The Connection Between Extreme Diets & Addiction

Jezebel has a clip HERE from the WE series "The Secret Lives of Women" which looks into the connection between extreme diet lifestyles and addiction. Essentially, the clip shows chef Gabrielle Brick who explains how discovering the raw-foods lifestyle instantly cured her alcohol and cocaine addiction. "But has she traded one addiction for another?" queries the Jezebel blogger.

The clip has been edited and she keeps talking about "the scene" and dating guys "in the scene"--that at this point she can only really relate to other raw-foodists. Now we here at Fat Feminist Fitness Blog are no strangers to the Raw Food Movement. LisaD and I went to a Raw Food Restaurant, check out our reviews HERE & HERE), we both had a mutual friend who went Raw after college who lost quite a bit of weight and seems really happy (though she's not totally Raw), and of course, I still have that Raw Food Cookbook I intend to share/review recipes from. So, I'm prefacing my criticism/concerns with a grounding in not being a knee-jerk hater of the Raw Food Movement, but as studies have shown greater connections between anorexia and OCD as well as autism/aspergers, I think that this woman does seem to display signs of the "dry drunk" who is using Raw Food has her new addiction.

Also, I found her morning tea based drink, with 1,000 ingredients--including Chinese and Amazonian herbs--to be interesting, and perhaps the source of her self proclaimed "abundant energy." My mother went to an acupunturist and Chinese herbalist (paid by her insurance) for fibromalgia and she mentioned her low energy. My mother has had to take a nap every day of her life since she was 15 and first suffered from Rheumatic Fever, but once she started taking the herbs she was bouncing off the walls. It couldn't have been simple caffeine because she can drink strong coffee and still go to sleep, so there must have been speed somewhere in the mix, though herbal. She stopped taking them. I'm guessing whatever my mother took, Chef Brick is taking in spades--so the question isn't just, has she traded cocaine for raw food, but cocaine for speed stacked Chinese/Amazonian herbs? I think so.

Once again, let me just say that I think that eating lots of raw fruits, veggies, and nuts (raw almonds are so sweet and lovely compared to roasted, I've noticed), is great. But a big message of this blog is BALANCE. This morning on Dr. Zorba he had a caller who insists on running 8 miles per day, regardless of how he's feeling. He developed an irregular heart beat after a night of heavy drinking and then going on his 8 mile run, Dr. Zorba's advice was to: LISTEN TO YOUR BODY. Good advice. Binging is bad, but so is running 8 miles with an electrolite imbalance. Cocaine is bad, but so is super-charging your life with speed, even if the source is herbal. If you have a serious addiction issue or you are a binge eater, you need to deal with the root of the problem and not just try to mask it with another obsession. LISTEN TO YOUR BODY, honor your body, seek balance--the euphoria of the extemes is beguiling voice, but ultimately, whether it is in the form of the cocaine washed Hollywood party or the Raw Foodist Vegan Retreat in the Amazon where you experiment with "herbs" you will be out of balance. Speaking of that, sometime I'll have to share a story about when I was doing aid work in Ecuador and met these people at an eco-retreat who came down to Ecuador every year to have these week-long drug binges/herbal drug binges and how that type of American or European abuse of the developing world's laws and supporting such activities is really a major contributor to systematic injustice. Anyway, that's another post. So, reader, what do you think about the clip?