Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (33 page)

“Do you want a sponsor?”

“Are you offering to sponsor me?”

“Yes.”

Diane handed a wad of napkins to Katie, which she blindly reached for, and held her hand tightly as Katie cried.

It is one of the most magical moments in life, when desperation tunnels through one’s soul and emerges into the light of courage and one is able to ask someone for help with food, the most intimate, meaningful object in life. Consider that Katie weighed 411 pounds that day and was barely able to go to the supermarket. She thought that she was a monster, whom no one would sit next to or touch on purpose, that she had been put on display in the meeting. A month earlier, she was convinced no one would rent an apartment to her, or that her boss would fire her when she went to the first sales meeting and he saw what she looked like. Her family had done everything it could to let her know how unwelcome she was in their midst, and her therapist had betrayed her best shot at losing weight.

And there she was, in a pink hospital coffee shop being offered a second chance by a woman who knew she was wildly emotional, unpredictable, a failure at everything. Jesus, she’d failed Diane, and she was offering her time and hope anyway.

In turn, Katie would write down each day’s food and call it in to Diane every morning. She would report any deviations from the day’s menu. She would tell her when things were horrible and when things were good, and Diane would cajole her to go to a meeting either way and to not eat over it.

Even if Katie had serious doubts about Program, after failing at it so many times in so many ways, it was the only thing she’d ever done that worked.

After her talk with Diane, Katie had her last night of drive-ins. At McDonald’s, she flicked open her cell phone and consulted an imaginary lover about what he wanted before ordering two large orders of fries with four packs of ketchup and a large chocolate shake. She ate that star combo of hot and cold, crispy and soft, salty and sweet, in the parking lot of the Safeway next door, consuming 2,200 calories of bliss. Then she drove to Popeye’s for a sort of normal dinner of chicken, biscuits, mashed potatoes and gravy, which she ate in the franchise’s parking lot. Katie would join me in saying “sort of” because we both know that the nutrition in her chicken was massively overbalanced by fat. She would not be surprised to know that the stop cost her not only seven bucks but 1,500 calories, which is more than either of us eats in a day when we are losing weight on our food plans.

Her final stop was Dairy Queen, where she she waited while a guy on his cell phone dithered about what he wanted. She ended up ordering two large Blizzards, an Oreo and a Snicker at 980 and 1,140 calories respectively.

Her drive home from Oakland was a last hurrah of 5,820 calories while maintaining a kitchen that would be used for abstinent cooking the next morning.

This is beyond the “mindless eating”
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that Brian Wansink blames the statistics of obesity on, or Geneen Roth’s “emotional eating,”
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which is a substitute reaction to feelings, although both authors make salient points about America’s expanding waistlines. This was a last embrace of a lover that gripped her as tangibly as the lover on her cell phone was a fake.

The eighteen months of writing
Eating Ice Cream with My Dog
were punctuated by a number of books that took a second, closer look at the obesity epidemic and diet industry. With hard science to back them up, J. Eric Oliver, Brian Wansink, Gina Kolata, Gary Taubes, and David S. Kessler scrutinize what and how we eat and, in the cases of Oliver and Kolata, the improbability that we can or even should lose weight.
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And yet, for as much information as Oliver and Kolata give about how the roles of genetics and hormones predetermine an individual’s weight, they do not consider how other biological scripts make us fat. Let’s face it: it’s really hard to get fat from eating too much steamed cauliflower. Those calories have to be coming, in consistent and big quantities, from somewhere else. And they have to be doing something besides filling up our stomachs on the way home from an emotionally charged OA meeting with abstinence on the stroke of midnight.

Those calories make us feel, temporarily, better, and one of the messengers in the brain that is increased by high blood sugar is serotonin, the neurotransmitter that regulates body temperature, alertness and sleep, concentration, memory, creativity, and emotion.

I look at those by-products of serotonin and think they sound great. Who wouldn’t want more creativity or serotonin’s enhancement of memory?

The problem, according to Joan Ifland, in conjunction with Gilbert Manso, MD, is that the tide of serotonin flooding the brain makes us drunk. “Serotonin alone will make us feel confused, dazed, foggy, and sleepy.”
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What did Katie do as soon as she got home? She flopped into that new bed of hers and zoned out on
Saturday Night Live
, which she loved but was too full to laugh at.

Elevated blood sugar also stimulates the manufacture of endorphins, or opioids, which affect the reward-and-pleasure center of the brain. This sense of reward is activated by the sensations of food and is so involuntary that we react to even the expectation of food. I see this every day with my dog, who licks her lips whenever she does something “good” (peeing or taking a dump, not lunging at a dog or person she dislikes) outside and on leash. Like the opiates (codeine, morphine, heroin) they resemble, writes David A. Kessler:

Completing the sugar-charged triumvirate of brain chemicals is dopamine, the neurotransmitter that affects motivation, cognition, and voluntary movement, all of which prodded Katie to plot her drive home from Oakland in order to get her rewards at her favorite spots and be able to eat in the peace and privacy she prefers. Dopamine gives the oomph to do the work that a reward requires.

While likening some people’s desire for particular foods to the desire alcoholics have to drink, shoplifters have to steal, and compulsive gamblers to pull up a chair at a roulette table, Kessler considers “hyperpalliative” (i.e., easy to eat and really yummy) foods habitforming rather than addicting. He mentions Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon as models for how to stop their particular behaviors but he never mentions twelve-step help for bad eaters. At least by ignoring it, he doesn’t misunderstand it.
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Instead, Kessler devises a vague cognitive approach to weight loss: if only Katie had deliberately taken a different route home, using residential streets rather than the fast-food strips, if only she had committed to having grilled chicken and salad that night, if only she had coached herself in how awful she would feel in the morning, she could have avoided ingesting more than five thousand calories and the cravings she had the next day when she told Diane she would have four ounces of chicken at dinner.

But could Katie have reasoned herself out of what Kessler calls the “cue-urge-reward-habit” cycle?

Katie and I, like millions of other people, consider ourselves addicted to sugar, wheat, and refined carbohydrates. They are mood-altering substances that replace the world of negative emotions we live in. What was really going on as she lay on her bed and watched
SNL
? Katie, at 411 pounds, took up no space at all, so snugly wrapped in that sunken, inert, carefree, Teflon-coated space that was big enough only for her and a remote control. An expert in manipulating foods, she had fed perfectly in order to gain that state. “Guess what food combines tryptophan [the precursor of serotonin] and sweets?” Anne Katherine posits. “Ice cream, a staple for most overeaters.”
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No shit.

Katie woke at seven in order to call Diane, and while she felt great hope and relief—“the pink cloud” of twelve-step programs—her voice was thick with her hangover’s need for more sleep. She hauled herself to the kitchen and drank two big glasses of water, took a Diet Coke from the fridge, and went back to bed. The aftermath of such a night wasn’t any prettier than the garbage she’d thrown out at a 7-Eleven on the way home. She stayed in bed that day and watched a season’s worth of
Project Runway
, barely managing to make a breakfast of a banana and yogurt after one in the afternoon. Thanking God it was Sunday, she had no energy, no mood at all, no motivation, no expectations. The day had only one challenge: three weighed and measured meals, no sugar, no flour.

On Tuesday, she emailed me that, “The most amazing feeling came over me as I ate that first abstinent meal. I felt like I was ‘home.’ I hadn’t had that feeling is so long. It feels solid, secure, free. I have freedom. I feel less scared, less depressed, touched by God. I haven’t felt touched by God in three years. I’m weeping as I write this out of gratitude. I can’t believe how glad I am that my food is simplified. I’m free of searching for all these ways to control my eating. I don’t have to think, which is good…” She was parched for more of the self-esteem she was amassing, but as Sheppard and Katherine warn, the succeeding days found her fretting over what she had done to herself in the last two years, raging at a godless universe when she was supposed to be saying the Serenity Prayer, looking for a hit of something—a new Must-See TV show or alphabetizing her books—to take the edge off the boredom of not eating through the days, her fear and frustration around her life, and the damp February chill of northern California.

Those are the dangerous days, the last seven of the first ten. The relief tapers off as the body detoxes without a brain that has been trained to supply the serotonin/endorphins/dopamine only when it is turned on by sugar. Katie’s nerves felt like they had been run over by a cheese grater, and she had the shakes, diarrhea, a compelling thirst that couldn’t be bought off, and crying jags. Diane advised her to drink lots of water and to get as much sleep as possible—and make calls to people in Program, go to meetings, read her daily meditation book, and pray, pray, pray.

I didn’t hear from Katie for a couple of weeks after that and I understood why. Early abstinence is a silent, selfish time. Finding the words for email is difficult, and my abstinence was also so shaky that Katie really couldn’t risk a phone conversation. I was viral and I knew it. She had her eyes glued to her own feet as she lifted out of the detox and started to fight for a future that would unfold as slowly as she lost weight.

Katie—and I—are perfectly normal in our responses to sugar. Sugar (and sugars derived from refined carbohydrates), science is starting to show us, replaces or enhances the felicitous hormones and neurotransmitters so effectively that an alteration in the brain’s neural synapses occurs.

At the 2005 convention of the Western Psychological Association, Bartley Hoebel, PhD, presented his findings on experiments with rats allowed unlimited access to sugar. After ten days, they were given naloxone, a drug that blocks many of the brain’s neurotransmitters and external opiates.

Sugar is as much a drug, Hoebel concluded, as heroin or cocaine—and it works on exactly the same center of the brain that heroin does. “There is something about this combination of heightened opioid and dopamine responses in the brain that leads to dependency,” explains Hoebel. “Without these neurotransmitters, the animal begins to feel anxious and wants to eat sweet food again.”
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And like other addictions, “users keep seeking.”

Is it any wonder that the writers of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous recommend that recovering alcoholics have chocolate and sweets constantly at hand?
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Is it any wonder I laugh derisively whenever I see a commercial selling rum that pairs the liquor with diet cola and announces “zero sugar”? Why doesn’t the nutrition, diet, and neuroscience literature more closely compare an intolerance for alcohol with an intolerance for sugar?

The worst of this self-produced and willfully amped pharmacopoeia isn’t over yet. It gets worse because it can change the brain. By overwhelming the brain with glucose-induced opioids and mood-enhancing hormones, receptors begin to shut down and more external stimulation is needed to achieve the same sense of well-being, satiety, relaxation, and pain tolerance, all acting on fewer receptors for them.
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Preceding David Kessler, the gurus of the antisugar movement include Nancy Appleton, Kathleen DesMaisons, Joan Ifland, Anne Katherine, Kay Sheppard, and H. Leighton Steward. They devote the balance of their books to specific eating plans and some of them sneak in a twelve-step approach, with an agenda that is puritanical in comparison to other diets that allow points for a single-serving package of Oreos or a Skinny Cow ice cream sandwich. So puritanical is their approach, in fact, that they ban all of our beloved substitutes: aspartame (found in Equal and NutraSweet: good-bye Diet Coke), saccharin (Sweet’n Low), and cyclamate (Sugar Twin, which is scary stuff without the misgivings of Sheppard and Katherine, given that it carries the warning “Take only on the advice of a physician”). Sheppard’s list of forbidden sweeteners is even more exhaustive, adding dextrose, maltodextrose, polydextrose, whey, syrups, malt, rice sweeteners, natural flavors (the Sheppard follower now proceeds to throw out her Celestial Seasonings Tuscan Orange Spice and Almond Sunset teas, among others), manitol, sorbitol, caramel color, artificial sweetener in packets. Packets probably includes sucralose, so now my favorite jam made with Splenda is off her grocery list, along with sugar-free Swiss Miss and Jell-O pudding.