Medication

SD 7/23/13; First fill 9/23/13; Second fill 11/4/13

I have one addiction.

All throughout my life I have engaged in activities and avoided succumbing to emotionally and physically addicting behaviors. At the age of nine I spent my entire savings gambling – playing a game at a school carnival trying to win a teddy bear. I did not win the teddy bear and vowed never again to spend all my money in pursuit of trying to gain something. When I walk into a casino, I go in with a set amount of money, play until that money is gone, and leave with whatever winnings I accrued while playing. The first time I tried a cigarette at 13 I coughed and found it tasted disgusting, yet I became a brief social smoker in my early and mid-twenties, not inhaling to avoid becoming addicted to nicotine. I did inhale other substances, but none to the point of making it anything other than a fun weekend or a social activity that I easily put away when it came time to engage in a productive life.

I suppose I could become addicted to shopping because I like to buy things and I have way too many things, but I never got hooked to the point of corrupting my paycheck-to-paycheck existence, spending so much that I could not pay my mortgage. I drank fairly consistently in my late teens (when beer was legal at 18) and into my 20s, but one too many hangovers left me unwilling to continue drinking alcohol enough for it to become an addiction. Now I’ll have a beer or glass or two of wine a few times per month, and a hard drink maybe once every several months.

I believe, however, that we all have an addiction. We are all tied to at least one that feeds our mind or our emotional state with a release of endorphins or seratonin. It sure as heck isn’t sex for me.  I am addicted to food.

I suppose that many obese individuals have this problem and we become willing to have surgery to control our eating when we cannot do it ourselves. I chose the surgery that does not make me sick when I eat a cupcake (or two), or a candy bar for Halloween, or a second helping of my favorite pecan pie at Thanksgiving. Therefore, much of the success a band patient experiences, or doesn’t experience, comes from between our ears. We must tackle the addiction to food with a restricted stomach but an unfettered mind.

I saw a new psychotherapist last week, because my health care insurer sent me a notice that my former psychiatrist was leaving their network. One thing I addressed with this new psychotherapist was my desire to address my overeating – my urges to snack despite my reduced stomach capacity. We discussed my caffeine habits (I drink coffee and tea during the week) and she told me that many people drink caffeine to calm them down – despite caffeine being a stimulant. We discussed my issues, in addition to snacking, with concentration, daytime fatigue, difficulty focusing and my disorganization and cluttered environment, all symptoms in common with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

This is not news to me. I forayed into a diagnosis of ADD with another psychiatrist over a decade ago and took a popular (non-stimulant) ADD medication at the time, which did help my concentration and focus.  I stayed on the medication for several months but I gradually stopped because I was not convinced the changes were significant enough to warrant my being on yet another medication.  However, my new psychotherapist indicated she wanted to prescribe for me Adderall. Adderall is an amphetamine (a stimulant), of which one of the side effects is weight loss.

The goal is not to use the drug for weight loss, but to address the issues (such as distraction and the repetitive behaviors associated with eating) that might encourage me to snack. It still does not address any emotional connections I have with food.

I do not feel guilty using medication to help me on this journey. I am committed to making this band and weight loss program work, any way I can, until I can get a better understanding and control over all the reasons I put too much food into my mouth.  I see this as adding additional tools to my toolbox to get me healthy – physically and psychologically.

I’ll let you know how this goes.

In addition