I write about my childhood and my life and scatter it everywhere, because I believe my story matters. From destructive addict to sober at fifteen, to married with children today. It's a long journey, and experience is the source of everything I know. I teach it and write it to you in order to deepen my own understanding of how to manage a life.
If you're struggling right now with an active addiction to food, you've come to the right place. But if you're looking for a hack, dip the avocado in avocado oil, then sesame oil, eat it three times a day and lose all the weight in two days, I don't do that kind of nonsense. Don't chase it. You've already leased too many years going nowhere, serving one purpose: enriching the people who exploit you. That is not how we should treat each other. Good housekeeping. Now it's out of the way.
I have no idea where you are. By the time this reaches your eyeballs I might be in another realm of existence, lol. Either way, I'm going to help you with words. Empower yourself to improve.
The first step is recognizing that food itself is addictive once it has been refined, processed, and corrupted. But here's the deeper game. We are also addicted to psychological patterns. So if we perfect our food and never touch the psychology, we've only stopped a behavior. Sooner or later another addiction pops up, because the anxiety underneath always finds a way out. I write so much about anxiety because it is directly connected to how we eat. Take a deep breath and really absorb that.
You are at the end stage of addiction if you're ready to quit, and the beginning stage of health and recovery. This period is frightening. We don't know what's going to happen, especially when we let go of the addiction and are left again with those anxiety feelings. But now there's a new language. The language is understanding the nervous system, and the job is to regulate it. This takes time.
If you're in serious trouble, reach out to the people you love and get support. Find a good therapist. Make it happen. It's also incredibly important to have a support team who understand food addiction, and to start talking and writing about it. These are tools sitting right in front of you. Journal online or on paper. There are countless lectures on YouTube. Find someone compassionate who gets right to the point.
When we reach an emotional bottom and can't even focus enough to meditate, there's still prayer. Even if you're an atheist and don't know how to pray, there's a way to communicate with the inner self. Set intentions. Just try it.
The body and the mind are one thing, not two. Science can separate them, but they operate off each other. One cannot exist without the other. They signal each other, they react to each other, and it loops. That's just how it is.
So the first thing we work on is your emotional world. We stabilize you. Your best tool right now is the long, slow, deep breath through the nose. When you feel yourself losing your breath, you're likely having a surge of anxiety. Yours feels a little different than mine, but it's the same animal. Suddenly we're pulled out of the present, the mind drifts into the future or the past, and the five senses keep dragging us away.
That's the paradox. The senses designed to keep us alive, to fetch water, find food, build shelter, plant seeds, make fire, are the same senses that hijack us. We have to learn to temper them, to respond differently to whatever we experience as anxiety, to control the reactivity.
Easier said than done. I say that everywhere, because it's true. Nothing about life is easy, and nothing about improvement is easy. It gets easier as you make it a lifestyle and build habits around it. The early resistance, denial, and fear fade. But we have to start, and we have to build momentum. And the momentum to get better has to become a far greater power than the momentum to self-destruct.
It's a practice. You may not have it all at once. You may not get it tonight. But you do the small things: prayer, meditation, clean diet, exercise, service work, writing, breath work, hygiene, psychotherapy, time in nature, reading, philosophy. You combine those with the harder inner work of learning your character defects and defenses and strategizing how to improve. The improvements often come naturally while we're busy doing the work. We stall only when we approach the areas that frighten us.
Procrastination is common. So is the skepticism that psychology can actually excavate our problems, pull them out of the folds and recesses of the mind completely. We don't perfect the healing in one night. But there's real relief the moment we find a process. And the process, ultimately, is how well we can catch ourselves holding our breath, and keep improving the breath from moment to moment.
I write a lot about food addiction because I have my own variations of it. I've never been overweight, but people very close to me, including my father, struggled with weight their entire lives. So much so that in my teens I vowed never to be like that. I built a small neurosis around being the opposite of the people around me. I loved sports and refused to compromise my athleticism for debaucherous eating.
Looking back now, it feels like destiny. At fourteen I cared about cutting my sodas from six a day to two, a big deal for me then. Eventually it was no soda at all, clean from alcohol and drugs all these years, totally committed to exercise. I spent so many years criticizing myself. Now I praise myself, just grateful that my body has carried me this far, that I'm not tired, that I still want to learn. I'm inspired to teach, to create, to capture the world through my senses and transmit it into the collective consciousness.
That feels like the purpose. I am the radio and the antenna. I'm broadcasting, transmitting messages into the fabric of human consciousness, which affects all consciousness, which affects this planet.
So that's what we're working on here. Synchronizing ourselves again with the deepest source of power, the one born inside us. It begins with a single breath. Five or six seconds in. Hold for two. Five or six seconds out.
Do five. Do ten.
This is a sensitive topic. If you're dealing with addiction right now and want help finding real support, I can point you toward resources.