Echoing the comments on trying therapy, a nutritionist and/or a weight coach. Doing a weight loss transformation and keeping it off is very hard to do alone. I say this after losing over 100lbs in a previous life.
Ask HN: Food Addiction
21–30 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: Food Addiction
#22Skip breakfast, heavy lunch with dessert, then soup for dinner. Do this for six months. You're welcome.
Re: Ask HN: Food Addiction
#23>my blood work is starting to approach the higher ends of what is considered ok.
Your blood work is showing you are healthy. It doesn't sound like there's any need to change your diet.
Re: Ask HN: Food Addiction
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a vitamin but NAC helps me with obsessive behaviors and changing habits. Hilarious that the FDA threw a fit over it.
If you mean N-acetyl cysteine, it's a glutathione precursor. Glutathione is an important antioxidant critical to liver function, among other things. Milk thistle (as a supplement) is a popular glutathione precursor. There are others but I don't remember them because milk thistle worked for me, so that's what I used.
How do you determine a safe dosage for a child?
Re: Ask HN: Food Addiction
#25> I've tried fasting and I was able to do 18h fasts daily with no problem and even go over a week without eating, just on water and herbal tea. But that completely messed up my habits, metabolism and relationship with food, and I'm now struggling to follow a schedule and any kind of diet.
This is called restricting, and it's classic eating disorder behavior.
> I'd love to know if anyone has been able to completely replace food with protein powders and vitamins, hospital liquid diet, or any other alternative. The idea here is to abstain from food for a full year and then restart eating normally with a light balanced diet with a nutritionist's help.
This is incredibly dangerous. Don't do this.
Get a nutritionist, and seek professional help to recover from your food addiction/eating disorder. Most importantly, do what they say.
The internet is rife with people who have active eating disorders and will make yours worse in an effort to justify their own unhealthy behavior. It's almost never a good idea to take the internet's advice on psychiatric matters, but in this area it is especially dangerous.
Get off the internet and get professional help.
Re: Ask HN: Food Addiction
#26After about a week or so, following a strict keto diet (<20 net carbs), destroys my compulsion for food. Something along the lines of, “Yeah I could eat, but I don’t _have_ to”. It does take willpower at first, but getting your body off of the sugar/carb craving can do wonders. Hit me up if you wanna chat more - email in my profile.
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Re: Ask HN: Food Addiction
#27I know someone who successfully got their food addiction under control via “FA” - see foodaddicts.org. Basically they put you on a strict food plan where you weigh & measure all parts of your meals and avoid sugar and any of your personal triggers, and you check in regularly with a sponsor like in AA. Not something I would want to do, but for one person I know who couldn’t get their eating under control, it worked re…
If you want to do twelve step but find FA too rigid, you can also check out OA (Overeater's Anonymous). It doesn't have a set food plan; you come up with your own with the help of your sponsor and a nutritionist.
Re: Ask HN: Food Addiction
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you mean N-acetyl cysteine, it's a glutathione precursor. Glutathione is an important antioxidant critical to liver function, among other things. Milk thistle (as a supplement) is a popular glutathione precursor. There are others but I don't remember them because milk thistle worked for me, so that's what I used.
How do you determine a safe dosage for a child?
I don't know. I'm not a child. I didn't give it to my children.
If I were trying to help a child, I would likely start by removing particleboard furniture and other sources of off-gassing from their environment as a means to lighten the load on their liver.
Though to be frank, I did that for me as well, on top of supplements because I was very sick at the time.
Re: Ask HN: Food Addiction
#29Sounds like you're really working hard, and digging deep.
It also sounds like you might be experiencing addiction replacement/displacement, when you "overcome" one thing and shift the focus on to something new [2]. People can go through the whole gamut - alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, and still end up in something more socially "acceptable" like shopping or phone overuse. Even the act of "overcoming" can itself be an obsessive (control desire) act.
I'll second the comments saying maybe talk to a therapist [2]
What you're looking for is a "hole" (feels like an inadequacy or deprivation threat). When you hit it and deal with it, the other stuff will fall into line. Good luck.
[1] https://www.addictioncenter.com/community/addiction-replacem...
[2] Don't get addicted to therapy :)
Re: Ask HN: Food Addiction
#30Speaking from my own addictions: there has always been some underlying cause. With enough motivation, I was able to break free just like you did from smoking,etc... but working to resolve the addiction without resolving the root cause and any current environmental conditions to which you are responding to by eating will never work. I am in the same boat as you, what I have found out is, finding the problem is only the first step, there are many steps before actually solving it.