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Food addiction is very real.
I've gone cold turkey on things before. Alcohol, sex, masturbation, porn, internet, reddit, video games, etc. Of all of them going cold turkey on sugar was the absolute hardest thing I've ever done. And unlike quitting most of those things it remains difficult to continue.
I found with most addictions there there is a one to two week hump where your brain is resetting and still craving the thing you want. If you can make it through that one to two week hump you are usually fine. With sugar that hump was more like a month. Probably because my body can still produce it from other things I'm eating, so unless you are literally starving to death for two weeks you can't go full cold turkey on sugar.
The other unique difficulty I've had is what I call "food depression". Its usually when I start getting a little bit hungry, but not hungry enough to desire any of the foods I'm supposed to eat. Or it happens when I'm shopping and go down an isle with a bunch of forbidden foods. I get overcome with an extreme sense of sadness and loss. I've been on the verge of tears.
I always have to just wait it out. Its either real hunger, and I'll be hungry enough in an hour to eat the healthy thing. Or its just a craving and it will go away and I won't be hungry in an hour.
One oddly helpful thing is having young children. I can usually see in real-time how much hunger and food impacts their moods, and its made me far more aware of my own hunger and mood connections. Especially when that connection is negative and harmful.
I want to preface this comment by saying that I think addiction/habituation mechanisms of sugar are still not all that well studied scientifically and that I don't think there is strong scientific evidence for almost any recommendation here. That is, unlike some of my other comments on the general topic area, which are strongly backed by large bodies of published research, this comment is indulging in some mere speculation.
One thing I tried long long ago, in a location far far away from where I currently live, was a weird recommendation that I saw on the internet before I really had any sense of any of the science in these worlds. A quick search doesn't show up any real science for it, only mostly returning results for one study that basically does nothing to actually support the hypothesis. Anyway, the idea was to have one small piece of chocolate basically immediately after you woke up in the morning. The idea was that your reward circuits aren't reared up to go nuts over sugar at that time, so it would be sort of 'training' your brain to think that sugar is less rewarding in general, which could reduce cravings later in the day. I did it, and it seemed to kinda help, but again, totally anecdote and no science. It could have even been somewhat harmful, but overtaken by other changes in my life at the time.
Another thing that I've heard from medical folks like Peter Attia, but haven't gone to look if there is any good science, is to pay attention to the time concentration of consumption. That is, you can down a glass of orange juice or sugary beverage super quickly, and that gives a massively concentrated rush in a way that doesn't happen by, say, getting about the same amount of sugar in the time that it takes to eat that sugar in apple form. (He actually talked about having a continuous glucose monitor and spoke about different foods causing different kinds of spikes; I recall him saying that basically the biggest, quickest spike he ever saw was something like raisins that were coated in some yogurt or candy or something that he had on an airplane.) After getting married, the wife is a big fan of fruits, and I definitely eat more of them now than I used to. Still not a lot, and I definitely can't binge on fruit the way I used to binge on various sugary products wayyyy back in the day. There is some intuitive plausibility to something like this if you think about comparisons to nicotine. There seems to be pretty significant differences in addictiveness of nicotine rushes from smoking/vaping compared to slower delivery mechanisms like gums/lozenges/patches. Again, I haven't taken the time to see if there is any not-bad science here.
I will also note that I don't remember the timeline of how long I had cravings after I got 'off sugar'. But now that most of it comes from fruits or the occasional single piece of chocolate after dinner, I absolutely notice a difference if I go to an event and have basically a 'whole dessert'. I'll likely have some minor cravings the next day, but they go away pretty quickly.
That blood sugar level spike is the glycemic index. I believe most people would benefit by eating more foods that are lower glycemic index. Which approximates to the obvious advice of avoiding simple carbs, but with some counterintuitive foods that are surprisingly high or low. Sweet fruits that don't spike your blood sugar that much, etc.
That blood sugar spike and following crash is not good for our moods or satiation. And also makes your body release lots of insulin.
And I hope this is real rather than yet another fake understanding of nutrition from the raggedy and untrustworthy discipline of nutrition science.
There was a flurry of activity trying to make glycemic index do a bunch of things. I don't recall much conclusive coming out of it. For particular questions of addiction/rewards pathways, I don't think the work really got very far out of the stage of some basic theoretical mechanism conjectures. I also haven't followed up enough to see if any of them were busted by empirics.
FWIW, when I lost my weight, many years ago, I did so by following the "GI Diet" which basically recommends you eat mostly low-GI foods. The theory being that it would reduce sugar spikes and regulate your metabolism. Of course it also just happens to mean you are eating mostly lower carb and low sugar foods, and to some degree I suspect any reasonably healthy diet combined with exercise will work.
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"Small piece of chocolate" (like one or two of the tiny squares; 10% of a bar) after a meal that might not be immediately satiating seems to result in fewer net calories for me than eating more of whatever I was having for lunch; a bit of a 'one weird trick' but maybe the (small) blood sugar bump is helping here?
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The obvious difference between food and other addictions is that you cannot go cold turkey on all food. At least not without dying. The common recommendation for recovered addicts to never engage with the thing they got addicted to again, even in moderation, cannot apply to food.
It is actually theoretically possible to quit by going cold turkey. At least if you start morbidly obese. To be clear I am not recommending it, but the canonical case was Angus Barbieri. He supposedly lost 276 lbs, and kept most of it off, at least at the five year follow up.
There is some clinical research on protein-sparing modified fasts, which seems to be more sound from a physiological point of view. In early research there was a realitvely high incidence of death, possibly from mismanagement of the amino-acid profile or (preexisting?) heart disease. It seems like it would probably be hard to get an institutional review board to go along with a large scale study now, hard to fund a high quality study, and you would have perpetual problems with compliance.
From the applied side, this is something like what competitive bodybuilders have been doing in the last weeks of contest prep for some time. That is a world known for disordered eating, so I only point this out to say that it works physiologically, not that it's necessarily a good idea.
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It can’t apply to food if you’re talking about all food, but I think it can sort of apply to the kind of highly processed foods and high glycemic index foods that seem to be the worst. Maybe you can’t cut all carbs. Okay cool. But you can do something like Paleo or Keto or something similar. Like instead of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, make the same thing at home using as close to natural ingredients as possible. Use lean beef, good quality cheese, a whole grain bun, etc. and really, I think that burger would probably taste better anyway. Substitute fries for baked potatoes. And on it would go.
Which is ~450 calories. You could eat a McDonald's double cheeseburger as your 3 meals a day and lose weight. And since I remember what I used to make it, the last burger I prepared at home (albeit not with your ingredient list suggestion, the beef was pre-packaged refrigerated patty, not from mince, though nutritionally it would be near-identical) was instead 480 calories.
Short of directly eating blocks of lard, there is no specific food item that can be responsible for the 600lb outcomes that OP describes. It instead requires an inordinate quantity of food. That it's more likely to be McDonalds instead of homemade burgers has more to do with the general dysfunction that you require to hit 600lb, rather than because McDonalds is better than the equivalent amount of homemade burgers at making you 600lb.
I mean part of the issue is that people can eat that and a large fries in a single meal. I think if you did the whole food version you’d feel full much faster. Which would definitely help to keep your weight reasonable.
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Well, also french fries and a large coke are likely more calories than what you would eat and drink with it at home. I'm guessing potato chips and a single can of soda.
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God. It would probably be delicious, but it would take forever, and probably cost more. I’d be a lot healthier if I developed better habits around cooking and meal prep.
I mean I'm too tired to cook sometimes too, but when I am (and don't want to order pizza or something) a cheeseburger is exactly what I make:
This seems like way less work than going to McDonalds, and takes less than ten minutes? If you want fries with that you need to think ahead and plug the deep frier in ~15 minutes before starting the above and add "0. Throw fries in deep frier" to your steps. Cutting up a potato first is fast enough for me (and much healthier), but those frozen fries work fine if you want to optimize for speed.
(EDIT: I see downthread you are vegan (but still think cheeseburgers are delicious), so substitute one of those frozen patties for the beef stuff and don't use butter -- even easier, and the black-bean ones are pretty good (although almost but not quite entirely unlike a burger))
You can make the case with the burger but the deep frier part is not plausible. Cleaning up a deep frier and the fine mist of oil it will deposit all over your kitchen are a lot of work, there are substantial efficiencies of scale for deep frying.
Also keep in mind that getting in a comfy car and driving to McDonald's and back doesn't register as work to most people in the same way that cooking and especially cleaning dishes do.
Wat? It lives in the pantry and I bring it out if I want fries; if you're mostly doing potatoes the oil only needs changing from time to time. I deep clean it maybe annually.
The thing has a lid; there's no 'mist', fine or otherwise. Are you thinking of an industrial unit? You are correct that this would be a bad idea -- the $50 Walmart ones work fine for domestic quantities.
I hadn't considered leaving the oil in the pantry in the fryer between uses, if you use it often enough I guess that's workable.
I had also forgotten that deep fryers have lids which will trap most of the oily steam. So consider me convinced on that point.
Honestly it turns fries into one of the easiest things you can make -- with homecut potatoes and appropriate oil choice they are reasonably healthy IMO -- I've got some pork fat in the freezer and will try with lard once I render it!
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It's mostly start-up costs. Admittedly, the start-up costs are high; we got 'lucky' in that wife wasn't allowed to work for a while during the immigration process, so she bore a lot of those costs while unemployed. We kept a spreadsheet of recipes; I usually did the calorie counts. But once you have the recipe and have done the calorie count once, it's done forever. (You also don't have to do this right away if it's not an important goal; you can always just go do it later, since you have all the information just sitting there anyway.)
Actual cooking time can really vary. We have a mix, with some recipes that are pretty quick and easy to make; honestly, many of these take less time than I would have taken to go out of my way, fight through traffic that always seems to get worse, stop by a drive-thru, wait through what always seemed to be a longer and longer line, and then still have to wait for it to be prepped. Just a burger and fries? Easy peasy, honestly takes almost no time. Maybe 15-20min of cook time for the fries, and you do the burger while they cook. Even faster if you're just microwaving a baked potato. There's a ton of really simple meals, like throwing together a salad or making some spaghetti (purchased frozen meatballs are an easy starter), and legit, I'm probably saving time over running to a drive thru.
Up to this point, you don't even need much "meal prep"; you just need meal planning, so that you can pick up all your groceries for the week in one stop rather than having to constantly run out to the store to get that one thing you're missing.
Getting more into meal prep, with a little time and effort, you can start freezing things to have some 'ready made' stuff that just needs reheating for days when you have no time. We'll have more extravagant recipes that we'll make on some weekend that we're going to be home anyway (winter is fantastic, especially because the cooking keeps the house warm), and we'll just make a double/triple/whatever batch (depending on calorie counts and how many portions we're wanting), bag it up, freeze it, and bam, we've got ten meals that we can just pull out and reheat over the next few months. Family size matters for what is plausible. If you're not a big family, you can bang out twenty days worth (or more) of lunches/dinners in a long afternoon. A freezer helps, so you don't have to eat the same thing every day for a week, which is what a lot of meal preppers do. But we'll also sometimes do, say, a casserole or roast or chicken that we'll just eat for three days in a row or whatever. That maybe takes more time than if you're stopping by Chipotle and buying enough food once to have it sit in your fridge and eat on for three days... but probably less than stopping by Chiptole every day and buying individual meals each day.
Now, once a week, one of us goes through the recipes and picks some for the following week. Can take into account if we know we have some work thing or whatever and put something super easy on those days. Then, since the actual recipes are right there, make a grocery list. That whole process maybe takes 20min now, tops. We often do it between sets while we're at the gym, so it doesn't even take up what would otherwise be productive time. I spend wayyyy more time writing stupid comments on TheMotte than I do on almost any of this.
Costs are a big question mark; it really depends on what you want. We've definitely culled some recipes that were good and tasty, but not so good and tasty that they justified the cost. If you want everything artisanal and fancy, sure, you can rack up the dollar signs. But when you're making it yourself, you really can tailor it to what you want, and for an equivalent quality, you're almost always saving (or for equivalent cost, you're almost always getting better quality). I will absolutely put a cheap American cheese slice on my homemade double cheesey until the day they ban it; nothing else melts quite like it; fight me.
It definitely changes your relationship with restaurants, though. So many times, when we do end up in a restaurant, there's like half the menu that would just pain me to order, thinking, "MFer, I can put Alfredo sauce on some pasta for like a buck o' five; why would I pay you fifteen for it?!" Restaurants now are mostly for being social, when traveling, for an experience, for some international dishes that are kind of a pain to get/keep the ingredients, or for some dishes that genuinely do have a significantly higher home prep cost/difficulty (I may or may not be finally close to cracking sushi well enough; this was always one of our few 'always worth just picking some up' meals).
Since I feel like I need a closer, I will just remind you that the start-up costs are absolutely high, and you will probably feel very very frustrated for a while. But like with most things in life (exercising, taking up a new sport/hobby, buying a house for the first time, hell, being married, etc.), it does get easier. You can try to ease into it, too; don't feel like you need a brand new recipe and make every meal yourself every day for three months; just plan to substitute some number of meals a week to start and hopefully be fine with repeating some things as you're building a repertoire. One last thing that also helped my wife is that I always assured her that if something went horribly wrong with a new recipe, we can always just go pick something up/order something in/pull out a frozen pizza or something; it's not the end of the world. Thankfully, we only had to do that a handful of times.
As an aside, any chance of posting some of those recipes in the Wednesday thread? I'm beginning to get heavy into meal prep, and could use the inspiration.
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Batch cooking is an honest revelation, especially with automation like ovens, crock pots, rice cookers, or sous vide rigs. When I'm doing well I can meal prep for 3 days with about 3 hours end to end, of which maybe 30 minutes is actual touch time and the rest is watching a movie waiting for food to cook. That gets me very whole foods that are honestly pretty boring, but there's a whole universe of price points for effort vs outcome. You could do a week's worth of giant 1000-calorie burritos in 90 minutes end to end, I bet.
I’d be interested in a writeup. I know it’s possible in theory, but I’m a lazy son of a bitch, and haven’t made a plan.
Also, this forum will probably skewer me for this, but I keep a vegan kitchen. So lots of the common minimal-prep sources of protein are off the table. C’est la vie.
Oof. Good on you for following your ethics, but that is harder. I can only speak for my own situation, I hope it helps as a sketch:
I'm designing food supplies for 3 days, which lines up neatly with integer bulk quantities of food I can buy. I'm targeting 1800-2000 calories a day, 150-200 grams protein, about 300 grams carbs, the balance is fats. My level of talent and energy to invest is minimal. My 3-day buy is:
This assumes stocks of olive oil or EVOO and spice blend on hand. I use 2 large baking pans, because I don't have a lot of counter space.
Batch 1 is chicken:
Batch 2 is broccoli and cauliflower:
Wait out the rest of pan 1's cooking time with a beer and entertainment. When your timer dings, cycle pan 2 in immediately, turn the heat to 450 and let it climb, set timer for 25 minutes, and give pan 1 the rest of your beer to cool. Move the chicken out into a storage platter, move the platter to the fridge to start chilling, and pour out chicken juices wherever you find acceptable, perhaps a beer can or the trash. Roughly swab out pan 1 and prep batch 3 in it:
Wait out batch 2, cycle in batch 3, bake for 40 minutes. While it's cooking, pull the chicken out and start portioning out. For these portions, one day is enough volume to fill one 8-cup Rubbermaid container and one 4-cup Rubbermaid container, as here.
This is, you'll gather, not haut cuisine, and that's somewhat intentional, in order to encourage the food-as-fuel mindset.
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Cooking doesn’t take that long if you do it enough to be good at it.
Corollary, some people think it’s work and don’t like it. These people generally don’t do it enough to get good at it, so they don’t get fast at it.
Healthy cooking is usually cheaper than fast food with intelligent meal planning, however, so I don’t think that’s a true criticism.
I’ve always been fairly neurotic about cooking whenever there’s a time pressure. I hate seeing my kitchen devolve into even more of a mess. It’s why I don’t enjoy baking.
Agreed that cheapness is not difficult on its own.
The capability to manage your kitchen and clean as you go is a skill, but it can be learned with enough practice.
Though it's important to remember step zero - make sure your work area is easy to clean.
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This was something that started off difficult with my wife, too. She was biting off more than she could chew, was wanting to make three complex dishes in one afternoon (some of which might even be brand new), for example, and not even thinking about any cleanup. She would get real anxiety from all the crazy. To stem the bleeding early, I would come into the kitchen just to clean up everything while she was cooking. She has gotten better at figuring out how to clean as she cooks.
If you're not going nuts and making several complex dishes simultaneously, a dishwasher helps, a lot. If it's a big family with no dishwasher, there's definitely a much bigger time penalty in comparison to just eating takeout and throwing everything away.
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