Ketogenic Diet may help Eating Disorders
 

Ketogenic diet may help eating disorders



https://www.dietdoctor.com/ketogeni...ating-disorders

The Study: https://link.springer.com/content/p...-020-0278-7.pdf
Dr Eric Westman and Dr Tro are two of the clinician authors of this case study.

Food Addiction or Carb Addiction has become a hot topic, thanks in part to Dr Robert Cywes , #carbaddictiondoc, actively entering the low carb scene recently. A good thread and link to his videos in the Diabetes form:

https://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?p=9358150

I know every form of low carb has been helpful with my issues with emotional eating: I had handled the psychological issues, but the physical ones would still nag at me.

I believe it! I often talk about the time I was stuck in traffic on my way home from DC when i95 was shut down to due high winds. Cars in front of me. Cars behind me. None of us could move. We had nowhere to go for 16 hours. It was brutal. I was deep in ketosis at that point so I wasn't really hungry. Besides a bathroom, all I really wanted a glass of wine or a shot of vodka or something to ease my agitation. Anyway, about 13 or 14 hours in, I suddenly remembered that I had a BJ's size bag of Cadbury hard shell eggs in the deck of my minivan. I had been saving them for the Easter baskets and I was hiding them there away from the kids.

I dove into those Cadbury eggs and I felt better almost instantly as the sugar high washed over me. It wasn't as good as some wine would have been, but I still had to drive home and those Cadbury eggs were not a bad substitute at all. Before that incident, I don't think I ever realized the enormous sedating power of sugar. Sure, I had been obese for years, but I had never had or understood the difficult psychological relationship with food that many with eating disorders have. But now I see it so clearly - Sugar is a drug.

It irritates me that drug addiction is "Real" but food addiction mainly "carb" addiction is not.

Despite the studies showing opiod sensitive areas of brain getting a "hit".

Ps. meaning, talking to folks outside the lc world.

People can be addicted to things they don't even take into the body, so why not something that is, like food? I mean, who would ever question if gambling addiction is a "real" addiction because no one swallows gaming pieces like a pill? Of course it's real. So is addiction to other things like drugs or food.

I wanted up upvote this, but we're not on fb! Sex addiction, too. So why not food that affects one's body & mind? Being a recovering binge eater I can tell you that the addiction is real - and so is the recovery by eating low carb, moderate protein, & high fat.

I'm a different person than I was 5 years ago. I was eating low carb, no wheat, no sugar, but I binged on protein. Now I eat moderate protein (for me that's 60-70g/day) & I feel SO much better!

The thing I question is how much of it is actual addiction, and how much of it is purely the hormonal (insulin, etc) reaction to a high carb diet.

I went to an Overeaters Anonymous meeting one time - only once, because by the end of that meeting, I realized that I wasn't having the same kind of reaction to food in general as others at the meeting were having. I didn't have a "trigger food" that the mere mention of that particular food could set of an eating binge, not even necessarily for that particular food.



If I ate something carby, I'd get into a vicious cycle of eating carbs, blood sugar high, blood sugar crash, eating more carbs, rinse and repeat all day long, but it was carbs in general - not terribly specific at all, I'd just eat whatever carbs I had available. Cake, cookies, donuts, pretzels, mashed potatoes, bread, potato chips, tortilla chips, candy, popcorn, pretty much all carbs, especially if they were also sweet. One carb binge led to another carb binge, and another carb binge, and another, each carb binge a few hours apart.

But the friend who talked me into going to that meeting told me one time about how she reacted when she was making a sandwich for her DH, and he wanted chopped lettuce on it. So she chopped up lettuce, put it on his sandwich, and it was the tiny little bits of lettuce that remained on the cutting board that she snarfed down - she went crazy stuffing those tiny bits into her mouth. LETTUCE. She wasn't craving lettuce, she was eating it purely because it was food. Her trigger for it might have been making/handling/seeing/smelling the sandwich she made for her DH, or some component of the sandwich, but not the lettuce itself. She didn't even crave or want lettuce, but that was what she went nuts eating.This seemed to be the kind of experience they were all having - even if they initially ate the trigger food, it didn't stop there, they would end up eating everything, even stuff they didn't really even like.


I realize that carbs in particular can set off the pleasure/addiction center of the brain (and I definitely enjoyed the taste of the carbs I ate), but I think the problem (especially in the case of those who stop eating obsessively when they stick to LC) is at least as much the insulin reaction as it is any kind of addictive reaction to food itself. Either way, despite the overweight being accused of gluttony, no self control, not pushing away from the table soon enough, not exercising enough, if there's any kind of addictive or insulin reaction (or both) to the food you're eating, then it's not truly your fault that you're overweight.

The skin is the body's biggest organ, and you can absorb things transdermally. Celiacs have to avoid beauty products containing gluten.

I used to think I was an "emotional eater" until I went very LC and was not hungry and craving food all the time. A big hint that it is chemical/hormonal (for me at least) is that I was normal weight and ate what I wanted until puberty, then all hell broke loose.

Dairy contains casomorphins and grains contain gliadorphins, so it makes sense that opioid peptides in food would affect people who are susceptible to them.

I'm with you a hundred percent! I think for many obese people, it is the physical nature of the addiction, not the psychological. For me, low carb was a giant light bulb going on in the darkness of the healthy whole grains advice. I never felt so hungry as when I was obese.