This might help someone - A Mental Health Disorder has been at the root of my food addiction and my inability to be consistent.
VERY long post so TL;DR: Finally accepting that I have a mental Health Disorder (in my case BDD/OCD) has already started to change my relationship with food, lessen the addiction and food noise, and change my reasons and approach to weight-loss and fitness.
Hello all! I just wanted to post here because I feel like I found a key that helped me finally break through what felt like a hopeless food addiction. This post will not be for everyone, it will not apply to everyone, and I would never discourage someone from losing weight and getting fit/ healthy. This post is for people who struggle to be consistant to a degree where they feel hopeless. The root cause could be a mental health disorder and by focusing on healing that, you might actually start to heal your relationship with food and your body so that yo have the resources, support, and space to actually stop coping and start being consistent. I wanted to share this incase it might help someone else. While we share similar goals all of our circumstances and details that cause us to gain weight and will help us to lose weight are different. I have REALLY struggled with being able to be consistent and recently had a lightbulb moment! Maybe this will help someone who is struggling in the same way 💖
The example from my own life: I have struggled with my weight for a long time, in a way, my whole life. I have specifically struggled with food addiction and obesity for the last 10 - 12 years. I was a big drinker before then but hardly ate so it was easier to get drunk which kept me from gaining weight. When I stopped drinking as much and started eating MUCH more, that’s when all the weight-gain started. It didn’t help that the last 10 years were rough: I was in survival mode financially and with my mental health , in an unstable relationship and life style that depleted me, and we all know Covid happened, and then my dad was diagnosed with cancer and passed away from it after a brutal two year battle. Through it all I struggled with using food to cope, wanting to get fit and healthy, but not being able to gain control and consistency with my habits around food and activity.
Fast forward to this year. I cut out a lot of stressors that were contributing to depression in my life: job I hate, draining long term romantic relationship, and other relationships that negatively impacted me. I finally had what I wanted - space to just work on MYSELF. I thought “finally, nothing to get in my way”. All the excuses I had for not being able to lose weight were eliminated from my life and I was left with just me. At first it felt easy, I was happy to be on my own and able to lose some weight. Apply a little pressure or stress, and all the eating to cope would come right back. I already yo-yoed with my weight so many times this year it’s not even funny. I started to question: is it just a habit now that’s so strong I’m struggling to break it? Is it food addiction and should I go somewhere to get in-patient treatment like rehab? The last two weeks I hit a breaking point. I got really depressed due to my inability to be consistent. I felt doomed to yo-yo my entire life and never get the results I wanted.
Last Monday I was struggling with the feeling of wanting to lay around and do nothing but binge eat. I dug into that. I thought, “why would I want something that actively goes against everything I actually want for myself?” The answer: this behavior is benefiting you in someway - not just the dopamine hit, but you are getting something from it. Okay - what am I getting from it? The answer: comfort. Okay, comfort from WHAT?! The answer: everything I’m avoiding doing - examples: I hate having to go outside, hate having to get ready, dread interacting with people, my world is shrinking smaller and smaller because I’m basically trying to avoid everything. Okay, WHY? And then I broke down crying - the answer: I just feel so hideous all the time and not because of my weight but because of my face. There it was. The answer. I have known this my whole life. Most of the time, I feel grotesquely hideous. I have used various methods to try to cover that up from alcohol, to food, to barley leaving my living space. I hate getting ready because it rarely seems to help- doing make up and all that when it’s said and done I still feel hideous. This time, instead of judging myself for it, I let myself cry about it. I let myself accept that this is true. I’m always so busy trying to mask this or deny this because it’s embarrassing and I’m ashamed to be so impacted by my appearance as a grown woman when there are so many “real problems” in the world. But I could no longer deny this is at the root of what I’ve been running from my whole life. It’s caused depression, social anxiety, agoraphobia, food addiction, and has negatively impacted every aspect of my life. I finally decided to accept I have Body Dysmorphic Disorder and to seek help for that instead of ignoring or covering it up. I joined Reddit threads, found support groups, started going through a BDD workbook, and booked my first therapy session with a BDD expert specifically to focus on that.
In this process I have learned that BDD is a sub category of OCD. I learned that people often don’t seek help with their BDD until 10-15 years after diagnosis (if they are lucky enough to get diagnosed) even though 80% of the people with this disorder struggle with lifelong suicidal ideation, and most have co-morbid depression, and social anxiety. Why? With symptoms so severe, why is it then that this mental health disorder is so drastically under diagnosed and under treated? 1) People are ashamed. People think those who struggle with BDD or other non-specified OCD revolving around their appearance is immaturity, vanity, or some other moral failure on their part. People often down play the very real and painful impacts these mental health disorders can have on someone’s life. Along with that people don’t want to admit they are ugly or think they are ugly. Struggling with this disorder brings a lot of shame. It’s like double the shame - shame about your appearance and shame that it impacts you so deeply. 2) People who struggle with BDD believe they are ugly and often get stuck in the loop of questioning if they have BDD or if they are just ugly. If they conclude they are just ugly they continue to painfully live with what is probably BDD. Even if someone is not imagining that they are ugly but let’s say by societies standards would be considered ‘ugly’ or even ‘conventionally unattractive’ they COULD still have BDD or some similar variation of OCD that is not talked about nearly as much. What matters most is the obsessive and compulsive behaviors around appearance and the very negative impacts it has on your life. This made me realize, a lot of people are probably struggling with this and are stuck in the same places I was in (shame or uncertainty) and therefore not seeking help. If any of this has resonated with you, I highly encourage you to visit The Center for Clinical Interventions website and work through their BDD workbook: https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/Resources/Looking-After-Yourself/Body-Dysmorphia. Also, and possibly most importantly, to try to find a therapist who specializes in BDD / OCD. Find community, even the BDD and other mental health reddit threads are a great place to start and they often have links to helpful resources.
It has only been a week but my relationship with food has already started to change. Now that I can actually accept and can name clearly without shame what I’ve been running from (OCD/ BDD) and can work on it directly, my relationship with food is changing. So what is changing already?
A huge desire for me to want to lose weight was so that I could look better. Changing my face mostly would require expensive and dangerous surgeries but losing weight seemed like the thing most in my control. Nothing wrong with that AT ALL. However, it wasn’t helping me because in a way I was fixating on weight-loss as a punishment for my appearance. Even when I tried to approach it with love and care the truth was underneath. I DO still want to lose weight and get fit but not as a desperate fix to look better - which didn’t work because food was my coping mechanism for the exact same problem. It really was a messed up cycle!
Once I realized this, I paused weight-loss as my primary goal and switched to focusing on learning about OCD/BDD and getting help for this. Once weight-loss was put on pause, I was able to better observe and understand my relationship with food. Nothing was off limits, no food was labeled ‘bad’, I was trying to be mindful but not fully restricting. I had tried this approach before but without accepting the root cause for what was driving me to want to eat highly palatable food in excess in the first place, it didn’t work. Now that I had this knowledge, I found myself eating what I wanted but then getting satisfied quicker. Throwing what was left away WITHOUT feeling a sort of grief for leaving food behind. I found myself thinking ‘I already ate something highly palatable today let me reach for protein’. I found myself finally more naturally following all of the good knowledge I had because my main source of internal pain was no longer being ignored. I naturally just had less food noise and less of a desire to cope with food. I also found that on the one day the urges to cope with food were coming back strong - I was more easily able to identify the emotional roots of what I was covering up and pursue that instead of food (even after giving in a little to the food noise at the beginning of the day).
I am at the beginning of this process to learn to manage my BDD/ OCD and if I continue to see positive impacts on my relationship with food I will update again.
I hope this helps someone who is feeling hopeless and secretly (and maybe even unknowingly) struggling with BDD, OCD, or any other unaddressed mental health disorder. Even if you have BDD/ OCD and start to address it and your relationship with food doesn’t start to change right away like mine did, that doesn’t mean there is no answer. Before I got to this point I worked through a TON of other things going on with my mental health especially recovering form growing up in a dysfunctional family system resulting in CPTSD (and THAT took a few years). All of our paths look different but whatever yours looks like I’m rooting for you! Keep going! 💖