My first conscious memory of addictive eating…
…is me hiding behind the couch with a jar of peanut butter and a spoon.
I was a picky eater and my dad was a gourmet home chef. It broke his heart that I would turn up my nose at all the delicious home made meals he crafted, in favour of the highly processed junk food my palette preferred.
My mom couldn’t say no to me, and I quickly learned how to manipulate my environment to soothe my unmet emotional needs through crappy food-like substances.
Most of my childhood is a blur though, so I don’t have a pile of memories I can trace back to when all this started or how it progressed. I think I was actually a happy-enough kid until my parents split up when I was 13.
I read somewhere that divorce is harder on teenagers than it is on young kids, since their identities are really beginning to form and they’re also more inclined to take on responsibilities beyond themselves. That was definitely true for me.
I don’t remember thinking about my weight as a kid. I noticed it more in adolescence but even then I don’t remember any of the stereotypical turmoil of yo-yo dieting.
Photographic evidence shows that my chubbiness fluctuated throughout my first two decades, and I vaguely remember the thrill of fitting a size M at Le Chateau, which was a Canadian fashion store that was all the rage when I was a teenager.
So while food and weight were obviously on my radar, I wasn’t obsessed with them.
Yet.
In late adolescence, I discovered cannabis and it wasn’t long before that turned into a raging habit. With the weed came the munchies, and boy could I do munchies!
Over the next two decades of my life—through my 20s & 30s—I knew I was addicted to weed and that it was a problem. But it wasn’t enough of a problem to do something drastic like get help. Do they even have treatment for potheads? I didn’t know. I didn’t care.
I certainly never considered getting help for my eating; after all, I reasoned, it was just munchies and that if I could just quit weed then the food would take care of itself.
Spoiler alert: if it had been that simple, I wouldn’t be here writing this and you wouldn’t be here reading it.
I started trying to quit weed in my later 30s. And by “trying to quit” I mostly mean doing a ton of personal development programs and workshops, yoga retreats, and communication courses. God forbid I get therapy or something sensible like that. Nope, I was gonna do it all by myself. Ha. Ha.
In late 2020, I attended two 25-day programs at The Haven to put my life back together after my dad died that spring and my whole world imploded over the summer (someone mentioned something about a bad cold going around that year, but I didn’t notice because I was too busy drowning in despair over my broken house, broken home, and broken life).
Somehow, miraculously, in the middle of all the introspection and connection facilitated by those programs, I was finally ready to give up weed. I didn’t even have to try, it just kinda left me.
So, now… remember when I just had to quit weed and the food would take care of itself? This was the point in my journey where I discovered my relationship to food was Its Own Thing. And probably the original thing, given that jar of peanut butter from before.
Well shucks.
I had joined an AA group over the weed, not trusting this spontaneous recovery to last if I didn’t grasp it like a drowning man. And I noticed my junk food intake creeping up right away. Before long, it wasn’t just creeping but full on raging.
I was walking to the grocery store daily for a family size bag of chips and a box of pastries. I told my sponsor at the time that I think I’m developing a problem with food. And she told me the standard AA party line about such things: “Oh, don’t worry about that. One thing at a time. You’re sober! That’s all that matters!”
She was wrong. I knew she was wrong. I knew she didn’t know what I was talking about the moment she told me she “had the same thing” because she keeps a bag of peanuts in the car and eats them mindlessly when she’s driving on the highway.
I knew it wasn’t the same thing, because she left the peanuts in the car. Like, who does that?!?
Every self-hating food addict knows: The peanuts come in the house. The peanuts go on the couch. The peanuts go in the mouth until the bag is empty and the mouth burns from the salt. Then the person goes out and buys more peanuts.
One does not simply leave the peanuts in the car.
I digress.
Over the next four years, my Junk Food Journey continued. It took all kinds of twists and turns. It went into spontaneous remission briefly when I fell in love, and roared up furiously when that relationship got rocky.
I spent a month in an eating disorder clinic. I spent 6 months in Overeaters Anonymous. I did a stint with some other food addiction coaches who also preached abstinence. I got obsessed with abstinence.
I got obsessed with intuitive eating.
I was obsessed with my obsession with food.
I was obsessed with bodies. Specifically bodies that mine would never have looked like even if I’d eaten nothing but kale and turnips from the time I was 6.
I resented runners for looking good while running, because they were out there earning their toned butts and I hated running and it just wasn’t fair.
As an aside, the eating disorder clinic was a trip. They actually taught a lot of great tools, but like most food recovery places, they had a very narrow view of what causes eating disorders and what the universal solution is.
Specifically, they prescribed me the “keep it in the house” approach to “normalize” my relationship with my “trigger foods”. So, if chips made me nervous, then I was supposed to keep chips in the house. You can guess how that went:
- Day 1: I buy a bag of chips to keep in the house.
- Day 1: I eat that bag of chips. Like, duh.
- Day 2: I buy another bag of chips and swear I’m only going to have one bowl.
- Day 2: I eat the whole bag of chips, one bowl at a time. Shocking.
- Day 3: I buy two so that I have one to keep in the house after I eat the first.
- Day 3: I eat one bag of chips. I obsess all night over the other bag and eat everything else in the house instead.
- Day 4: I eat the other bag for breakfast.
- Day 4: I buy three bags of chips…
- Day 5: I realize this strategy is total hogwash. Maybe it works for others, but not for me.
I think now I’m supposed to narrate some linear and followable path from all of this to where I am today—which is totally imperfect and totally good with that.
I no longer obsess about food all day; I obsess over my “purpose” instead (but hey, I’ll take existential dread over hopeless despair any day). I’m able to set reasonable and healthy limits around my food, and stick to them most of the time.
When I don’t stick to them, I meet that experience with awareness, self-compassion, and understanding.
But there is no linear path.
In my OA days, I’d read stories about people who came into the program and just like that, they were cured, as long as they went to meetings three times a week and did a set of steps every year for the rest of their life.
And you know what? Power to them. If that works for them, then blessed be the fruit. But it didn’t work for me. And if you’re here, then it didn’t work for you either (or you never wanted to try it, and I respect that.)
I don’t claim to be “fully recovered”, and I think that’s a good thing.
I subscribe to the “Learning Model” of addiction, which is different from the “Disease Model” in that it doesn’t see addiction as a disease to be cured, but rather a normal learned process in response to certain stimuli, repeated behaviours, and psychological predisposition.
It took my brain 40+ years to learn how to be a really pro junk food junkie, and while the re-learning is faster than that, it’s not overnight.
Spoiler alert: building new food habits takes time.
Years.
But that’s a reason for compassion and understanding, not despair. Once I got serious in my intent and healing practices around food, I made huge strides in a relatively short amount of time.
I learned about nervous system regulation and parts work and attachment theory, and I used those tools to see how this junk food relationship was showing up for me personally and how that was different from literally every other person I’ve ever met.
You can get a chronological sense of my journey from my Trainings page. My modus operandi is to get trained in any tool I might want to use, instead of just hiring someone to use it on me.
That’s a very expensive and very time consuming way to go about things, but I’m the eternal learner and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
That’s what makes me uniquely qualified to help other people on this journey. I’m not here to offer you some cookie-cutter healing modality that’s guaranteed to show results in only 30 days.
Working with me, I don’t promise that you’ll lose 50 pounds in 6 months. Maybe you will, and maybe you won’t. This isn’t a weight-loss program, it’s Food Relationship Repair.
When your relationship with food is healthy, and you’re eating foods that nourish your body, then your body becomes healthy and finds its own set point.
Every individual is different and has unique and individual needs (no duh).
And I’m going to be honest with you: I can’t meet all of those needs. Anyone who says they can is full of it. You’re special and unique, and there is not, nor will there ever be, a healing modality that works for every client in every kind of addiction; or even one that works for almost everyone in one kind of addiction.
“One Size Fits All” works about as well for recovery as it does for t-shirts and leggings. And if you’re here because you eat too much junk food, then you know exactly how reliable that label is!
At the end of the day, you’re the only person who can be responsible to get all of your needs met. And thank the good lord for that, because wherever you go, there you are—ready to meet your needs as they come.
Maybe you need trauma therapy because some bad things happened when you were little.
Maybe you need to learn mindfulness because you can’t stand to be alone with your thoughts for more than 20 seconds.
Maybe you need a better support system because you’ve burned every friendship you’ve ever had by not setting healthy boundaries and then ghosting them instead of telling them what you need.
Nor am I ever going to tell you what meal plan you should be on, because that’s not how it works. You probably already know which foods make your body feel good and which ones make it feel icky.
And if you don’t, you’re still the best detective to figure that out. I know what works in my body (do I always follow it perfectly? No way—I’m still a messy imperfect human!).
I do happen to believe that highly processed food-like substances are terrible for everyone, but how much you can get away with and still feel moderately well is up to you to decide.
“Well that’s great Mercedes. So what can you do for me?”
I’m so glad you asked!
What I can do is help you learn to guide yourself through your own junk food recovery journey.
I can be with you as you feel your feelings and then gently direct you to look at the beliefs causing them and the new choices you can make about what to do next.
I can point out some major pitfalls that I’ve tumbled in so you don’t have to.
Or maybe you do, because some people only learn the hard way.
If you do fall in them, I can hold your hand as you find your way back out.
I can help you find what other kind of professional support you need, because this is the kind of journey that takes a village. You get to create your own village, and it’s helpful to have someone with experience creating theirs to highlight some of the better applicants.
This is the place where I think I’m supposed to make a promise or something. All the marketing stuff says “Tell them why they should trust you to solve their problems.”
Well, that’s problematic to begin with, because I can’t solve your problems. No one person can. Not even you, not all by yourself. (If you could, you’d have done it by now.) But you together with your village can solve your problem.
And because I’m an expert at building a recovery village, I can help you build yours so that you never have to walk this path alone again.
I can help you work through a ton of the blocks to a healthier relationship with food, and I can put you in touch with resources and professionals to work on the aspects that are beyond my scope.
I read somewhere that the best teacher is one who’s just slightly ahead of you on the path; not so far ahead that they are unrelatable and unreachable.
I’ve taken courses with “recovered food addicts” and they just didn’t get me. They couldn’t meet me where I was. They wanted me to do what they were doing because it was working for them. But it didn’t work for me because I was nowhere near where they were.
So actually, I can make you a promise: I will never try to be something I’m not.
I will always confess that I am a wobbly and imperfect human doing her best, and I will never fake competency when I should actually refer you elsewhere.
And through all of that, I will guide you as one human to another, through as much of your junk food journey that makes sense, and then I will support you in transitioning to the next phase of your development when you outgrow the container we create together.