Frequently Asked Questions
	Questions people commonly ask me Formerly at dognozzle.com

• What diet are you on?
• Why didn't you just go on a diet?
• If you don't diet, how do you lose weight?
• Do you count calories or carbs?
• What about binging or overeating? How do you eat the right portions?
• Do you ever get cravings for things like candy or chips?
• What role does exercise have in your recovery?
• How many different diets have you tried?
• Have you ever tried the Atkins Diet?
• What's your opinion of Overeaters Anonymous?
• What is "Recovery"?
• I can't seem to get started. How do I do it? How did you do it?
• How can food be your friend and ally?
• Where is your OA section at?
• Will you be my sponsor?
• OK, tell me what you really believe!

What diet are you on?

I'm not on a diet.

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Why didn't you just go on a diet?

Been there and done that. After every one of my diets, I still had my Binge Eating Disorder (BED). The inherent problem with dieting is the artificial lines it sets up between dieting and not dieting, weight loss and maintenance eating, abstinence and relapse, good food and bad, rapid start eating and what have you. There's just no common sense to any of it. All the lines ever did is set me up to feel like a failure when I thought I was on the wrong side of one. Diets didn't cure my binge eating disorder, they made it worse. I had to quit throwing gasoline on the fire.

I enjoy the way I eat now. I doubt I'll change much of anything when I get to whatever weight I finally stabilize at. There's just no lines to cross when you aren't dieting. If you want to see what I eat on a typical day, click here.

Obesity and binge eating disorder are two separate issues. When I got my binge eating disorder pretty much under control, started getting more physically active, and improved my nutrition, weight loss occurred naturally. Dieting simply does not and cannot properly address binge eating disorder in any constructive way. I wanted long term results.

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If you don't diet, how do you lose weight?

I eat primarily whole natural foods—foods that promote good health—and I exercise moderately several times a week. When I'm shopping for groceries or getting ready to eat I ask myself, "Is this a health promoting food choice?" Of course I had to teach myself a lot about the science of human nutrition so I knew exactly what that was. Mostly it's just using common sense. I learned that most modern processed packaged foods are a waste of calories. They have little to offer in terms of promoting good health; pretty much the opposite actually. Instead, I choose mostly fresh veggies and fruit, whole grains, beans, fish, and a limited amount of lean meat—and, perhaps just as important, I got more active. I realized that an active lifestyle was a mandatory component to success.

When I ask myself if eating this food or meal is a health promoting thing to do, I empower myself to live in the solution not the problem. That is, each time I eat, I face the fact that I am making a conscious choice to eat the particular food I put in my mouth. No one is forcing me to eat it. More importantly, I'm choosing the consequences. If I choose to eat healthy whole natural foods, the consequences are that I'll feel good later and I'll continue to improve my physical and emotional health. If I choose to binge on a big bag of Doritos and a box of Ding-Dongs for dinner, I'm choosing the consequences. It's that simple really. If I don't choose to eat foods that promote my general health and well-being, so be it. I'm an adult. I have the right to do that and I don't have to be consumed by guilt or shame. Given the choice, I rarely choose feeling bad and dying young.

I never use to think of eating in those terms. I felt like I didn't have a choice. I felt powerless over my eating disorder. I felt like a victim of my eating disorder. The fact is and always was, I do have a choice. I just have to remember to make it.

Recovery was not really about my weight loss per se. The idea was for me to be the fittest healthiest person I could be no matter what size I was. It was that change in thinking, I believe, that opened the door to real recovery.

I also never let myself get very hungry. I eat. Eating is essential and I do it often. The old tree meals a day stuff is pure crap (at least for me). It's a hard mindset to overcome, but I had to throw it out the window like a lot of my other old ideas. A lot of days I eat every couple of hours.

I also had to look at my whole life. I couldn't feel good about myself as long as procrastination and messiness was a serious part of my life. I had to start picking up after myself religiously. I had to work at organizing my routines and my life. I had to make sure that I brushed my teeth twice a day and flossed; that I always folded my clothes and put them away, and did my dishes at least every day. I had to get more active. I had to start taking care of me on all levels as best as I could. That was the only way that my self-esteem would ever stay high enough to allow me to do what I'm doing in terms of my recovery. I had to take a whole life approach. Anything less would have been just one more wish for a quick and easy fix. I had to realize that it wasn't a weight problem, but a problem with how I lived. When I eat right, exercise, and live well, reaching and maintaining a healthy weight is a byproduct.

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Do you count calories or carbs?

No. That leads me to obsessing about what I eat. I've found that when I'm fueling my system with high octane fuel and choose to be active, my body begins to give up its excess fat tissue almost automatically. When my system isn't lacking for essential nutrients, it doesn't feel deprived. When it has all the vitamins, mineral, protein, carbs, and such that it needs for healthy basic functioning, it doesn't scream for more resources (food). When I began getting all the nutrients I needed, I soon began to eat intuitively. When I quit starving myself with fad diets and rigid food plans and started fueling my system optimally, I started getting in touch with and honoring my body's hunger and satiety signals.

I use to think of only the extremes when I thought about weight loss. Either depriving myself by following some strict diet plan, or binging. I was either starving or overeating. Took me a few years and a bunch of failed diets to begin to see that eating normal amounts of healthy food might just be a viable option. I've never seen a diet book suggest it. When I finally tried it, even though imperfectly, I began losing up to 15 pounds a month.

People with a normal healthy relationship to food don't have to deal with either of the extremes on this scale. They live comfortably somewhere near the middle, around 5. They intuitively know how to do this; it's nearly automatic. They don't feel guilty about what or how they eat. I found out that I could learn to eat intuitively, but I couldn't learn how by dieting. Unless a doctor prescribes a diet for medical reasons, taking detours below the middle of the scale can foil long-term permanent recovery from BED. Eating in the middle of the scale can produce spectacular and healthy weight loss. If we are starting at 10, five is a much more realistic goal and shorter distance to go to than 1. As I get closer to my healthy weight, the rate of loss is slowing down, but my weight and relationship to food, is "normalizing". This is the road less taken and the shortest and surest route to real recovery I've found.

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What about binging or overeating? How do you eat the right portions?

For the most part, when I'm eating only foods that are fresh and natural, and I eat in a mindfully aware way, I can eat all I want. I don't worry much about portion control. I do though, try to fill up mostly on vegetables at meals. I've come to love them. I eat a lot of broccoli, spinach, asparagus, onions, yams, beets, green beans, and things like that. All I want in fact. Over time, my tastes have changed. I'm much more aware of and happy now with the subtlety of flavors over the intensity. This is due largely, I think, because I'm no longer continually assaulting my palate with the strong salty and sweet flavors common to processed foods and snack foods. It's sort of a cleansing effect that happens when a person starts eating primarily whole fresh natural foods. My taste buds seem to have gotten a lot more sensitive. They are happier, more satisfied now, with the milder flavors like you find in steamed vegetables. I usually eat the majority of my vegetables first. I do this so I can fully experience and enjoy those tastes before I move on to stronger flavored foods. Basically, I fill up on my veggies so a smaller portion of the denser higher fat foods will satisfy me. The cleansing effect that I mentioned also lets me get by without the need to add salt at the table. I use to load salt on everything to sharpen the taste sensation. Now I find that if a food is very salty, it's usually overpowering and unpalatable to me.

As far as binging goes, I had to accept that some binging is part of recovery. At least in the early days. What I tried to do is make sure I'd binge on healthy foods. Same with overeating. If I was going to binge or overeat, I was a lot better off to do it on fresh wholesome foods. Yes, there were times when I chose junk food. The only way I could move forward and not fall into the usual trap of starting all over was to count the binge as a vegetable and move on. There's just no way to do recovery perfectly. When I finally figured out that it wasn't the end of the world when I slipped up, I started getting results. I learned to be compassionate and patient with myself. I learned to hold myself to normal human standards. Even healthy thin people will over eat at times. It's normal, particularly during the holidays. Also, a piece of chocolate cake or some ice cream can be part of a healthy diet. It's not going to kill anyone to eat junk once in awhile.

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Do you ever get cravings for things like candy or chips?

Sure. Sometimes. When I do, I try to do a couple of things. First, I'll drink a big glass of water and eat a fresh apple or orange. Latter on, if I still have the craving, I try to get a healthier substitute. For instance, there is a natural foods store near me with an in-store bakery. They have the best carrot raisin muffins I've ever eaten. All whole grains and no trans-fats. They also make these killer vegan cashew cookies. I'll go and get one muffin and a couple of the cookies. Another natural foods store in my town sells all natural organic turkey pepperoni sticks. These are the best pepperoni sticks I've ever eaten in my life. No nitrates or anything and not greasy. Once in awhile I'll go ahead and get one or two from their butcher shop... yum. Muffins, cookies, and pepperoni and a maybe something like a nice bowl of blueberries or a big bunch of grapes. The thing is, they are all very healthy foods. There's very little, if any, empty calories in them. I don't feel bad about treating myself well in that way at all. I probably do this at least a couple of times a month. The goodies will be my lunch that day and it's something to look forward to. It's kind of a little celebration ritual I have every month right after my Social Security check comes.

One other thing I try to keep in mind is that dessert comes after dinner for a good reason. If I decide to have a portion of a dessert type food, I make sure I do it on a rather full stomach. I want to have eaten my main meal first. I try to never eat sweets on an empty stomach. Making sweets or other junk food my main course was one of my big binge behaviors and I choose not to go back down that path because the destination is always painful.

Face it, eating can be one of the great sensual joys that help make life worthwhile. I'm not willing to give up enjoying good food The thing is that now, "good food" has more meaning to me. On top of tasting good, it must be healthy and nutritious.

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Speaking of cravings—exercise is probably my strongest asset in warding off cravings. I can't express strongly enough how absolutely indispensable moderate exercise is to my recovery. I'm no exercise freak or anything, in fact I have a seriously bad back, fibromialgia, arthritis, and I hate sports. I was the kid that no one wanted to end up with when choosing up teams in PE classes. But without an exercise program that can put me into the category of having at least a moderately active lifestyle, I never seemed to have the power to follow through with my eating plan. Exercise seems to empower me on many levels. I think it's pretty much a biochemical or hormonal process and it branches out from there. Even moderate exercise seems to stimulate the production of some sort of brain chemicals and/or hormones that control appetite. That makes me feel more empowered and less depressed too.

When I started out, I could only walk for 5 minutes at 1.5 miles per hour 3 times a week, but it helped so much. I think that if people aren't ready to accept that a planned exercise program needs to be part of their recovery, they may still be in the magical thinking stage where wishing, making plans, and self-promises substitutes for real action. I don't believe that there is an easier softer way. I never found it and I've never seen it. What I did was find an activity (bicycling) that I really enjoy. I make my exercise fun.

How many different diets have you tried?

To many to count. You name it and the chances are good that I've tried it. My first was called something to the effect of the Air-Force Diet. I was in the 6th grade at the time. If I remember right, Reader's Digest put out an article on it. My mother read it and then she forced me to try it. Basically, it was a lot like Atkins, only the Atkins Diet hadn't been "invented" yet. We were too poor back then for me to eat that much meat so the Air Force Diet, fortunately, soon landed in the scrap heap of my diet history. It did though, help cement in me the image that I was really fat even though at the time, I was just a little huskier than some kids. I think that was due mostly to being of good sturdy Norwegian stock and my mom's high fat and white flour way of feeding me.

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Have you ever tried the Atkins Diet?

Yes. A couple of times. When I was on it, all I could think about was oatmeal and fruit. I had dreams about eating fruit—a lot of fruit. I did lose some weight and pretty quickly. It was mostly water though and popped right back on. The Atkins Diet is not a healthy well-rounded or balanced eating plan. Nutritionally, it leaves a lot to be desired. It made me feel really ill so I couldn't stay on it very long. Like all fad diets, it couldn't help me learn to intuitively know when I was hungry or honor my body's satiety signals. It couldn't help me build a healthy relationship to food.

Food helps heal, build, and repair our bodies. It balances metabolism, produces energy, and supports our overall well-being. Eating well, whether one wishes to shed excess weight, maintain weight, or gain weight, means providing our bodies with the highest quality fuel possible. If our nutritional needs are not met, we feel fatigued, unhappy, and unwell. A healthy well rounded diet produces appropriate satiety signals, increase vitality and vigor, improves immune function, repairs and builds muscle/lean tissue, and helps lower our risk for chronic disease. The food we eat also supports our brain functioning and influences our emotional health. A high fat low carb diet such as Atkins simply doesn't serve any of those causes. You can read more about Atkins style diets here.

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What's your opinion of Overeaters Anonymous?

OA has its good points and its bad points. I like the 12 Steps quite a bit because of their history and their underlying psychological processes. They are a legitimate path to emotional and spiritual growth, but the idea of abstinence as it's used in OA probably causes more people to give up than it helps. Recovery from binge eating disorder isn't an All or Nothing proposition. It happens in stages one little step at a time.

Eating disorders, including Binge Eating Disorder (BED), are not addictions. The OA abstinence model of recovery is all about treating addictions. It is modeled almost exactly after the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

A lot of people in OA are really just dieting while they are working on the issues of living. At least that's what I did in OA and that's what I've usually found there. Members will go to great lengths to rationalize that their eating plans aren't the same thing as diets, but they usually are. It's a free source of support for losing weight and that's saying a lot. It's awfully hard to deal with binge eating disorder all by yourself. I just hope people will go into it willing to take what they need and leave the rest.

I also feel OA should set a policy that it is NOT the right tool for people who are suffering from anorexia nervosa. In my opinion, suggesting that OA is the right approach for that particular eating disorder is grossly irresponsible, inappropriate—and incredibly dangerous.

If you are really interested in my current thinking about OA, you can read more here.

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Recovery is about the willingness to work on my whole life and all the issues that kept me stuck in my eating disorder. I didn't just eat too much to get to 450 pounds. I didn't just yo-yo diet my way there—I lived my way there.

This web site isn't just about losing weight and learning to eat in a healthy way. It's about facing the complex set of life and living issues that added up to my Binge Eating Disorder and morbid obesity. Some people are just overweight. Diet and some exercise may be all they need to get fit. I had to finally give up the delusional thinking that I was just overweight. My problems were so much deeper. It was the way I was living my whole life that kept me so fat and unhealthy. For me, recovery was and is about learning to live my whole life in a more balance and sane manner—a healthier manner, one small step at a time.

My tendency to procrastinate was absolutely part of the dynamics that was keeping me stuck in my illnesses. If I wasn't willing to start working on overcoming my tendency to procrastinate, I would never begin to develop the self-discipline necessary to cultivate my own health, to empower myself. I mean, living with a constant pile of dirty dishes in the sink was depressing and self-defeating. I had to start turning my thinking and attitudes around and take real action steps by actually doing my dishes shortly after meals. I learned that it's pretty darn nice to have a clean empty sink. It feels good and impacts all of my life. In particular, a clean sink chips away at my depression and boosts my self-esteem. It may be small, but having done the dishes means that I've at least accomplished something. I took a step to improve the quality of my life. That's just one small example.

It was never just one issue. It wasn't just the childhood abuse. It wasn't just my PTSD or my learning disorders. It wasn't just my chronic pain issues. It wasn't just how I ate or that I detested doing exercise. It was all of those things and more. No, I never had to fix all of those things before I started to lose weight. I'm still plenty broken, but I had to take a whole life view of recovery and become willing to begin untangling the complex knot that was my life. I had to start picking up after myself and doing my dishes after meals. I had to become willing to ask for help with my psychological and physical health problems. I had to admit that my life was really out of control on a lot of levels, that I wasn't managing my life very well and that I needed some help.

Recovery is learning to live my way to better health.

I can't seem to Get Started. How do I do it? How did you do it?

There is no simple answer. First you have to ask yourself, exactly what is it that you want to start. I finally figured out that I had always had my priorities wrong. My weight was only a symptom. I had to give up the mentality that losing it, the weight, would fix me. I had to get willing to fix the reasons that I had the extra weight in the first place. I had to work at changing a lot of my ideas about weight and diets. I had to start thinking about healing my life not just my size. I had to begin working at changing many of my automatic responses to life--to untwist some of my thinking. Of course, you could say it took me years to get started because of all my failed diets. However, there are several main ideas that I came to understand and accept over time that were crucial to my personal recovery. I learned a lot while I was binging and yo-yo dieting my way up to 450 pounds. Probably the most important thing was that no one was going to do this for me. I had to be willing to go to whatever length it took to get the job done. That often meant getting out of my emotional or physical comfort zone. Here are some other important ideas:

• Binge Eating Disorder and Obesity are two separate health issues. Weight loss can't be successful over the long haul unless I dealt specifically with my binge eating disorder first.
• Getting fit, healthy, and enjoying life needed to be my main goal, not losing weight. That's a byproduct of a healthy eating and healthy actions. Health and fitness will take the rest of my life and I'd like that to be a very long time.
• Diets don't work. Small lifestyle changes over time work.
• I had to dump perfectionism. Recovery comes in shades of grey, not black or white.
• Don't think "diet", think: I am retraining my taste buds to acquire a taste for healthier foods.
• I had to stop beating up on myself. Count binges and junk food as a vegetable and move on!
• There are no quick fixes, magic pills, or shortcuts. Patience and persistence pay off.
• Exercise didn't have to hurt. It could be activities and movements that I enjoyed doing like bicycling.
• It doesn't pay to keep trying the same old things over and over.
• My best thinking got me to my top weight. I had to ask for help from people who knew more about how to recover than I did.
• It takes action. No amount of reading about it or wishing I was healthier and happier would get the job done.
• Don't "start tomorrow". Tomorrow never comes. I have to take at least a small step forward today and every day.
• If I wanted to be a healthy person, I had to start living like one. Junk food, a sedentary life, procrastination, and messiness, will never bring me health and vitality.
• If I ate healthy foods I'd begin to develop a real preference for them. I can't just eat less junk food and expect to change my relationship to food.
• Food is not my enemy. If I kept that attitude, I'd always be giving food power over me. I had to make friends with and develop a healthy relationship with food. It's my best ally on the road to recovery.

Recovery is a highly personal learning process. What works for one person may not work for the next. We are all individuals. It is a process though; one that can be achieved one day at a time, sometimes one moment at a time. My hope is that readers find some useful new idea to think about that may start them on their own journey of self-discovery and healing.

1. I stopped all dieting and diet-like behavior including the "OA abstinence trap".
2. Started focusing on the process (action) rather than the end goal (weight loss). My primary goal changed from weight loss to becoming a healthier more active person (physically, mentally, and spiritually).
3. Began keeping an accurate food and mood journal to gain more insight into why I binged.
4. Began establishing a fairly stable pattern of eating while gradually increasing activity levels.
5. Gave myself permission to recover imperfectly and tried to stop thinking in black or white, All or Nothing terms.
6. Learned all I could about the science of human nutrition.
7. Started eating primarily whole natural foods.
8. Made a point of increasing my daily activity level from sedentary to moderately active.
9. Continued to improve the nutritional characteristics of the food I was eating and established a pattern of regular moderate exercise.

[More on Getting Started]
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How can food be your friend and ally. Food use to be my higher power. Aren't you in danger of making food your higher power?

Good food is a health promoting substance that helps ward off diseases like cancer and heart disease. It helps control my cholesterol and build lean body tissue. My body needs food so it can regenerate skin, blood, and muscle cells. It is the stuff that keeps my brain functioning well to reduce my chances of falling into the pits of depression. It tastes, smells, and looks good. It offers me a lot of sensual pleasure each day in the way of sight, sounds, smells, texture (feel), and taste. What's not to like? I enjoy food and eating now more than I ever dreamed possible—more than at any time of my whole life.

The only way I could make food my "higher power" would be to treat it as an adversary or condemn it as a bad thing. You might think of it in this way—I think it suits OA concepts quite well. When I choose primarily from the multitude of whole natural foods that are put on this earth, foods that promote my fitness and well-being, I'm doing what my higher and/or helping power(s) want me to do. I'm aligning my will with theirs.

I believe in feeling good, healthy and fit, not looking good in conformity with fleeting and ever changing fashionable body types. A healthy weight cannot be determined by the numbers on a scale. A healthy weight is the weight at which a person settles as they move towards a more fulfilling and meaningful lifestyle—a lifestyle that includes eating primarily whole natural foods and being active.  

This web site is for informational purposes only and is not meant to serve as medical advice or to replace consultation with a professional dietician, nutritionist, physician, or mental health professional. None of the information presented within this web site is meant to diagnose, prescribe, or to administer to any physical or emotional ailments or conditions.