You never hear of anyone getting high or ‘doing apples’ because you’re usually satisfied after eating one or two. We’re made to handle eating something like that apple it’s a natural food. “We feel rewarded when we eat an apple when we’re hungry. “Our brains are built for different levels of rewards,” Dr. Unfortunately it’s usually the unhealthy, processed foods that get us hooked. She tells me that recovering alcoholics and addicts often become “transfer-addicted” to food: After years of flooding the reward centers of our brains with chemicals, we continue to seek the same kind of high elsewhere. Pamela Peeke, MD, MPH, FACP, is the author of several books, including The Hunger Fix, and founder of the Peeke Performance Center for Healthy Living. What I was experiencing is called “cross-addiction,” and it’s a common phenomenon. I gained 20 pounds, and had to buy all new pairs of pants. I couldn’t concentrate at work, distracted every few minutes by an urgent need to shove something in my face. I would switch up where I bought my binge foods, embarrassed at the frequency of my shopping. I became obsessed with a specific flavor of Haagan Dazs ice cream called “Bananas Foster,” and I’d walk for blocks looking for a deli that sold it. Hidden out in my home, alone, I would gorge myself with complete abandon-the same way I had once enjoyed locking myself in for a spree of opiates and alcohol. Sometimes I’d buy both, and consume them together like a sugar-and-fat speedball. So I would sneak off to pick up a cake (yes, a whole cake), or a pint of ice cream. I didn’t fit in with my old drinking friends anymore, but being social with a new group of people after meetings was sometimes more effort than I could handle. Saturday nights during my first year were the hardest. Celebrating sober anniversaries called for huge, sugary sheet cakes. Before, during and after meetings, I constantly made a beeline for the snack table, which often overflowed with donuts and cookies. With bars no longer such an appealing option, my social life began to revolve around getting food with other sober people. It seemed like in every meeting, someone would share about eating pints of ice cream at night to get through those first days and months-or even years-of life without booze and drugs. I left rehab with new hope and a new pot belly, and found my way to AA. Along with smoking cigarettes, eating staved off the urge to sign myself out and call my dealer. In those first few weeks, my only solution to my intense cravings for Vicodin and beer was to clean my plate and ask for seconds.
And a 24-hour station offered unlimited coffee, tea and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The meals were carby, fatty institutional foods, which I loved. The treatment facility didn’t have sodas or candy, but there were cookies and cakes and puddings at the end of every meal. No longer numbing myself with booze and drugs, I reverted to my seven-year-old self, panicking about not having enough cookies to fill that emotional void. Days after my arrival, I began to experience an unexpected side-effect of sobriety: hunger. I came into recovery via 28 days at a rehab in upstate New York. I’d been fired by my job and my therapist-yes, people you pay for a service can fire you-and most of my “friends” were people I’d never seen in daylight hours. I got sober after my daily pot smoking, drinking and painkiller habit caught up with me at the age of 25. Even as a daily pot-smoker, my mind was focused on the next hit of THC, not the next pint of ice cream. It was sustenance, or a hangover remedy, but not a source of joy or an emotional fix. When I think about my time as an active alcoholic and drug addict, food was not a big part of my life. But my nascent food addiction seemed to disappear once I started using alcohol and other drugs in my teens. As a little kid I would scarf down an entire bag of potato chips, wanting it to satisfy something that wasn’t (physical) hunger. As early as I can remember, I felt panicked if my babysitter doled out just two cookies during snack time. Way before I ever started drinking, I had a weird relationship with food. I did it again and again-working my way through cookies and ice cream and gooey sheet cakes-until I found myself with a whole new addiction on my hands. Like many people in early recovery, I took the advice to eat sweets any time I experienced drink cravings. The book containing this passage is often recommended for newcomers to Alcoholics Anonymous, read out loud and sold in meetings. At least, it puts off the drink for an hour or two, so we can take another step toward recovery.” – Living Sober “So next time the temptation to drink arises, let’s eat a little, or sip something gooey.
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