Thanks Hannah, I'll quote my other post here just for those who haven't seen it:
brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Wed Jun 12, 2019 4:21 pm
Food obsession tends to be linked with health-based orthorexia, so if you're doing it for the animals this time around that will help a lot in avoiding that.
A couple other tips:
1. When checking ingredients, ONLY look at the allergy part to check for milk/eggs, and the cholesterol (0 cholesterol usually means no meat -- or so little as to be insignificant). If it has 0 cholesterol and doesn't have an allergy warning for milk/eggs then just consider it vegan.
Avoiding the ingredients list will help you a lot.
2. Make a point to eat something freegan every now and then (like once a month). Like go to a shopping mall food court and table surf for some uneaten chicken nuggets. Eating meat that was 100% certain to be thrown in the trash is ethically fine, it's purchasing meat (or it being bought for you) that's the problem.
I believe it's possible to have a diet that's safe for food obsession inclined people that's a vegan/freegan mix and very ethically sound. Maybe you can talk to your therapist about it.
In terms of meal planning to get lots of nutrients and avoid weight loss we'd be glad to help you with suggestions.
This suggestion is also very helpful:
Lay Vegan wrote: ↑Mon Jun 17, 2019 6:53 pm
Don’t obsess about meeting your nutrient needs or checking ingredients’ lists. Try and eat the rainbow, and fall back on supplements for safekeeping (b12 or multivitamin).
A multivitamin can be very useful as a safety net so you don't need to worry too much about micronutrients.
Beyond that, you might also benefit from one rich smoothie each day with nuts and protein powder, which can relieve some stress over macro-nutrients.
@Lay Vegan do you remember where Unnatural Vegan talked about that? Did she call it her pregnancy smoothie or something?
I've also seen a lot of ex anorexics (I don't know if that was your problem or not) get into lifting and strength training. The diets they follow often end up being a different kind of orthorexia -- BUT one where the goals are fundamentally healthier (as long as they aren't training to injury).
Sometimes the psychology of addictive behavior is hard to kick and swapping one addiction for a safer one can be the path of least resistance.
I'm not saying that's the case here, but if you find yourself restricting again to the effect of losing weight, maybe a polarity shift like that could help course correct into something more sustainable.
It's a controversial idea in psychology to go for workarounds rather than cures, but it can make sense. See SSC's hair dryer example:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/t ... ategories/
The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
But I think the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back.
It's something to talk to your therapist about if you're still having trouble.
