Addict Nation (34 page)
Americans eat about twice the amount of meat as the global average. We’re about 5 percent of the world’s population, but we eat more than 15 percent of the meat consumed in the world. Sadly, the rest of the world is starting to imitate us. People in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Mediterranean, whose diets had been to a great degree plant-based, are now equating meat with affluence and gorging on it too. So they too are developing Western ills, like obesity, heart disease, acne, and diabetes.
In the early 1960s, the world’s total meat supply was about 70 million tons. In 2007, it was more than 280 million tons.
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That’s a lot of dead animals. Whether it’s a chicken breast on a salad, a slice of bacon on a breakfast sandwich, or the pepperoni on a pizza, each of those animal products came from a living being that cannot exist without those parts. As I always like to say, there’s no such thing as “spare” ribs. The average consumer is nibbling on the carcasses of hundreds of animals each year.
It’s Destroying the Environment
According to an in-depth United Nations study, meat production is
the single biggest
cause of global warming, far beyond transportation, something even hybrid-driving, liberal Democrats have been trying to ignore, for fear of having to look in the mirror.
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The wanton destruction of the rainforest is happening primarily to create grazing land for cattle. In one typical five-month period, more than a thousand square miles of Brazilian rainforest were destroyed to create either grazing land for cattle or farmland to raise crops to feed the cattle.
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Also, consider the methane gas produced by the animals themselves and their mind-boggling physical waste. Think how much excrement 10 billion animals produce (if that doesn’t ruin your appetite, I don’t know what will). A lot of runoff from factory farms heads down rivers, like the Mississippi, and ends up in large bodies of water, like the Gulf of Mexico, where it’s creating aquatic dead zones.
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Then factor in all the energy expended in growing all the grain, corn, and soy consumed by animals. If you care about world hunger, consider this. If all the “feed” used to fatten up cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, chickens, and turkeys were instead given as food to starving humans around the world . . . we could eliminate world hunger.
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In Third World countries, poverty is marked by malnutrition and starvation. In America, poverty is increasingly marked by obesity. The greater Huntington, West Virginia, area was recently designated America’s unhealthiest region. The five-county pocket of Americana has a poverty rate of almost 20 percent, which is well above the national average, and about
half
of all the residents are obese! No surprise that the area also led the nation in diabetes and heart disease.
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Tragically, the dysfunction underlying that region’s obesity is becoming the rule, not the exception. Is this really what we want to be?
Given all of these facts, it is obvious that our fast-food lifestyle is simply not sustainable! Now we must ask ourselves, “What can be done?” We can start with more humane farm practices, slashing subsidies to agribusiness, and encouraging consumers to purchase locally grown, organic fruits and vegetables. It’s time we stopped endorsing and promoting our own demise.
You Ain’t Heavy, You’re My Enabler
There’s an old saying, “Tell me who you walk with and I will tell you who you are.” What that means is you become like the people you spend time with. So, to give yourself a fighting chance against food addiction, hang out with friends who are fit, active, and healthy. You’re probably thinking,
You’ve gotta be kidding, right?
Wrong. A three-decade study of more than 12,000 people published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
showed that a person’s chance of becoming overweight rises by 57 percent if he or she has a friend who’s overweight, by 40 percent if a sister or brother gets heavy, and by 37 percent if a spouse becomes obese.
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That likelihood triples among close friends. Study author Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University called it a “social contagion.” It makes sense when you think about it. Associating with overweight people makes being overweight seem normal and acceptable.
Another study, by researchers at the University of Buffalo, found that obese kids consume a lot more calories when they eat with their overweight friends than when they eat with their thin or normal-weight friends.
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It’s easy to say, “Hey, if they’re binge-eating on snacks, then it’s okay for me to gorge too!” When food addicts get together, the kitchen becomes a drug den. What we should be doing is hanging out with people who challenge and encourage us to be our best selves, not our worst!
In developing food sobriety, it’s invaluable to have a social network in place that supports your new, healthier choices. In the vegan world, we call it “vegan kinship.” This is a subculture that supports vegetarian choices. We help each other weather the social backlash that comes with going against the tide. It’s an enormous comfort to have vegan friends who understand me and with whom I can celebrate compassion.
When We Eat Addictively, We Are Trying to Escape
I’ve saved the most important aspect of food addiction for last: the emotional component. When discomfort or emotional pain starts to surface, addicts reach for their substance of choice. Druggies go for drugs. Boozers go for booze. And foodies go for food. But in each case, the question we must ask ourselves is the same: What feelings are we trying to escape from?
A book that’s become a classic in food-addiction recovery is
Fat
Is a Family Affair
by Judi Hollis. She writes, “We are as fat as we are dishonest!”
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The stuffing of food to create the pleasure rush is about using the brain’s opiates to mask emotional pain. The problem with addiction is that once the rush wears off, we’re left with the very same emotional problems . . . plus the additional problem addiction brings—in this case, a weight problem. As Dr. Hollis writes, “As long as we keep eating, we can ignore internal messages that say, Something is wrong here. I’m living the wrong life. I don’t belong in this body or these roles.”
For me, the evidence that I was eating emotionally could be found in the timing of my cravings. When it comes to food, I was always the Night Stalker!
In the mornings when I wake up, the idea of food is actually somewhat nauseating to me. Once I get into work around 12:45 I eat my first meal of the day, usually a healthy mix of salad, veggies, and something soy like tofu or Fakin’ Bacon. So far, so good. I remain fairly disciplined until I get off work because I’m so busy I barely have time to eat. Also, I don’t really want to eat after they put my makeup on between 2:00 and 3:00 PM, because my face gets smudged (yes, it takes an hour for makeup). Suffice it to say, for most of my day preparing for my show
Issues,
food is not an “issue.”
Fast forward to 9:00 PM. I’m home, I’m exhausted, I’m feeling deserving of a treat. And it’s at night that I experience free time, which is precisely when suppressed feelings and unresolved issues come to the surface. I’m no longer distracted by work. The uncomfortable feelings are rising up in me and . . . I escape with my most recent drug of choice: food.
It got to the point where I couldn’t fall asleep unless I ate something right before I went to bed. Come to find out I was suffering from a common ailment: night eating syndrome (NES)! Here are the symptoms:
little or no appetite for breakfast
eating more food after dinner than during the meal
eating more than half of daily food intake after dinner hour
recurrent awakenings from sleep requiring eating to fall back asleep
These symptoms fit me to a tee. I was relieved to find an official syndrome that actually explained behavior that felt increasingly out of control and irrational. The last time I experienced a fit of night eating, I finally had the information to do something about it. And it came from
Fat Is a Family Affair,
which brilliantly hones in on which feelings we eat to escape, explaining, “Eating is a substitute for true intimacy and risk. If we want to change our bodies, we have to change our relationships. . . . Problems arise when we try to get nurturance without being vulnerable. The only way to do that is with food. Food is that single, solitary, lonely substance that is ever-ready and never fails. Food never expects anything of us. . . . People aren’t quite that predictable or dependable.”33
Reading that, I realized there was a long-standing personal issue I was too scared to face. Understanding the real dynamic behind my overeating gave me the courage to finally do something about that issue. I ended a relationship that had been weighing me down, literally and figuratively. This freed me up to find a new relationship, which involved taking a risk and having the vulnerability to seek nurturance from another human being, instead of food. Sure enough, the weight started to come off almost immediately and I began returning to normal. To put it in recovery lingo, I was practicing emotional sobriety by finally getting rigorously honest about my real needs and not trying to stuff them.
The Twelve Step approach to healthy, honest eating can be part of a new spiritually based lifestyle. We can get out of our ego-based gluttony and into health and sustainability, for ourselves and the planet. Such a switch isn’t about losing weight, but that will happen naturally as we transition to unprocessed, locally grown, organic foods, with an emphasis on fruits and vegetables, nuts and grains. We can turn those beautiful, healthy, environmentally sound choices into a delicious journey.
“What happens in a 12-step meeting is that people’s brains are retrained to experience pleasure from different sources. In a 12-step program, it’s a group culture that gives those pleasure centers a different source . . . through the camaraderie of the meetings and the celebration of each person’s accomplishments. A 12-step meeting, from beginning to end, is designed to give pleasure. The genius of it is they did this before they knew anything about the brain chemistry. The celebration of birthdays, the appreciation of a person with 2 days of abstinence, the appreciation of somebody with 26 years of sobriety— and the hope that there is a system that will help us—is giving pleasure, all the way to the serenity prayer and the hugs at the end. The meetings can give an experience of joy.”