Developing a Food Plan
Most food addiction treatment programs start out with a sugar- and flour-free plan, where you weigh and measure foods at three meals with one or two snacks a day. This is so important because you may have a fairly distorted view of what is a normal portion. While some people can eat cleanly without weighing and measuring, you may need to stick with the scales and measuring cups at the start. You also can expect a typical plan to:
• be clear and structured. There need to be boundaries with food, a beginning and end to eating meals. You need to know which foods are good choices and which will trigger you. You’ll want something clear enough to keep you from overeating, but loose enough to live in a world where you share meals with others without being tied to one thing. You’ll want to commit to three meals a day and maybe one or two planned snacks, preferably around the same times each day.
• include all the main food groups and that means complex carbohydrates such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins (fish, poultry, meat, tofu), fats, and dairy. You’ll want the foods necessary for health.
• satisfy hunger. It’s important to have a plan that satisfies and doesn’t leave you feeling hungry. The guiding principle is there needs to be enough to eat and not too much. You want a food plan you can live with for the rest of your life, meaning it can’t be a restrictive weight-loss plan. Ironically, when you eat well, you get to a weight that’s right.
Though there’s not one way to eat trigger-free, an example of a weighed-and-measured plan might look like this (and I cannot stress enough that there can be great variations of this, depending on your size, preferences, activity, and triggers, so you will want a nutritionist’s guidance in working out something more precise and tailored for you):
Breakfast: 1 ounce protein (cheese, egg, meat), 1 cup whole-grain cereal (shredded wheat, oatmeal, puffed rice; something with healthy grains like Uncle Sam’s cereal, which has flaxseed), 1 cup milk or yogurt, and 1 fruit.
Lunch: 3 cups salad or 2 cups cooked vegetables, 1 tablespoon dressing, 3 ounces protein, 1 starch.
Snack: 1 fruit, 1 ounce protein.
Dinner: 3 cups salad, 2 cups cooked vegetables, 1 tablespoon dressing or butter, 4 ounces protein, ½ cup starch.
Snack: 1 fruit, 1 cup cereal, 1 cup milk or yogurt.
To figure out what kind of vegetables and salads, meats or proteins, and starches are best for you, I recommend getting the advice of a nutritionist who specializes in food addiction.
Beware: not every nutritionist understands eating disorders in regard to food triggers and possible food addiction, and many won’t agree with the idea of eliminating foods. (This thinking likely stems from years of working with anorexia nervosa where most foods are considered “bad.”) So your food trigger may be baked potatoes slathered in butter, sour cream, cheese, and bacon. You’ll want to avoid those ingredients just as the alcoholic needs to steer clear of wine, beer, or liquor. But a nutritionist may loathe having you do so, pointing out the nutritional value in those things. This is why I can’t stress enough it’s not the diet itself that’s important to the food plan, but the structuring of what and when to eat and avoiding your triggers.
What, then, can you expect from a good nutritionist? Whether schooled in food triggers and addiction or not, a nutritionist can help you develop a balanced plan right for your body size. Once you get the plan, you can take it to someone well-versed in overeating issues, maybe someone overcoming bingeing in recovery, for second opinions and additional advice and adjustment.
Every bit of care in this regard is worth it because you’re developing an eating plan for your lifestyle. Listening to that lifestyle is essential too, because you’re sure to find where one starch is good for one person at lunch, another person may feel deprived and need two. If you work in an office and pack your lunch or dinner, you may need less than one cup of a starch like rice, where the road worker needs more protein, maybe six ounces. Some people don’t need snacks. Others work odd hours and need to make their meals in a different formation.
Eating healthy through the day will help keep your blood sugar stable, which reduces cravings. Also, the more you eliminate sugar and white flour from your diet, the more your cravings will decrease.
Of course, you knew sugar would come up again, didn’t you? Let’s look at it for a minute and then at some specific foods and ingredients to watch out for.
Seeing Sugar in Disguise
Because of its stimulating properties, eating no sugar at all is easier than trying to handle it in moderation. The most difficult part is trying to find what foods really are sugar-free, because sugar is hidden in so many forms, with so many different names, in so many foods and drinks. You have to learn to read labels and find out what to eliminate.
Because of its stimulating properties, eating no sugar at all is easier than trying to handle it in moderation.
The Five-Ingredient Rule will help. Look at the top five ingredients listed in a food item. Don’t zero in on how many grams of sugar are listed. It can be misleading. You can think a food might be okay because the grams of sugar are low, but when even the tiniest amount can trigger you, that food needs to go on the AVOID list. You want to remove the sugar from what you eat as much as possible. Look instead at the total list that orders ingredients from highest to lowest amount. Is sugar or a derivative one of the top five ingredients? Then this is an item to avoid.
To really assess a food’s sugar content, familiarize yourself with these varying terms for it, so you don’t end up eating sugar hidden by a different name:
Agave Nectar
Corn sweetener
Corn syrup, or corn syrup solids
Dehydrated/evaporated cane juice/syrup
Dextrin
Dextrose
Fructose
Fruit juice concentrate
Glucose
High-fructose corn syrup
Honey
Invert sugar
Lactose
Malt syrup
Maltodextrin
Maltose
Maple syrup
Molasses
Raw sugar
Rice syrup
Saccharose
Sorghum or sorghum syrup
Sucrose
Syrup
Treacle
Turbinado sugar
Xylose
If you’re questioning honey, molasses, and dehydrated/evaporated cane juice/syrup on the list, don’t. Some nutritionists say these sugars are healthier than cane sugar because of the way the body breaks them down in digestion. Yet they are still triggers and can do just as much damage to your food plan as a spoonful of the refined stuff, because they can get you going on a binge. I tried honey with my tea because a well-meaning natural foods person suggested it as a better alternative to saccharin. But honey was the equivalent of sugar for me. Sweetness was my trigger, so I ended up having tea with my honey. Artificial sweeteners can work the same way.
Rethinking Sugar-Free Sweeteners
There are many different opinions on whether or not to include sugar substitutes in your plan. Frightening as it is to say, you may not know until you try sweeteners for yourself. Developing the best food plan for you will be a process of trial and error. But if you can avoid substitutes, then do. Even the taste of sweetness, and often the foods the sugar substitutes are in, are triggers.
Deciding on Drinks
What you decide about sweeteners will probably affect the beverages you choose, and what to drink is as important as what you eat. So many of us are used to flavored and sweetened drinks, whether it means soda pop, coffee, or tea. Some food addiction professionals will tell you to avoid all three of these beverages because the caffeine in them stimulates eating.
Caffeine, by the way, can be a two-edged sword when you’re wrestling with food triggers, dysfunction, and addiction. Because of its stimulant properties, caffeine can increase metabolism, energy, fat burning, and calorie expenditure. It can also stimulate hypoglycemia (when your blood sugar level is low enough to affect brain function), when your brain sends you hunger cues to fuel up and raise the blood sugar level.1 So use caution with the trial and error of caffeine in your plan.
While you could go decaf with the coffee and stick to herbal teas, drinking water will help you even more. Your body is made up of 60 to 70 percent water, and no person can survive more than a few days without it. The American Dietetic Association found that just a 2 percent water deficit can result in a 20 percent decline in strength; the lack of water is the number one trigger of daytime fatigue; and in 37 percent of Americans, thirst is often mistaken for hunger.2 That’s why you need to drink at least eight glasses of water every day to replenish what your body depends on, plus to better metabolize fat, feel fuller, and improve skin tone. But what’s a good way to achieve it?
• If you drink one glass first thing in the morning and three to four glasses by noon, you’ll be halfway to your daily goal.
• Drinking a glass of water thirty minutes before every meal helps you achieve that feeling of fullness to help prevent overeating, and will help your digestion.
• Fill a two-liter bottle with water first thing in the morning to drink by the end of the day, an easy way to see how much is consumed and how much more your body needs (regardless of whether or not you feel thirsty). If carrying a two-liter bottle seems awkward, use a half liter or 16.9-ounce bottle you fill and drink from four times over the course of a day.
If you’re a juice drinker, things are trickier. Juice needs to be considered a fruit and should be measured, so typically half a glass equals one fruit. If your food plan allows only so much fruit, you may want to forgo the juice and opt for the actual fruit to satisfy your hunger.
Gum
Right. Gum is not a food—at least it shouldn’t be—but it’s often used to substitute for food, so it’s worth mentioning. I used to abuse sugar-free gum. When I committed to a food plan, I wouldn’t take a chance on eating a piece of cake or a bowl of ice cream. I knew these could trigger me to binge again. Gum seemed safer somehow. It’s not always. I was chewing something sugar-free, but I still was putting something in my mouth to relieve stress, bring comfort, and help me cope emotionally. It was the hand-to-mouth behavior and way of coping I needed to change because once I gave in to feeding my emotions and spirit with something to chew or swallow, that in itself was a trigger and whatever I put in my mouth was never enough.
This is where diets go so wrong for those of us who are wired for triggers. The mantra of a diet is replace unhealthy foods like sweets with something healthy like carrots and celery. But a so-called healthy food can trigger you just as much as a sugary, fatty one when you’re feeding something that has nothing to do with nutritional needs.
After years of not having any gum due to addictive chewing, I now enjoy freshening my breath without being addictive about it. I believe some of these behaviors were more a function of emotional dependency and working on the spiritual and emotional recovery enabled me to no longer rely on these behaviors.
Going with Grains: Bread, Cereal, and Pasta
Most food plans for people with food addiction or who binge and overeat start without any breads or pasta since grains can be addictive and tricky to navigate. It’s just simpler this way—to stay away from the trigger foods and then gradually build them back into a lifestyle plan, if possible.
If you’re already building in bread, cereal, and pasta, be aware that one of the great challenges is making sense of their labels. Look for whole-grain products to get the optimum nourishment from what you eat. An intact kernel of grain is made up of three parts: an outer coat of bran, an inner layer of germ, and starchy endosperm in between. When wheat is refined to make white flour, the bran and germ are stripped away, along with most of the grain’s fiber, vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients (which in the grain fight disease, and in your body help prevent disease and infection). So look for 100 percent whole wheat or 100 percent whole-grain products, and pick “whole foods” as much as possible.
This may seem alien at first, since so many diets have told you not to eat any grains whatsoever. Yet everyone needs to find grains that are healthy and won’t trigger a binge—and different grains will work for different people. You’re changing from a diet mentality to a sane and stable relationship with food. When you eat whole foods, you’re more likely to be satisfied, and when you’re more satisfied, then you eliminate physical hunger from the triggers to binge or overeat.
In fact, diet breads have fewer calories but aren’t exactly nourishing. Look closely at products that say “whole wheat” or “multi-grain” as there may be whole wheat or grains in the product, but they may have been pulverized or refined and are right there along with mostly white flour. The reason white flour is so dangerous is because its starches break down quickly in the digestive tract and enter the blood stream as glucose, the kind of sugar that converts easily to fat. In fact, there’s a saying, “the whiter the bread the sooner you’re dead,” because there’s little nutritional value in white bread—it’s made with refined flour, a process that strips most of its B vitamins and iron, then replaces them with chemical “enrichments.” Because of the process, even bread labeled as “whole wheat” but containing “refined flour” in the ingredients can spike blood sugar levels faster than a candy bar, according to a Harvard Health Glycemic Index Chart.3 So even for bread brown in color, if the label starts with “enriched wheat flour,” the product is not whole grain, no matter what is printed on the packaging. Enriched is the ingredient term to steer clear of.
TRIGGER TALK
Getting Started
Deciding you are going to change how you eat can be overwhelming if you think change has to happen en full now. You don’t begin a journey at your destination. Rather, you take one step and then another and another. So when you start to change how you eat and formulate a food plan, you start where you can, how you can, and the best way is to identify what you’ll do first and then next, something like this:
• This week I’ll stop eating sugar.
• Next week I’ll cut out white bread and white flour pasta.
• By week three, I’ll have figured out with help the best food plan for me.
• By this month’s end, I’ll have eaten on the food plan for one full week.
See how identifying the steps gets you to living on the food plan and finding freedom within thirty days? See how within two months you can be living better?
Now identify how your new eating plan will help you keep going forward toward complete freedom like diets or ways of eating in the past never have—chart the positive steps you are taking in place of things you used to do, something like this:
What I Did Then Ate whatever, whenever I wanted Starved myself and then binged Changed what I ate with my circumstances Bought whatever looked good for the fridge and pantry |
What I’ll Do Now Cut out sugar and refined carbs Stick to my food plan and times to eat Read food labels Keep kitchen stocked with healthy foods |
Keep your “Then and Now” chart in a place that helps you keep taking steps toward your goals. If you’re really having difficulty, there are inpatient and outpatient treatment centers that can help you when you can’t get started on your own. With time and help you can internalize all of this soon enough, and you’ll be in a whole new place of eating and living—the Promised Land of Freedom.
Using the Five-Ingredient Rule for Fats
Another word and ingredient we’re already prone to steer clear of is fats, thanks to our diet gurus. We watch the word and look for it in terms of how many grams of fat are in this food or that. But in an effort to avoid fat, we buy skim milk, fat-free half-and-half, nonfat yogurt, low-fat mayonnaise, and low-fat salad dressing. Yes, these items have lower fat grams, but that’s not our greatest concern. We think we won’t be triggered to binge on yogurt and condiments, but there can be sugar in these items to trigger us to go for more satisfying sweets, like a dessert—or several. Lower-fat salad dressings have a lot of sugar in them, for instance, which is more dangerous to us than the fat in them.
What to do?
Use the Five-Ingredient Rule when buying salad dressings. Make sure sugar is not one of the top five ingredients (greatest content) in the food. This limits your choices but you will find dressings that are tasty and sugar-free. Once again, don’t be afraid if the choices available are high in fat. If you are no longer bingeing and are eating reasonable amounts, this really doesn’t affect weight. Plus, our bodies need some fats. Eating a normal portion of food helps fill us. Then we don’t have to worry about a dressing with seventeen grams of fat in a tablespoon, because the tablespoon of dressing is far healthier than the binges.
THE NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD
By this point, you may feel overwhelmed, like this food plan business is too complicated. It’s true you can get as obsessive about a plan as you once were in feeding your triggers. You’re creating a new relationship with food, and as in any new relationship there are questions. How much time do we spend together? Where shall we meet? What does this all mean?
The good news is you’ll find all the time you once spent and wasted on food is now available for a new embrace of life. You won’t miss the race to hoard snacks or binge in secret behind a closed door, or the moments wiping your mouth and brushing your front for any crumbs or evidence of overeating. You can spend newfound time on other things that really do mean more to you and help you pursue and live your dreams.
Tips like the following will help—practical things you can do, and guiding principles for this new relationship you’re making with food.
Know Appropriate Portions
Rigid planning threatened to undo me. I couldn’t live my life weighing and measuring every bite. I do think weighing and measuring have a time and place, and some people need to do this for years, maybe always. Others can weigh and measure at home, but not when eating out. I know some people who find success by bringing their scales with them, even to restaurants, events, and another’s home, so they’re certain not to overeat.
In the beginning, as Marianne mentioned, you’ll probably find more rigid boundaries are better than looser ones, and then they shift. What helped me find my own lines in the sand was being able to easily eyeball right portions. I needed to do this so I didn’t presume I was eating right. I could know for certain. Up to now you may not have done well in thinking on your feet, or at the table, about what choices to make. Learning portion sizes helps you be informed and plan ahead.
To ensure I wouldn’t be looking for food between meals, wouldn’t eat more than I needed at any given meal, and wouldn’t have to feel guilty for overeating or fear gaining weight, I used the following gauges. Measures like these help because there are some foods easier to assess in portions than others. For instance, an egg is nicely contained in a shell so you know one egg is one egg, and most slices of bread are each about 1.41 ounces (or 40 grams). But how to know the right portion of a salad with various mixed greens or a piece of meat or cheese?
• A two- to three-ounce portion of meat is about the size of your fist. This is considerably smaller than what’s served at many restaurants, which is more the size of a paperback novel—good to know so you can eat just half or a third and take the rest home.
• A three- to four-ounce portion of white fish is about the size of a checkbook.
• A one-ounce piece of cheese is about the size of a small matchbox or a pair of dice.
• One serving of raw, leafy vegetables is about one cup, and cooked vegetables are about half a cup. It’s good to be aware many restaurants double these amounts in the portions served.
• One serving of brown rice, whole grains, or mashed potatoes is the size of half a tennis ball.
• One-fourth cup of dried fruit is about the size of a golf ball.
• One teaspoon of butter or margarine is less than the size of a thumb tip.
• An eight–fluid-ounce container of yogurt, or cup of beans, or cup of dry cereal is about the size of a baseball.
You can come up with more visuals like this as you work out your food plan. Take the foods you most incorporate in your meals and put them on a plate next to items you can easily associate with them—things you know the weight and feel of, that are familiar to you: a cell phone, a lipstick, a computer mouse, a postage stamp, a business card, a dollar bill, a quarter, your key ring to the car and house. As you learn what’s representative, it may even help for you to snap some photos or write down these associations on an index card or key the information into a reminder on your cell phone for handy reference.
In time, you too will be able to eyeball serving to know the right portion size.
THE BEAUTY OF A PLAN
Most of all, as you look at the right food plan for you, remind yourself how the structure will actually set you free from so many decisions you’ve wrestled with in the past, on what to eat and where to get more food.
You’ll know what you’re going to do and you can be satisfied, not deprived and hungry, as a diet will leave you.
No one ever starved with three weighed-and-measured meals a day, and neither will you. Stay the course with the structure and let these words ring in your ears because they are the sound of success: Just stick to the plan.