet enough sugar-free for Life yeah eat anything else because the banana is like whoa that's even too sweet but certainly berries and apples and and even carrots and beets and roasted vegetables they are sweet enough and and and I don't need to have that concept of sweet but this fellow is still keeping that going so he's still kind of letting that um addiction thing it's not troubling him like again harm reduction but it's still there and if he wants to get off that whole craving for wanting Taste of sweet just get over it in a month and it's done when we talk about food addiction by the time somebody's probably by the time somebody gets to the place where they're considering this and talking about it yeah you know usually something's gone wrong in their life they have the freezer full of ice cream and they have an extra 60 pounds or you know they're they're coming back from lunch break late at work because they had to go to this special place to get this whatever special food they're craving or whatever what are the challenges or they've got diabetes yeah yeah exactly they've got a health scare they ended up in the ER they ended up on insulin or whatever it is um I guess one of the challenges is that um when somebody gets to that place their minimum years often decades down a path of casebud entrainment kitchen habits grocery shopping store routines family holidays it's not you know so maybe the physiological psychological Addiction in theory can be broken in 30 days but you know just just the idea of what you're talking about you know roasted vegetables instead of Breads and pastas and Wheats right that that's just it it's like a coup d'etat you know so how do you help people think about this like realistically let's say somebody's you know eaten the same way they've eaten all their life Suddenly It's come to a head so maybe I have type 2 diabetes and they're 60 pounds overweight and they're reaching middle age and they realize you know sexual dysfunction and endometriosis all those crazy stuff's happening like it does and and they want to fix it what are we really talking about here is it a three-year journey is it a is it a 18 month Journey it's a lifetime Journey but at some point sure at some point you buy into it and then you don't need you don't need yeah so so the first thing I would say is um become educated so like read my book food junkies um start listening to podcasts that talk about this like become educated to the idea now if you're already so um uh tired of your life like you're willing to listen to anything that you know you've probably already done that um so then you're gonna stop the sugar uh now now just like with any other drug like we have treatment centers for if you want to stop cocaine alcohol um whatever we have treatment centers even even uh smoking quit smoking we've got like programs to help people basically I want to make the acknowledgment that that first four weeks and that idea of I gotta stop this what kind of life is that sort of what your implication is there uh we know that already we've got tools to deal with all of that so basically what I would say is plug into the addiction Community there is a food addiction community that knows exactly every thought that you have how am I going to live without this the rest of my life and we have answers and we have people who say yeah we got it we've been there too and guess what it in three weeks from now that's going to be gone and and then in three weeks from now you're gonna go oh my god it feels so much better maybe I can have a piece of fruit or cake now and then we're going to say no this is what happened okay you want to plug into a community and um I would say uh for if you really really like you said years and years and years of trained your receptors to you know basically it's going to be an issue all the time because we do say once you're an alcoholic you're always an alcoholic but you can be an alcoholic in dormancy and it can be latent it can be quiet but you have to constantly be on check for the thoughts because we always have this delusion that we can pick up again and be normal and you want to be connected to a community so it could be a Facebook Community it could be a 12-step Community it could be just a community of peers where you've decided you're going to be my food buddies where we talk about food the healthy stuff and and basically buffer against the food industry's constant messaging that um you know having this latest thing is going to make your your life and your day super superb you want to you want to get away from those messages so it is basically a lifestyle but and you might say I don't know if I want to do this like but but you're already people listen to this this is so important you already invested in that lifestyle you've got diabetes that's a chronic condition obesity once you've gained that weight it's always going to want to come back it's you're already in a chronic you're already heading towards something that's going to be daily why not be in a in a healthy place place where you just have to in the morning uh be aware of what you're going to eat today be prepared for any potential dangers talk and then that's it the rest of the day is yours there's no more self-loathing there's no more looking at the at your closet going oh my God I can't wear this anymore because you're afraid of that whole bit one hour a day versus a day of misery for the rest of your life yeah so if somebody's addicted to Oxycontin or if somebody's addicted to smoking you know the goal whether they're in Al-Anon or a 12-step program or working with or just on their own their goal is to stop right the food the food we can't stop so what does Breaking the addiction actually what does it actually look like like what what is the stop what is that we can stop the trigger of food so part of the journey this is to not do this yourself to actually hire somebody it is worth the cost of getting a food coach it really is you have to do it the rest of your life it might just be for three or four months figure out what your bigger foods are so it's going to be sure we do not need to each I'm talking about added refined sugar I'm not talking about fruit and and and in vegetables I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the extra sugar in your coffee and and candies and and all that kind of stuff so we don't need that we can eat just healthy food basically stay away from processed food and you can even stop listening to this talk right now you'll be fine if you're just doing the unprocessed stuff with it so we don't need the process stuff uh and and then uh you may discover if you've been years down the line of eating badly that you also have to stock um some of the Savory stuff that may not have a lot of sugar in it but still has a little bit of something you're gonna have to stop that you may have to stop Dairy like I said earlier or not or figs or something like even even uh potatoes which I my starch and and um bananas but you can still eat berries so figuring out what your triggers are and then you're good yeah intent just not that stuff yeah I I appreciate that because uh I think you know if you're going to bring an addiction you have to quit something and I think the way most people approach it is uh with moderation it's like how can you moderate something you're addicted to you you can't even moderately come back to alcohol if you have an alcohol problem none of that would make that would really make any sense um and I'm speaking for many this is not just me Vera's experience I have I have not sugar for more than 10 years like we find extra sugar probably 15 years now and I I do not miss it at all and I'm speaking for many when I say this this is many of us if you don't have just a little bit it it's like somebody very wise said if you don't need it you're not going to Crave it like you just won't yeah I know that um you had a story with uh addiction as well too so I we should have started with that because I know when it comes to food when it comes to food you know people it's very very common that people just tune other people out and they say there's this yoga guy what does he know about he's never you know he's never a state of play being Haagen-Dazs or whatever and so here's Vera this medical doctor she's just you know spouting off things she learned at med school or whatever so give people a little bit of context so that they don't uh just tune your message out as you know singing from the pulpit sure well actually when I was in med school or even before that I'm which would have been not a child of the 90s I'm a child of the 70s um and uh I would have been diagnosed with having a bulimia at that time because the food addiction was not even on the radar then even I would have thought that's crazy what does that mean um and so I was I was 100 pounds more than I am now and my focus was school and food uh and you know I couldn't smoke pot anymore I couldn't drink anymore because I was in school and I was very committed to doing well at school but I had to do something to get through those horrible days of you know internship and whatever what did I have I had that food at night and and you know my partner would make me um a cake twice a week and I would eat half of it while I was waiting the raw batter and then the other and you know my the the level at which I ate food like I said it would have been believe me I threw it up and ate it it was my focus to get me through um and so you know you could have said well there was that psychic distress but that continued after uh when I um you know was a doctor and I was obese telling people to lose weight and there was just something wrong with that story and it wasn't actually until I got into the addiction field that it just hit me oh my God this is the same thing and right around that time was when things were starting to be uh studied and and being published and so I connected the dots thanks to the research at that time um and uh ever since I adopted that approach I'm just going to use this you know a crack addict would not smoke anything they wouldn't even smoke pot even if that wasn't their initial drug of choice because it's a gateway to the other so I I realized if I do that then my desire to eat will be quiet and that is exactly what happened exactly what happened so I mean I went through the experience and that's why I feel so impassioned to um speak on podcasts and whatnot because uh uh I mean I'm not alone really I'm not there are many of us out there and and you know you hear so much about how people lose weight only to gain it back again that's because they're doing moderation if you want to lose weight and keep it off please follow this this concept of uh yeah if you're one thing that confuses me is you know you mentioned food helped you get through school certain things they they soothe people differently you know if you were you know you mentioned the the crack addict or the person who uses cannabis or the person who smokes or the person who Vapes or is so confusing to me how you know someone could be addicted to cigarettes but would find food addiction and not only a foreign concept they they just can't even get that hit from it and someone else you know I had a friend who went really far down the road with crystal meth I was like how could you be freebasing crystal meth is crazy I mean just just sounded crazy I mean I couldn't even pick it up what is he doing yeah from your addiction studies you have any indication if this is like neonatal stuff nature nurture just wire differently I mean if we put 100 people in a room and we put out different vices whether it was cocktails sugars people would reach for different things do you have any indication why that is you know there's that idea yeah so some of it is the actual drug itself so like if you take um alcohol which actually is the universal it has all of the neurochemicals in it it's why it's why it's so easy if a person like your your crystal meth person if you stop um he'll probably uh and thought well you know it's okay I can do some some other stuff you might actually find that alcohol will soothe the problem or actually uh sugar actually well then the person who quit smoking they may they may choose the cigarette over the sugar but once they put the cigarette down the sugar becomes very appealing but you see the thing is is a substance like freebasing that's smoking cigarettes is smoking like cigarettes nicotine is about on par with sugar and if we could smoke sugar it would be as addictive as cigarettes um and and the fact that a person is freebased well they're smoking it and and that's a little bit more addictive more it's more compulsive than if a person is um uh um chewing it like if they were chewing a so so eating food is slower um uh but if we could enhance it by eating quickly and a lot that makes it more addictive and like I said if we could smoke it now I'm really worried about vaping because vaping yeah yeah smoking sugar and tobacco yeah right you have a flavored Vape that's sugar in there as well that really worries me um but anyway so how quickly something goes to the brain is one feature and then also um some drugs are more dopamine based than others are more opiate based or endorphin based so that would be like uh the fentanyl crisis of today it's the endorphins and and you know endorphins gives a slightly different feeling than dopamine dopamine is the excited oh this is I'm looking forward to this endorphins is that kind of uh pain pain relief yeah pain relief you know these things are happening but they don't matter to me because I am on some other world and alcohol has a touch of that too and sugar does too but not as much yeah about somebody who likes ice cream Ice Cream Dairy there's a lot of endorphin in Dairy and sugar and when you eat ice cream it's not the excitement of a candy bar it's the kind of glazed out like that guy who's eating um at night a tub of ice cream he's glazing he's almost having like a mild endorphin Buzz hmm yeah yeah bottle of wine great conversation vera for people listening especially this time of the year I know people will want to get your book and follow you you mentioned a Facebook group can you tell people how to connect with you online yeah okay so online you can do my my webpage which is uh beer retirementmd.com but I actually think I I'm a lot more active on the um I have a Facebook group as well if you're a retirement uh with pardon me I'm sorry a YouTube um a channel which has all of my videos on it but the Facebook group I'm sweet enough sugar free for life is where um you can get on and it's free and you can say hey I want to quit sugar and then people it's very supportive it's very active so that's one good way to get on perfect well thanks so much for coming on the show thanks for all your work let's keep in touch okay thank you

Channel: YOGABODY

Views: 15,698

Keywords: yoga, yogabody, lucas rockwood, yoga teacher, yoga teachers college, food addiction ted talk, sugar addiction how to stop, food addiction recovery, dr vera tarman food junkies, fast food junkies, food addiction, food junkies, sugar addiction, weight loss, cravings, keto, low carb

Id: J3R1Fjnyli8

Length: 30min 10sec (1810 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2023