The term “Food Addict,” is too broad because there are many foods I can eat in normal, sensible amounts.
I am not a sugar addict.
The term, “Sugar Addict,” is too narrow because wheat, rice, oats, and all other grains I have tried to eat make me binge until I can’t eat anymore.
When I eat foods that turn to glucose in my body, the eating madness takes over, and I gorge until I finally collapse into bed and sleep it off.
In the morning my head, joints, and muscles ache. My hands and lips are swollen, and I feel so desperately sad that I don’t want to go on.
The self loathing used to drive me to eat more of the foods that bring me momentary euphoria: the sweets and starches that drive my mania.
Back in 2008, I went on a whole food version of the Atkins Diet. After just a few days, my appetite normalized, and I felt like I was back in control of my eating. I would experiment with fruit, oat bran, and sprouted grains, and the binges would come roaring back.
I learned not to try to re-introduce the foods that made me gorge, and I added moderate intermittent fasting. I learned to finish eating by one or two o’clock in the afternoon. I wouldn’t have breakfast until 16 hours later, and this is how I discovered the freedom of living in Nutritional Ketosis.
In 2013, I wrote the e-program, “Sugar Freedom.” Over the past 5 years, I have become aware that I need to be free of more than sugar in order to stay in nutritional ketosis. When I am in N.K. I feel alive and I thrive. I don’t get the hit and the euphoria that I get from glucose producing foods, but I do get reliable energy, and a steady kind of optimism that allows me to be a reasonably sane wife, mother, and worker.
Yesterday, I went shopping in town with my son. I had eaten my ketogenic breakfast at 7AM. By 2PM I was only mildly hungry, but we went to Chipotle for lunch, and I ordered a salad. I foolishly used some of the dressing that came with it instead of bringing my own. The dressing has honey in it, and I am still paying the price for eating it as I write this at 8:30 the next morning.
One very good thing, is that the terrible eating episode that I went through afterward finally drove me to find a new word, a true word for what I experience when I eat foods that contain sugar or grain. I experience Glucomania. I am a Glucomaniac, and I can only be free of this madness when I don’t eat sugar or grain.
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