Almost a year ago I injured my ankle while in the middle of a runner’s high and continued to abuse it while riding out the high. I haven’t been able to run at all for much distance, and have been through two physical therapists for my overall body, including therapy for my wrists for my dad-to-day job as a programmer. I also had a recent health scare resulting in minor surgery, I have since realized the same infection I had surgery for, I’ve probably had before a couple years ago. So with a string of health issues all just within the last year: at 30 years old I’m feeling fucking old, and I’ve realized I’m struggling with gluttony.
I’ve been on and off keto for over 4 years, each year I tend to do better and better in terms of strictness and not falling off as hard, being more resilient to big cheating, and my lab results prove it. The only thing that has not improved one bit, the scale and my body fat and image issues.
With the health scares, and not being able to exercise for a few weeks due to surgery, I’ve more and more realized I have problems with alcohol and food. When coming off of a fast, which I haven’t been able to get back into for a while, I feast HARD. Even with keto or mostly keto friendly foods I put on weight due to stress, and probably due to caloric intake being way high. And right now while bathing for my infection, I’m about to eat pork rind pancakes and a sour cream erythritol and almond milk dessert I made. I know I’m not hungry and shouldn’t be eating it. But I can’t make myself stop.
Those of you struggling with addiction or gluttony, how did you get over it? Please help me.
One day at a time. Just focus on today, now, doing the best you can. I’m also finding time restricted eating or intermittent fasting to be helpful. By committing to eat only in a window of noon to 7pm, I’m cutting out a lot of extra consumption. Best wishes to you.
Plan is to try to do a keto reset, super strict, no dairy and no sweeteners of any kind. OMAD is ideal with dinner for me. But I just started a new job where everyone does lunch everyday. Have to ease into denying lunch socialization. Once I’ve eaten it’s hard to stop, which is why lunch OMAD hasn’t worked for me. Keto isn’t a magic bullet for me, it just makes things slightly easier.
Be clear about your why. Make it strong and emotional. Remind yourself of your why every day.
Recommit to eating healthily every day.
Know your trigger foods and situations. Avoid them.
Do not go hungry. It looks to me that fasting is not serving you well. I would say you should avoid hunger by eating great keto food regularly.
Find your own best keto food that you can always go to if you are hungry. Cold bacon was mine.
When you find yourself in a gluttony session, put the food down; tell yourself that if you are hungry for more in 20 minutes, then you can have some more. Give your satiety signal a chance to kick in.
Eat highly satiating foods for you. For me it is meat fat. Once I have had just a little, I am 100% stuffed and I can’t fit much more in.
Eat keto, eat fat. The weight loss mechanism here is reduced insulin, this is the key. Don’t give the carb monster an inch. If in doubt, go eat some fat. I usually do bacon and eggs with a side of butter.
If you are off the wagon and you feel an ounce of motivation to get back on, DO IT! Use the scraps of motivation that you find. Don’t wait for the perfect day and the perfect feeling. Use the feelings you have right now.
Right on Brian! While exercise is great it alone is not going to resolve your concerns. Diet is a must…that is something you can control…even when you’re sick or injured. Few people can even keep things in check with exercise and it’s does get more difficult as we get older. You’re not old… be patient with yourself. With respect to alcohol. Yes it’s hard on the liver and not diet friendly period. It alone will cause some inhibitions and gluttony. Please drink only a few of the lowest carb beers. Highly distilled clear alcohols will be better for the liver. Make a post drinking diet plan and stick to it even if you’re out socializing… know what you’re going to eat afterwards and maybe get to bed shortly there after to avoid eating more than planned.
Great suggestions by Alec! Trust yourself on your goals and plan ahead. Gluttony is a impulsive thing… Keep your mind preoccupied with things that keep your interest. Especially when drinking. No more rewards for good moments… the setbacks are not worth it. Keep your mind on the prize, the reason, the facts, the TRUTH.
In my experience, if alcohol is a problem, dealing with it first will help every other issue. Alcohol also provides plenty of calories that the body has to deal with, without any useful nutrition accompanying them. It also damages the liver in a way that causes further health problems. So getting alcohol consumption under control is very helpful in many ways. If you are an alcoholic, you will find moderate alcohol intake impossible to achieve, so in that case you will find it easier to cut out alcohol entirely. You might find Alcoholics Anonymous to be helpful in such a case.
With alcohol out of the way, the next thing to look at is carb intake. Keeping it as low as possible allows insulin levels to decline, which helps both with appetite control and weight loss, in addition to general metabolic health. When insulin levels are chronically elevated, the hunger is constant, precisely because the cells are not getting enough energy—it is all being stored in the fat tissue, instead of being released for use as fuel. Not only that, but insulin occupies the receptors in the brain that are supposed to receive the hormonal signal from the fat tissue that we have plenty of energy on board and don’t need to eat for a while.
In sum, without excessive alcohol to impair your judgement, and without excessive carbohydrate to stimulate excessively high insulin levels, you are not lilkely to find your eating out of control. Of course, food addiction is possible, but eliminating the factors that stimulate constant hunger gives one a much better chance of dealing with food addiction, if it turns out to exist.
I feel for you and you are getting great advice. I too suffer from binge eating even while remaining fully keto and I also found fasting exacerbated it. So I’m taking a break from fasting, after my last fast I ate as much keto food as I wanted whenever I wanted to ease up on the restriction rebellion. That lasted about a week then my satiety signals kicked back in. Now I’m working really hard not to eat unless I’m truly hungry. I was hungry after the fast so I ate. I was scared it was too much but whatever! It didn’t turn out to do any harm.
One thing I do avoid is sweeteners because they trigger cravings for me.
But here’s what I noticed when I kept eating even when I wasn’t hungry anymore: the food didn’t get me “high” like when I was a carb burner and using food for emotional reasons. So eventually I lost interest in emotional eating because it doesn’t work anymore. I have to find other coping mechanisms. It’s hard! Still working on it. Wishing you well.
Heck yeah, I do. I have an eating disorder, so gluttony is my middle name. It’s something I’m really trying hard to correct in my life, and so far, out of everything I’ve done over the years, Keto has been the best at helping this issue.
I find that my appetite level varies from day to day, even when my activity level does not, but that my weight remains stable throughout.
The one thing I still find hard to deal with is the sugar/carb cravings, but then I expected them to be, since I am a sugar addict. The interesting thing about ketogenic eating, however, is that the strengthened satiety signaling makes the difference between real hunger and a craving absolutely clear. Doesn’t always stop me from caving into the craving (craving-caving, love it!), but it does keep me from denying that’s what I’m doing. It also seems to help keep me from bingeing—so far, at least, though I still fear it’s possible.
One technique I’ve borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous is the idea of not swearing off carbohydrate for ever—that is a sure recipe for a binge! Instead, I promise myself all the glazed doughnuts I want tommorrow, just not today. It works pretty well, though I must confess I have my moments. It took a few years for my alcohol cravings to subside after I stopped drinking, so I am hoping that eventually I can expect the sugar/carb cravings to do likewise.
If you’re eating like this and meeting your weight loss or health goals, then it doesn’t matter. This is a hard one for a lot of us, because we’ve been taught that if we eat “a lot” we’re gluttons and there’s a lot this kind of puritanical BS surrounding what we eat.
If you’re eating like this, want to be losing weight and aren’t that’s another matter. I assume when you mean you’re putting on weight, it’s a net gain after several fasts–an overall trend. You’ll almost always re-gain at least half of what you lose on a fast and lots of us have experienced a net gain after a fast here and there. Stress as well as recovery from injury can really inhibit weight loss, so give that some time. Also, make sure you’re getting enough sleep. Lack of sleep can have huge impact on insulin response.
I think you want to consider whether you’ve ever truly broken through the carb craving phase and have gotten fat adapted. You said you’d been “on and off keto,” but it’s not clear how long you’ve been on. Cravings that you can’t control are hallmarks of the adaptation phase. I think the first step is to go strict low-carb for a few weeks, ditch anything that’s artificially sweetened, and not worry about what you eat beyond that. Ditching the artificial sweeteners will help break a habit of what your mouth expects, but some people have insulin responses even from artificial sweeteners and which ones can really vary from person to person. Eat lots of protein (you’re athletic and recovering from an injury & surgery) and plenty of fat. When you get cravings eat those things. My guess is that the cravings and binges will dissipate after a few weeks of that.
Finally, (and I really mean finally–this is not the first place to go), as someone who has experience with binge eating of this type, my very unpopular opinion is that you should be looking at calories and giving yourself a stop point. After fasting, during a re-feed, you should probably target around at least your estimated TDEE or over. You’re only ever going to have an estimated number on this so, so use a calculator just as a starting point. Hypothetically, if your TDEE is 2000 calories, aim for at least 2300 or 2500 on re-feed days. When you get to that point, and are considering eating more, use it as a stop point to really consider whether you’re truly hungry and want to eat more or whether it’s just habit. If you are truly hungry eat more. I’m not advocating for a hard stop point based on a number–it’s a guidepost to check in with what you’re craving or wanting and why. You could also use protein and fat macros instead of calories to track this.
Try that for a couple of weeks and see how you go. Your actual intake will probably be different every day. Remember that even if you ate 3000 calories of food on every re-feed day, you’d still probably be down overall, so don’t restrict if you’re hungry. If you just read that and freaked out that I suggested you could easily go 50% over your TDEE and it seemed “way too high” and “that would be so gluttonous” then look back at my first paragraph.
Once you’ve battled the psychological “glutton” demons and the potential bad habits or routines, if you’re still struggling to lose weight, then you might consider an elimination diet to identify food sensitivities. But that’s a long way off.
First off, I don’t think you should say you struggle with gluttony. That sounds so harsh and judgmental and I have found those are never helpful…I hear a lot of myself in what you wrote so honestly. I think you did a really brave thing putting that out there. You shouldn’t feel shame or just blame yourself or think you don’t have will power or something. What I hear is you are fighting your physiology. None of us are wired the same. And some of us, whether by virtue of our history or just our genes, struggle with behaviors that can affect our quality of life. What I hear in your story sounds a lot like an imbalance of dopamine- some of the things you describe like the intense high you got from running, from food, and alcohol, are indicative of a lack of dopamine. It could manifest in myriad ways but for you those are your demons. I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with food, and body image, my entire life. This isn’t about me, but I just want to say I identify with a lot of what you’re going through. And keto helped mitigate a lot of my compulsive tendencies…but, I also have a history of restrictive eating disorders and that will definitely mess up your brain chemistry and your reaction to pleasurable food. So when you say you fast and then feast hard, I think maybe fasting isn’t appropriate for you right now. Or maybe ever. And who cares?? Fasting is venerated in the keto community and I really think it can be problematic. For this very reason. So that would be my first suggestion. It sounds like your brain has a very strong reaction to the perception of a lack of food. Many of us that have dieted or restricted food have the same reaction. So maybe forget about fasting. I’d try to cut out alcohol entirely. It will make it that much harder to work through the other things you want to address. I’d maybe talk to your doctor about getting on some medication that could help you through and maybe balance your neurotransmitters. Wellbutrin was very helpful for me as it works on dopamine receptors. I might get flak for saying that but you know what? Sometimes it’s ok to need some medication when you’re feeling like nothing else is working. As far as changes in your diet, I’d suggest making fatty meat the center of your meals. Eat as much of whatever delicious cut or type as you like- for me, once I started “letting” myself eat ribeye until I was totally satiated many of my compulsive food cravings- like eating tons of macadamia nuts or fat bombs- went away. I feel really satisfied eating that way, and it’s worth trying. Lots of people do carnivore for that reason. I’m not 100% carnivore but I mostly eat fatty meat, eggs, and bacon. It’s made the biggest difference in helping me feel better in the 5 years I’ve done keto. So just have compassion for yourself. Because your body is really trying to protect you. So understand you’re not lacking willpower. Lots of people have been where you’re at or are there now with you. You were just honest enough to share it
Brian you sound overwhelmed, frustrated and struggling to manage your impulses. With all the health problems and not being able to cope with exercise it sounds like you’re falling in to bad habits. It must feel bad and you need some compassion! This is a difficult time for you - so sorry to hear this! I would seek out some professional help in addition to the good folks here - a good therapist to get emotional support and coping tools and consider anti-depressants to help stabilize impulses and mood. The high expectations for strictness with keto seems to put you in a recycling for failure (binge/fast) - which seems to set off another downward spiral. Hang in there! Get more support!
Sweeteners trigger insulin release when they hit the mouth.
So for anyone type 2 or insulin resistant sweet anything will trigger hunger to feed the insulin.
I avoid all sweeteners now and it is helpful, I don’t have much appetite and can eat well when I am hungry. For me sweeteners of any kind skew my hunger signals completely, so I simply avoid them and have no probs now. Brian Good luck!!!
