Deep-seated food issues

[mintleaf]

Recently I had realization that, regardless of what my doctor says, my self-limited diet is a serious problem. I eat zero vegetables and can't stomach anything with a texture similar to pasta -- so my diet consists of mainly fruits, grains, processed foods, and dairy. (Emphasis on grains and processed foods.) I eat a decent amount of meat and maybe a few servings of nuts a week. This isn't just picky eating. I'll eat foods that taste bad, as long as they're somewhat familiar. I'm a pretty flexible and resilient person, but trying to force myself to eat something I'm not comfortable with completely and literally shakes me.

I recognize how childish and irrational this issue is, believe me. I've made tons of attempts throughout my life to add new foods to my diet and to eradicate the problem altogether...I tried addressing it once with a therapist, but they didn't see it as serious compared to my other (previous) issues. I haven't made any effort since then.

But now that my depression and anxiety have for the most part faded out, yet I still feel exhausted and foggy almost constantly, I think it's time to get serious about it. My goal is to add at least three vegetables to my regular diet by the end of summer.

(Pretty sure it's a recently 'discovered' and minimally acknowledged eating disorder, but I can't remember what it's called and haven't been able to track down the original article I read. My doctor and former therapist have just described it as phobic. If you have any idea of what the proper term for my problem might be, I'd really appreciate it.)

This is what happens when I come in contact with one of these foods: I take a bite, am immediately reviled, have to coach myself through the process of not spitting it out, chewing it and swallowing. If I'm feeling brave (hah) I'll take another bite, but it's extremely rare that I can fully convince myself that something isn't disgusting. Even if I'm able to add something to my diet, I never totally acclimate to the point that eating it is a comfortable experience. I mean, I've been eating yogurt with chunks of fruit of it for years and still go through this process every time I eat it. It's kind of funny, but...ultimately not at all.

What I'd appreciate feedback on:
1. Why do you think I'm like this?
2. What do you think I can do to become comfortable with these unfamiliar tastes and textures?
3. Where would you recommend starting? / What are some good, healthy recipes that include relatively palatable vegetables?

How to piss me off:
1. Tell me that this is a ridiculous first-world problem and that I need to stop being such a child (I've learned to anticipate this)
2. Turn this into a discussion on cognitive functions. Telling me that I have underdeveloped/malfunctioning Si would probably not be useful.

Thanks to anyone who reads this / responds! Even just some good resources would be great.

 

[cafe]

1. It could be a sensory sensitivity or you might just be naturally resistant to change. Most people have some kind of quirk like this, though to a lesser extreme.
2. How much does it bother you when familiar foods change? If it does not bother you very much, there are ways of integrating vegetables into other foods. I'd look for recipes via an amazon search.

Although, if you're careful, you could get a lot of your necessary nutrients without consuming a lot of vegetables, I'd think. Especially since you like fruit. Whole grains have fiber. Orange pit fruits like peaches have some beta carotene. Nearly all fruits have some vitamin C.

Also, if you can tolerate juices, something like V8 Splash might be okay. It doesn't have a lot of texture to it. If you can tolerate something more along the lines of purees, Naked Juice and similar juices have a lot of veggies incorporated while mostly tasting like fruit.

 

[mintleaf]

1. It could be a sensory sensitivity or you might just be naturally resistant to change. Most people have some kind of quirk like this, though to a lesser extreme.
2. How much does it bother you when familiar foods change? If it does not bother you very much, there are ways of integrating vegetables into other foods. I'd look for recipes via an amazon search.

Although, if you're careful, you could get a lot of your necessary nutrients without consuming a lot of vegetables, I'd think. Especially since you like fruit. Whole grains have fiber. Orange pit fruits like peaches have some beta carotene. Nearly all fruits have some vitamin C.

Also, if you can tolerate juices, something like V8 Splash might be okay. It doesn't have a lot of texture to it. If you can tolerate something more along the lines of purees, Bare Naked and similar juices have a lot of veggies incorporated while mostly tasting like fruit.

I'm not sensitive to anything else sensory (besides artificial lights, the feeling of wearing glasses, and anything above 60 decibels...you might be right ) and I like change, so I don't know. But I guess knowing the cause probably isn't that important.

Thanks for the suggestions. and I love purees/juices, it's just that I haven't been able to find any inexpensive enough to drink on a regular basis. V8 Splash is decently priced and tastes fine, but the sugar content is kind of ridiculous, so I've stopped drinking it.

 

[Pseudo]

Have you thought o makin your own juice. It can find moderately priced juicier and I think they would be worth it to improve yor nutrition for the rest of your life.


Which vegetables to you find palatable already. Which do you dislike most? Is cooking method a factor? Then we can make suggestions.

 

[Xann]

http://greensmoothiegirl.com/ , worth a try, even if youre not a girl. Smoothies are just a lot easier to handle than actual vegetables.

 

[Scheherezade]

http://greensmoothiegirl.com/ , worth a try, even if youre not a girl. Smoothies are just a lot easier to handle than actual vegetables.

this looks like a great site,

[MENTION=17424]decrescendo[/MENTION] i have a friend who does n t eat tomatoes and loathes them and apparently it is a phobia but she did eat yellow tomatoes in a salsa because she did n t know what they were

 

[Randomnity]

This is really something that therapy is intended for. I'd suggest trying to find another therapist and making sure they understand that it goes far beyond picky eating. Not eating any vegetables is likely to make you seriously malnourished and unhealthy. Forcing yourself to eat them when you have a response as strong as spitting it out after could easily make the problem worse, not better.

If you won't do that, though, my experience is that with things you find repulsive, slowly pushing your boundaries a tiny bit will increase your tolerance over time, and pushing them too far can make you more intolerant. But a therapist, particularly one specializing in eating disorders, may tell you something very different, and I would really suggest going that route.

 

[kyuuei]

Disclaimer: While I am a certified nutrition consultant, I do not know everything and this game IS mental, as most food issues are. That therapist should have taken it seriously since (first of all) YOU take it seriously, and (second of all) food has a HUGE impact on your hormones and health, which COULD be contributing to other issues you are having (for example, common symptoms of depression AND an unhealthy diet are lethargy, irritated bowels, the inability to concentrate, etc.) and/or exasperating these issues unnecessarily. A therapist would be my go-to answer, especially one that deals with eating disorders as s/he's more likely to understand your issue in depth and work with you on it. I find things like depression affect every single issue and aspect of your life, and food is actually a major one in this case.

With all that being said.

1. Why do you think I'm like this?

This is answered, to me, by the vicious cycle of depression/stress/other issues in your life. When the core issues in your life are not being addressed, nothing really gets 'fixed'. Having a therapist 'reject' this issue as a serious one is not the right answer s/he should have given at all, they should have referred you to a food therapist.

2. What do you think I can do to become comfortable with these unfamiliar tastes and textures?

Start making them the textures you are familiar with. For example: Did you know you can frequently add a couple spinach leaves to a smoothie and you will not taste them in the smoothie AT ALL even if it turns the smoothie green in color? Starting out with something as simple as that could be a way to introduce vegetables in your life. Pureeing some whole vegetables into a heavy-flavored sauce is something my parents did for us as kids to get us to eat more veggies.

Since the relationship is mental, start out slow. Find SOMETHING you CAN do and be satisfied with. Experiment with it, and make it a game. This is NOT a long term solution at all.. I do NOT recommend catering to this (for lack of better words) picky eating behavior. But if you are going to be dealing with this, you should at least squeeze veggies in somewhere in your diet. (Have you thought of just buying a few pre-made juices? There are those Green Machine, Blue Machine juices that have veggies in them, and even if you didn't like the taste, you could have the satisfaction of knowing you at least got SOME veggies in your diet in the morning that way.) I think vegetables are a key ingredient here.. Pasta, you could definitely live without that just fine for the time being.

The second recommendation is to swap out some of your staples for higher-health convenience foods. For example, if you eat rice at all, switch to brown rice.. or compare labels on the soups you eat to pick more organic, less-sodium soups. Buy the 'healthier looking bread' in the aisle. Small swaps like that will at least make you more aware of the ingredients in your convenience foods, and (hopefully) make you care more about the foods you are ingesting. There's a book I like called "Unjunk your Junk Food" that shows you different additives and preservatives and foods that lack them.

Experiment with ingredients you have never tried. For example.. Horned fruit (an orange spiny fruit with a green inside) tastes like cucumber, but it is fruit,and actually takes zero effort to prep and eat (slice transversely, squeeze from the bottom, eat the little fruit-coated seeds that come out). If it is a mental game, maybe finding the taste of a vegetable in the texture/classification of a fruit will warm you up to the idea of eating the vegetable itself.

Mooooost importantly, if you don't cook already, I recommend starting to cook your food instead of buying pre-packaged foods. Cooking creates a more positive relationship with food.

3. Where would you recommend starting? / What are some good, healthy recipes that include relatively palatable vegetables?

Since my diet is pasta heavy, I'll try my best. On top of my recommendations, of which a therapist is at the top, here are a few websites and books to get you started.

http://voices.yahoo.com/ways-sneak-vegetables-into-foods-finicky-adults-11826332.html -- Some immediate, simple puree recipes to start you out. I can only recommend googling your favorite foods and learning ways to put vegetables in them. It is way too simple to puree a can of mixed veggies into a pre-made brownie mix and call it a day. You're cooking, you're creating veggies in your diet (granted, this requires you to like brownies) knowingly, but the texture and taste of the brownie is familiar and will overpower the taste of the veggies. Recipes like this are beginner steps that are easy easy to do. (As I said before.. this is NOT a long term solution, and there are many reasons to have a healthy relationship with whole vegetables. But if this is the difference between you eating a vegetable or not, I think most would agree that they'd rather you eat the vegetable.)

http://www.skinnytaste.com/ Even though this is centered around dieting, it also has many good qualities: vegetables replacing grains and fats, home cooking recipes, using ingredients vs convenience foods. Learning how to make the things you already like (and the ingredients in them... like buttermilk ranch at the store vs making it yourself..) may show you how many of those ingredients are bad for you or adversely affect your health, and it may nudge you towards things that help with that (coughveggiescough). It's worth a try.

And as I said before, "Unjunk your Junk Food" is a great little book with lots of pictures and examples to guide you through.

These are tiny, baby steps, that may get you looking in the right direction.. but seriously, a therapist is going to be the best call to arms you can have in shaping your diet to be more functional.

 

[Stanton Moore]

This is really something that therapy is intended for. I'd suggest trying to find another therapist and making sure they understand that it goes far beyond picky eating. Not eating any vegetables is likely to make you seriously malnourished and unhealthy. Forcing yourself to eat them when you have a response as strong as spitting it out after could easily make the problem worse, not better.

If you won't do that, though, my experience is that with things you find repulsive, slowly pushing your boundaries a tiny bit will increase your tolerance over time, and pushing them too far can make you more intolerant. But a therapist, particularly one specializing in eating disorders, may tell you something very different, and I would really suggest going that route.

This is really good advice, Randomnity.
You should find a therapist who also does hypnosis. I think that might help dislodge some of the subconscious anxiety about eating.
Also, there are therapists who specialize in working with eating disorders. Now, I understand that you don't have anerexia or bulimia, but someone experienced with those may have insights into this, or at the least might have good recommendations for the next step.

 

[Lark]

I used to have that thing about pasta too, no idea were it came from because I was a big fan of it as a kid, can eat it again now but from seventeen to twenty three maybe I couldnt eat the stuff at all.

 

[gromit]

Oh that sounds awful.

What about vegetables is it that you can't stomach? The taste? The texture? Is there a difference between raw vs cooked? Or is it simply the IDEA of it?

As a vegetarian and food lover and cooking lover, I have lots of tricks up my sleeve that I could suggest if it's a taste or texture thing. However, if it's something more psychological, that is beyond me.

 

[mintleaf]

Which vegetables to you find palatable already. Which do you dislike most? Is cooking method a factor? Then we can make suggestions.

I made a list yesterday of vegetables that I (at this point) can't imagine eating: beans, peas, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower. as far as cooking method: I don't know what all can be fried? but in most cases I'd probably prefer that to cooking, unless the texture could be masked by other ingredients in the recipe. idk, I'll definitely check out all of the links that others have mentioned.

This is really something that therapy is intended for.

I really appreciate all of these responses. Most have been so well-informed and helpful, and I understand the thought that therapy might be the best option. But if anything, I'd rather it be a last-case scenario. I just ended therapy at the beginning of this year and I'm not anxious to go back. Anyway, I haven't even tried a new food since my other issues faded out, so who knows -- maybe it'll be easier now. But hypnosis might actually be a good idea (thanks @StantonMoore)

This is answered, to me, by the vicious cycle of depression/stress/other issues in your life. When the core issues in your life are not being addressed, nothing really gets 'fixed'. Having a therapist 'reject' this issue as a serious one is not the right answer s/he should have given at all, they should have referred you to a food therapist.

That's possible. Even though I've had this problem since I was 2 or 3 years old, I wonder if I would have grown out of it in my pre-teen years if it hadn't been for all the other issues that began at that point.

The therapist didn't really reject it. I told him during the first session that my main issues were depression and anxiety, and that I had this unrelated food phobia; he asked me if my doctor was concerned about it and if I was concerned about it. I wasn't at the time, because I honestly hardly ever think about it. But yeah, my doctor's lack of concern is surprising. Though for some reason I've never thought to tell her that I'm exhausted all the time?

And again, thank you! The suggestions you made were exactly what I was looking for.

Oh that sounds awful.

What about vegetables is it that you can't stomach? The taste? The texture? Is there a difference between raw vs cooked? Or is it simply the IDEA of it?

As a vegetarian and food lover and cooking lover, I have lots of tricks up my sleeve that I could suggest if it's a taste or texture thing. However, if it's something more psychological, that is beyond me.

(It's honestly not that bad on a daily basis. Ignoring it is unfortunately easy.)

I seriously have no idea. I'd like to think that I know myself pretty well, but when it comes to this, I'm just like
I have one or two vague theories that I'm putting them on the shelf for now. Doubt they'd actually be helpful. And I'm not trying to sound self-effacing, but I think it has something to do with simple immaturity, too.

But yes, taste and texture are factors, so I'd be glad to hear about your ideas.

/ughhhhh lately I've been realizing the truth of the view that addressing one's own mental health issues in certain contexts can just aggravate egocentrism

 

[Chiharu]

This may sound weird, but have you tried vegetables prepared in various ways? Boiled, grilled, stir-fried, tempura, raw, etc? Fresh, frozen, canned? I hated vegetables until I started having them fresh with simple flavors (no "cheese" sauce, THANK YOU).

 

[Retmeishka]

Dumb question - and I haven't read this thread yet, so I don't know if the problem was ever resolved, and I know nothing about what anyone else said yet - but here is my question. Is the disgust happening when you eat foods from your own refrigerator at home, and if so, is your refrigerator turned up enough that it's really cold? The fridge has to be less than 40 degrees for food to stay fresh. If the fridge is warm, food spoils, and of course it will disgust you when you try to eat anything at all. This happened to me before, which is why I'm asking.

 

[kyuuei]

Since it's being re-addressed, I already posted back then... I figured I'd give more current advice. I didn't read my old response.

I've made tons of attempts throughout my life to add new foods to my diet and to eradicate the problem altogether...I tried addressing it once with a therapist, but they didn't see it as serious compared to my other (previous) issues. I haven't made any effort since then.

I'd say anything you are personally concerned with should be a concern to a therapist. You might need to talk to a therapist specifically designed to deal with eating disorders.

But now that my depression and anxiety have for the most part faded out, yet I still feel exhausted and foggy almost constantly, I think it's time to get serious about it. My goal is to add at least three vegetables to my regular diet by the end of summer.

I think that's a great goal. It's tangible, and concrete, and realistic. Also keep in mind: your diet and nutrition levels have a LOT to do with how you feel and how your body operates. I'd at least start taking a gummy multivitamin or something if you don't already. If nothing else, a multivitamin, adequate water (even if you have a flavor it with enhancers), and adequate sleep. You'll be more likely to tackle this task with those three prongs handled.

What I'd appreciate feedback on:
1. Why do you think I'm like this?

Something in your mentality and/or life relates vegetables and non-processed foods and such as disgusting. While there are real cases of people eating cilantro, or broccoli, and it physically tasting different than most people taste it as... Chances are, you don't suffer from that.

The first time I tried sushi I didn't think I liked it. There are some vegetables I still don't like, despite currently moving to a mostly vegetable diet.

An important thing to remember is your taste buds adapt over time to what you put in your mouth. Vegetables do not taste fresh, and amazing and crisp and commercial-esque when you eat at mcdonalds all the time. They just taste different, and bland. Your taste buds, your brain, your reflexes--they're drawn to fat, and sugar, and processed foods. Those are the things it will crave. And coming down off of that--it requires a bit of withdrawal symptoms to get through.

2. What do you think I can do to become comfortable with these unfamiliar tastes and textures?

- Start with baby steps. Don't try to tackle a raw vegetables yet.
- Cook your own food. If you want processed food still, fine, but cook it yourself, even if it's just sticking it in the oven and eating it. You should have an active relationship with every single meal you make.
- Get equipment that will help you. If you like milkshakes, but never make them yourself, invest in a blender. Get the things that will get you cooking.

3. Where would you recommend starting? / What are some good, healthy recipes that include relatively palatable vegetables?

I'd say to start by de-processing the food you currently eat. Whole grain pastas. Whole grain organic breads. Using meat that has been personally prepared by you. Replacing your sugar with other sweeteners--like maybe starting with coconut sugar, and moving to things like dates, date sugar, and honey. If you like coffees from starbucks, start looking at knock-off recipes to make them yourself.

There are a lot of ways online to easily replace your processed food with non-processed food. Hamburgers can be quite healthy for you if made by hand.

Pick a vegetable that's the closest to something you currently eat.
- Potatoes. French fries might a common processed food--... so look up a great recipe online for making great baked potato fries vs. fried fries.
- Or, if you really like milkshakes it's even easier. Pick lettuce--a mellow green leaf, and stick a few leaves into your milkshakes and blend them up. It's just enough to turn it green--but you cannot taste it and it's too few leaves to make any vegetable taste there. The texture will not change with 1-2 leaves. You can slowly add 2 more leaves until you're putting a handful in at a time. Then you can change it to spinach--a higher nutrient level, with still mellow flavor.
- Spaghetti is the easiest. Steamed, pulverized mixed veggies can mesh sooo well and seamlessly with tomato sauce and italian spices.
- A few well-blended and pulverized steamed cauliflower in mashed potatoes won't cause any suspicion. Pick a recipe you like, and the easiest and smoothest vegetable to stick in there will come with a simple google search. Just look up "hiding vegetables for kids". I swear, moms are awesome for sneaky yummy recipes.

Try some organic bars that have some replacements in them. See if that helps. Some freeze-dried greens are in Just Great Stuff's green chocolate dream bars for example... but to me, it just tastes like a chocolate protein bar.

Start a food diary and log. Write what you ate--what you cooked, how difficult it was, how you felt about cooking.. if it made you happy and accomplished after or not. How much you could really taste the vegetable--or if you only thought you could taste it.

And finally, watch youtube videos with raw vegans, hippies, or vegetarians. I particularly like this girl: http://www.youtube.com/user/FullyRawKristina .. Just watch them. Watch them be happy about their food, and the relationship they have with it. Try to connect to it--or just appreciate how happy they are about it. It couldn't hurt and it only takes a couple minutes. It could help inspire you to try again if you reject a dish you make. I have no desire to do this girl's diet.. but I like watching her anyways. She inspires me to think of creative ways to make things.

 

[Retmeishka]

Sorry for having bumped this thread, I was just digging through the 'health' section to look for things I was interested in.

I don't have a lot of time to write, and I don't have the internet at home, so I'm just throwing in a brief note here, but I actually have more to say on this.

Is the limited diet something that you have been doing for your entire life, since infancy, or is it something new that only started in the past few years or so?

If you feel 'exhausted and foggy constantly,' I would ask: Are you currently using any medications for your depression and anxiety? If you are taking drugs, feeling exhausted and foggy is a side effect of prescription drugs. Doctors won't tell you about drug side effects. (*Edit: Quitting drugs is extremely dangerous. When people go into withdrawal from psychiatric drugs, they can commit suicide or homicide, or other horrible things happen, so it takes a long time to quit drugs safely.*)

Even if the exhaustion is a drug side effect (rather than being caused by malnutrition, which is why I assume you wanted to try adding vegetables), you might want to try vegetables anyway for whatever reason.

However, vegetables are objectively, inherently gag-inducing. It's not just you. It's the vegetables. People who have a strong tolerance for disgust are able to make themselves try things that cause this discomfort. I can force myself to swallow broccoli, but I am aware of the physical sensation of wanting to spit it out. The more fiber it contains, the more you want to spit it out. The fiber stays in your mouth while you're chewing, and it doesn't get mushy, it just stays hard and fibery. It's natural to want to spit it out. I remember watching a movie not too long ago about chimpanzees, and even *they* like to chew up fruits, swallow the juice, and spit the solid fiber back out.

I recently bought a juicer, as in, just the other day. It was about $35 at Wal-Mart, the smallest cheapest one, Black & Decker. I juiced broccoli. Suddenly, after juicing it (the broccoli stems, not the florets), after removing all that fiber, I suddenly loved it and wanted more of it. It's the fiber that causes that gagging sensation. The juice itself was really good, although it had a little bit of bitterness.

I'm telling you that this is not imaginary, it's a normal response to the fiber in vegetables, and to other things in food that really are not edible. We aren't able to digest fiber. We are not designed to just go out and eat grass. That's why you can't acclimate to these things. They will always be disgusting, because they are objectively, externally disgusting as such.

I never liked the texture of meat. I never liked how un-chewable it was. I would chew and chew and chew, and it would still be tough. But I used to love hot dogs. As an adult, I've done a lot of dietary research, and I found out that actually, eating muscle meat is something that modern societies do, but primitive societies don't. Primitive people seek out organ meats, and sometimes, they just discard the muscle meat as garbage. Muscle meat is tough and chewy and doesn't have much fat in it, and it's the least nutritious part of the animal. Organ meats are soft and tender and full of vitamins, much more vitamins than muscle meat. I've tried eating kidney, for instance, at a Chinese restaurant (an *authentic* Chinese restaurant), and it was soft and delicious and it practically melted in my mouth.

Our bodies are programmed to like things that are good for us and dislike things that are bad for us; when we crave junk food, there's always a reason, something we're trying to seek, some nutrient (oftentimes that nutrient is saturated fat, which many people don't get enough of!). Meat-only diets are actually good for you. Some people even are using raw meat diets, although every time I've eaten raw meat, I've gotten parasites, so I'd say that's not a good place to start.

It's possible to get processed meats that don't contain as many synthetic chemicals - I just recently tried all natural 'uncured' hot dogs, and they're very good.

I forgot to mention: Weston Price (book author) says that cooking vegetables in butter usually makes them more palatable. It should be real butter made from milk, not fake butter made from vegetable oil.

 

[mintleaf]

Sorry for having bumped this thread, I was just digging through the 'health' section to look for things I was interested in.

Actually kind of glad you did, I hadn't seriously thought about this in a while. Never got around to making many changes.

Is the limited diet something that you have been doing for your entire life, since infancy, or is it something new that only started in the past few years or so?

I think I was a picky infant but even more so around age 3.

If you feel 'exhausted and foggy constantly,' I would ask: Are you currently using any medications for your depression and anxiety? If you are taking drugs, feeling exhausted and foggy is a side effect of prescription drugs. Doctors won't tell you about drug side effects. (*Edit: Quitting drugs is extremely dangerous. When people go into withdrawal from psychiatric drugs, they can commit suicide or homicide, or other horrible things happen, so it takes a long time to quit drugs safely.*)

Yeah, and the fogginess is due at least in part to the meds. My doctor isn't willing to change anything unless someone other than me makes a case for it, which I kind of understand considering how paranoid and subjective I can be, but like...the last time I went back on Zoloft it was accidental, and I went very emotionally numb and couldn't sleep and didn't want to do anything, and didn't realize I'd been taking that instead of antibiotics until weeks later. I don't think this is completely my imagination.

Anyway, I really appreciate your advice. Thank you!

 

[Retmeishka]

Yeah, and the fogginess is due at least in part to the meds. My doctor isn't willing to change anything unless someone other than me makes a case for it, which I kind of understand considering how paranoid and subjective I can be, but like...the last time I went back on Zoloft it was accidental, and I went very emotionally numb and couldn't sleep and didn't want to do anything, and didn't realize I'd been taking that instead of antibiotics until weeks later. I don't think this is completely my imagination.

Anyway, I really appreciate your advice. Thank you!

Yeah, it's not your imagination. The drugs make people go numb and turn into zombies, just walking around in a daze and not feeling any emotions and not caring about anything, or sleeping all the time. But quitting the drugs by yourself is almost impossible, because when you quit, you sort of... forget yourself. Even if you promise that you won't hurt yourself when you go into withdrawal, you forget promising that. People who go out in public and shoot into the crowds of people and then kill themselves are in withdrawal from psychiatric meds - every one of the shooters. If you try to quit the drugs, you have to have someone tagging along after you all day long asking you, 'Do you feel okay? How about now? And now?' because when the withdrawal kicks in, you go crazy and can't control yourself anymore.

So, I passionately hate psychiatric drugs, but I also never tell anybody to quit them suddenly either. It takes a plan to slowly reduce the drug dosages, day by day, and observe every little detail of your symptoms - how your moods change, how your energy level changes, are you having any strange thoughts or hallucinations, anything at all, and if anything seems worrisome, you have to stop lowering the dosages and take a bit more of the drug again to slow down the withdrawal. I don't know how long it takes because I've never been on multiple drugs at once. I took Prozac, briefly, for one week, and quit it, and the withdrawal lasted longer than a month, maybe six weeks of withdrawal, after taking it for only one week at the lowest dose, then opening the pills and dumping out half of it because they were too strong for me, so I was taking only half of the lowest possible dose available - and still, six weeks of withdrawal. If I can stay in this forum without getting banned for doing nothing, then you'll frequently see me complaining about how much I hate mainstream medicine and drugs and the drug industry.

 

[mintleaf]

Yeah, it's not your imagination. The drugs make people go numb and turn into zombies, just walking around in a daze and not feeling any emotions and not caring about anything, or sleeping all the time. But quitting the drugs by yourself is almost impossible, because when you quit, you sort of... forget yourself. Even if you promise that you won't hurt yourself when you go into withdrawal, you forget promising that. People who go out in public and shoot into the crowds of people and then kill themselves are in withdrawal from psychiatric meds - every one of the shooters. If you try to quit the drugs, you have to have someone tagging along after you all day long asking you, 'Do you feel okay? How about now? And now?' because when the withdrawal kicks in, you go crazy and can't control yourself anymore.

So, I passionately hate psychiatric drugs, but I also never tell anybody to quit them suddenly either. It takes a plan to slowly reduce the drug dosages, day by day, and observe every little detail of your symptoms - how your moods change, how your energy level changes, are you having any strange thoughts or hallucinations, anything at all, and if anything seems worrisome, you have to stop lowering the dosages and take a bit more of the drug again to slow down the withdrawal. I don't know how long it takes because I've never been on multiple drugs at once. I took Prozac, briefly, for one week, and quit it, and the withdrawal lasted longer than a month, maybe six weeks of withdrawal, after taking it for only one week at the lowest dose, then opening the pills and dumping out half of it because they were too strong for me, so I was taking only half of the lowest possible dose available - and still, six weeks of withdrawal. If I can stay in this forum without getting banned for doing nothing, then you'll frequently see me complaining about how much I hate mainstream medicine and drugs and the drug industry.

I haven't come to any strong conclusions re: psychiatric drugs, but my gut feelings are pretty similar to yours. Not as concerned with withdrawal, though. I went off of Sertraline (generic Zoloft) cold turkey and had no discernible withdrawal symptoms. Accidentally doubling my dosage last month was bad -- had noticed a random spike in anxiety and insomnia and didn't realize what had happened until a week later. But it wasn't as bad as what you're describing. What I'm mainly concerned with are the more subtle effects; sometimes it seems to be like my organic self was frozen in some other dimension when I started medication and went on living an artificially sustained life in another, and I worry I can't wake that self up again and integrate the two dimensions.

Very smart and well-meaning people have tried to explain to me why this is not a correct way of looking at it, and I've honestly tried to understand, but I just don't get it. I've brought this up on the forum before, too, and would be glad to hear more thoughts.

 

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[MENTION=17424]decrescendo[/MENTION] It's a gag reflex of certain foods right? I am guessing your tongue thinks of the food as foreign or invasive and wants you to spit it out (because the tongue isn't used to the taste/texture.)

Have you tried slowly getting used to the texture? Or anything that has that remote texture will just set it off?

I am asking because I developed a gag reflex when it comes to drinking milk (partly because of the taste and texture) even though I never had one until the end of high school. I had to forcefully make myself drink it. Like, a glass of milk would take me forever to drink, but a bowl of ice cream I can down in a few minutes kind of difference. If I had to drink milk, it needs to changed taste or texture for me to drink it in a few seconds.