They Said This 30 Years Ago

Boozers' kin more likely to be obese and lap up food instead of alcohol: study

Reuters

Sunday, January 2nd 2011, 4:00 AM

CHICAGO - People with a family history of alcoholism are much more likely to be obese - and researchers think it's because their brains make them binge on junk food instead of booze.

"Much of what we eat nowadays contains more calories than the food we ate in the 1970s and 1980s, but it also contains the sorts of calories - particularly a combination of sugar, salt and fat - that appeal to what are commonly called the reward centers in the brain," said Richard Grucza of Washington University in St. Louis.

"Alcohol and drugs affect those same parts of the brain and our thinking was that because the same brain structures are being stimulated, overconsumption of those foods might be greater in people with a predisposition to addiction."

His team found that people with a family history of alcoholism - who may be predisposed to addiction - were almost 50% more likely to be obese.

The alcoholism-overeating link might help explain rising obesity in the United States, which has doubled from 15% of the population in the late 1970s to 33% in 2004.

* * * *

ACOA - Adult Children of Alcoholics - and Overeaters Anonymous have been saying this for decades now. In its heyday back in the 1980's you could find as many ACOA 12-step meetings as AA or OA ones. Many people in OA arrived there via AA or NA or other 12-step groups. In my own family, most of my parent's generation and before were alcoholics and over-eaters. In my generation you also have alcoholics and over-eaters but also gambling addicts, shoppping addicts, hoarders, drug addicts, and sex addicts.

D'oh, Indeed!

The scale keeps moving in the wrong direction.

Yes, some non-McDougall foods have crept back into my diet, as well as some higher-fat "approved" foods, like peanut butter and tofu. But I blame a lot of the 5 pound weight re-gain on the lack of exercise due to PAIN.

I posted back in August about the doctor visit where he changed my thyroid med. My last visit a few weeks ago he increased it again because of all the hypo symptoms I continue to have, and besides the over-whelming fatigue, the muscle pains affect me the most. While there he also gave me the yearly flu vaccination and an osteopathic treatment that's supposed to help prevent side effects, because when I had the shot last year I wound up with a 103º fever and the panic from that raised my blood pressure to dangerously high levels again.

Well, the cure was worse than the disease once again. No reaction to the shot but the next morning I couldn't move my head, I had so much neck and shoulder pain! Twice daily Aleeve, many hours with a heating pad with moist heat, and gentle movements like qigong instead of the aerobic type of exercises and three weeks later I still have right shoulder pains. This is on top of my usual aches and pains from the spinal arthritis, neuritis, sciatica and various arthritic joints. I did manage a few gentle and slower Leslie Sansone workouts, but many days I had to stop after 5 minutes, the sciatica pain was too bad.

Today was the first time I was able to do a complete 50 minute very low impact Richard Simmons workout, my all-time favorite on, Silver Foxes. And now, an hour later, my arms and legs are still rubbery and shaky! It's going to take a while to get back to the level I was at last month.

Food-wise, I'm still debating which is the best food plan to follow. The no-added fat vegan diet didn't do that much for my cholesterol levels - the red yeast rice is what brought the numbers down - but the cardiac cath I had last year showed beautifully clear arteries so I know it's doing some good, even after Summer 1999's foray into unrestricted eating, thanks to the Overcoming Overeating philosophy (White Castle sliders and onion rings, donuts, cookies and cakes almost daily, real Italian sausages and turkey hot dogs - all my favorite foods).

I'm drooling just thinking about those foods!

But I know I can never eat them ever again, not if I want to get healthier physically. Mentally, that's another story, for I live to eat, and knowing I will never be allowed to eat another hot dog or piece of cake for the rest of my life is so depressing that life may not be worth living. I didn't even have cake for my birthday a few weeks ago, but that's nothing new. Most of my life I didn't have birthday cakes because I was forever on a calorie restricted diet, usually only 1000, even as a child in elementary school. I only started having birthday cakes when my son was young and he insisted mommy have a cake, because everybody gets a cake for their birthday. Yeah, right.

sigh

I keep watching videos from Dr. McDougall and his associates to get me back in the right frame of mind, to get back to enjoying (or at least tolerating) healthy no added fat starch based veg eating again, but it's not working. Even Jeff Novick's video where he's actually cooking only piqued my interest for a few minutes, until I remembered how those meals actually tasted.

Not bad, just not exciting. I'm the type of person who will seek out more foods to eat if what I did eat for a meal was unpleasant, unfulfilling, unexciting or bland. Dr. McDougall doesn't like exciting foods. He feels we would eat as a recreational activity, overeat, if food was exciting. He says we should strive for monotony in our food plans, to treat food as a medical necessity, taken in the smallest dose possible to sustain life. He even says to fill up on bland things like salad and brothy soups before getting to the cooked vegetables and starch portions of our meals so we fill up on the very low calorie, high water things so we don't eat as much of the filling foods. Yeah, I do that and I'm starving within an hour of the meal because the watery salad veggies and broth are already digested and out of my stomach and now it's empty again. Know what he says to do in this situation? Eat another salad and bowl of brothy soup.

sigh

I'm hungry. And tired. And achy. Brothy soup is not going to give me what I need.

Here We Go Again

In the past month I've sampled 4 different weight loss plans. My weight had gone down a few pounds AND up a few plus one on each plan. I've eaten as low as 600 calories in one day and as high as 2000 calories, both my daily requirement for the plan I was on at the time. Yes, I gained weight on 600 calories a day. I'm ending March 2 pounds heavier than I started it.

I keep promising myself I'm going to put a stop to this insanity.

Again.

So this morning I unpacked my Overeaters Anonymous literature again and spent my laundromat reading time looking over old Lifelines. OA may not be perfect, but it's the best thing I can think of right now.

Hit Me With A Clue Stick

Actually, I found out it's called the "club of condemnation" in Thin Within parlance. We're told not to beat ourselves up, but to "observe and correct" ourselves when we eat out of anything other than a zero-level hunger or fail to stop before we hit a 5.

But my God is not the flower-child, peace-love-happiness God of born again Christians. No, my God is the vengeful God of the Old Testament, the God who drowns babies, tortures Job and taunts Moses. This is why I had a hard time with Overeaters Anonymous, too. Ask God to help you? My God would toss me down on the ground, stomp on my head, and tell me to pull myself up and take care of my own problems, then like a Marine drill sergeant tell me to drop and give him 20 (Our Fathers, not push-ups in this case).

I spent the three day weekend following Thin Within - not eating until I hit a zero, stopping at 5 or below. I ate what I wanted to eat, including the cake my husband bought for Valentine's Day, even though I told him not to. "Trust God" and follow the rules? I broke the first rule and got on the scale this morning and saw I gained 3 1/2 pounds in the past 3 days. Yeah, this is the God I know. And I've spent the past decade trying to get rid of Him and accept the God within that Tao teaches.The more I read about Tao De Ching and the writings about Jesus Christ, the more I see that the writers of the Bible just rewrote a lot of the old Chinese writings to fit into a new religion, a new deity, just like they changed other pagan holidays and celebrations around to fit in Christmas and Easter with the pagan calendars.

What to do next? Continue along this track and trust that it all turns out right in the end? Trust God? Trust Tao? Trust Dr. McDougall? I already know I can't trust myself if weight loss is my goal.