Addiction: Lack of Nourishment?
By Matt Stone of www.180degreehealth.com
Adventures in recovery. Hmm, yes, how sweet.
For the last several years I’ve put an incredible amount of effort and attention into researching addiction. I didn’t mean to. It just kinda happened. It was an accident.
Well, sort of. The story goes like this:
Once upon a time I decided that health and nutrition was my real passion in life. I’m not a total health geek or extremist mind you. I ate half a pepperoni (or dare I say Pippa-roni) pizza just a couple of hours ago. Just find it intriguing, and have always had a strong desire to be really healthy and vibrant.
I started down the usual path, going vegetarian, switching to mostly organics with an occasional doughnut binge, and then tried a bunch of that “cleansing” stuff. The cleansing seemed to help a little I suppose, but something was missing. That something was mostly my muscle mass and sanity.
As I progressed in my coverage of a vast pool of nutritional texts (160-something and counting), paid close attention to my own diet and health while doing various ‘dietary adventures,’ and my understanding of human biology became clearer and more comprehensive – I discovered some truly amazing things.
For starters, I noticed that when I ate a lot of fat, protein, and carbohydrates together at one sitting – I wouldn’t get hungry for hours. I’d always had a big appetite, loved food (worked as a chef), and constantly had that 10:00am hunger. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, I’m a big fan of the calorie, but I noticed this nonetheless and was very intrigued by it.
About the same time I came across a book called The Schwarzbein Principle. At the time, only about a year into heavy-duty research, The Schwarzbein Principle seemed to be the perfect culmination of all that I had been led to believe at the time. It was one of those “this makes perfect sense!” books, and I gobbled it up like a plate of bacon and eggs.
After about five tiny little days of following the book’s advice with religious fervor, something incredible happened. I wasn’t expecting it to happen. It didn’t even dawn on me at first. The gnawing and ever-present desire to eat sweets – my nemesis for over 26 years, had vanished.
I couldn’t believe it. Chocolate bars in my cabinet remained half-eaten. I’d never been able to have sugar in my house in my life without finishing it in a matter of seconds. Yet I’d totally forgotten about this chocolate bar. It was an almost surreal feeling to see it sitting there. Even crazier, when I picked it up to munch it down, the odor of the dark chocolate entered my nostrils and I was noticeably repulsed by it. I set it back down -delighted that I didn’t cram it down my throat as usual but totally dumbstruck by the experience. Weeks later, the chocolate bar changed colors in the open air and became brittle and stale. I, Matt Sugar Stone, let a chocolate bar go bad in my cupboard for the first time in my life. WTF?
That was over three years ago. I’ve eaten exactly zero chocolate bars since then.
During that same phase I built muscle spontaneously while losing fat (weight unchanged) to the point where friends hardly recognized me, I literally did not have a bad mood for over four months, I began waking up at sunrise automatically every day, my digestion became flawless. A friend of mine said, “you don’t fart anymore do you,” with a tone of sadness in his voice as if I’d provided him lots of auditory entertainment over the years. “Nope,” I replied, and it wasn’t a lie. I went nearly a year without having the slightest amount of gas.
This was like some giant miracle – so good that even you probably don’t believe it. I thought it was crazy.
I began to integrate this with a lot of past experiences. For example, once-upon-a-time I went out into the woods for a summer and tried to kinda, you know, “live off the land.” Okay fine, I’m an idiot, but I at least follow my grand ideas to see where they lead. In the case of living in the woods off of insufficient calories and carrying a giant backpack for over 400 miles – it led to some really interesting mental states and eating behavior.
First, I went totally loco, which prompted me to leave the woods for starters. After I ate a few thousand calories my sanity returned pretty promptly, but I felt incredibly depressed. While starving in the woods, all I could think about was sugar and beer. Upon returning to civilization, I really liked sugar and beer. What was the best though, was dark chocolate, referred to by Neal Barnard as being “the whole pharmacy” for containing 5 very distinct drugs – 3 powerful stimulants (caffeine, theobromine, phenylethylamine) and a drug in the THC family (anandamide) combined with refined sugar. (This is now considered a ‘health’ food. I assure you, if adding this to your diet makes you healthier, the rest of your diet must be pretty f-ed up).
Not to be overlooked was my newfound love of tea. Never in my life had I ever been into hot tea, coffee, or any hot drinks for that matter. I once described myself as being “not into hot drinks.” This was mostly because I was warm all the time and didn’t notice anything when I drank caffeine, so it wasn’t addictive.
Things had changed after my starvation adventure though. First of all, I was always ice cold all the time. Secondly, tea, which had always tasted kind of bland and bitter, became the most amazingly delicious thing I’ve ever experienced. Earl Gray became my bestest number one friend in the whole universe, and I drank a cup every hour and ate 50 or more pieces of year-old Halloween candy with it. This, on top of my bittersweet chocolate fetish, which involved me carving off giant slabs from a multi-pound chunk of dark Callebaut, was my daily life.
Hey man, I always liked sugar, and chocolate was yummy and everything, but this was a whole new ballgame. I fought myself 30 times a day to keep my hands out of the candy drawer, but I never could find a way to do it. I lost every time. I was totally out of control. Going on 12-mile hikes up 13,000’ peaks a few times per week and being 26 and moderately healthy otherwise was about all that kept my ass out of fat camp.
What a disaster. Even thinking about that powerless feeling that I had in proximity to tea, chocolate, and stale mini Twix is enough to give me nightmares. Face it. No one likes to be addicted to anything. Addiction is powerlessness akin to having the school bully rub your face in dog shit.
But wanting to overcome my addictions got me nowhere. No matter how bad I wanted to be free, I couldn’t be. The only way I could become free was to not want sugar and stimulants. The only way I was able to do that was:
1) Eat real food
2) Eat more real food
3) Get plenty of sleep
4) Avoid overly-stimulating and excessive amounts of exercise
5) Combat episodes of sugar/stimulant consumption with lots more of 1-4
“Real food” is not some Michael Pollan-induced idea about eating “mostly plants.” When I say real food, I mean the good stuff. Think more of the French food groups: butter, cream, and cheese. To the French food groups I recommend adding copious quantities of fatty meats – particularly well-marbled beef, grease-dripping pork chops and bacon, roasted duck and chicken with the skin, whole eggs, and lots of calorie-dense plant foods (not a preponderance of kale and other fitting types of cattle-fodder). My favorites are coconut, olives, avocado, potatoes, yams, brown rice, and fresh corn.
If you combine these primary elements at each sitting, providing the human body with the basic elements it needs for optimal function – fats, carbohydrates, protein, calories, and micronutrients, the results can actually be quite amazing.
The problem is that most people, when they go on some big health kick, go to extremes and do a variety of things that intensity cravings for the very things that make them unhealthy – which are always those addictive substances, be they chips, chocolate, cookies, colas, coffee, alcohol, drugs, or breads. The things that intensify cravings are the things which strain our bodies and tax our adrenal glands. So imagine eating less (stress), cutting out fat, meat, or carbs (stress), doing fasts (stress), eating mostly non-caloric leafy greens (stress), exercising more (stress), exercising harder (stress), going to work (stress), and getting insufficient sleep (stress). This is what a human, in the 21st century, typically does in pursuit of being healthy.
That’s right – healthy, not sick. I know it seems like common sense when you see it spelled out like that, but how many have fallen for this one more than ten times? My hand is up. Let me guess. You failed miserably on your “health” plan and beat yourself up over it for lack of discipline. Bravo!
But when it comes to addictions, and breaking free from them in a permanent, no-willpower required way, food and rest are truly the two greatest assets. They are not to be underestimated. The correct diet and lifestyle eliminates addiction. The incorrect diet and lifestyle creates and intensifies addiction. It’s that simple, and there is no greater tool – ESPECIALLY in the field of psychology/psychiatry, that compares.
Try this for a month, then start to get off your addictive substances in that order. It’s a tough journey some days, but there are lessons in everything you eat and do and how that translates to cravings later on. Pay attention.
Whatever you do, never vow to “never eat/drink “x” ever again.” That’s too hard. Try to eat/drink “x” fewer times this month than the month prior. Then recycle that goal again and again until you all but totally forget about “x.” When you do have a massive craving, don’t fight it. Instead, go way the hell overboard. Make yourself sick. When you’re tired of eating/drinking “x,” have some more. And a little more. Hate that last bite/sip/puff.
Oh yeah, and NEVER eat/drink “x” addictive substance two days in a row. That will really reverse your progress.
“But won’t I get fat and have a heart attack doing all that?” Hell no! But that’s a different story for a different day. If you want the scoop on that, you’ll have to visit my website: www.180degreehealth.com
Freedom is yours. Addiction is for the ordinary. You’re just going to have to be better than that.
Go get ‘em tigers,
-Matt Stone
www.180degreehealth.com
www.180degreehealth.blogspot.com
www.180kitchen.wordpress.com
