Cabbage Overdose

Audio version now available.

I cringe at the term, “addictive personality.” My personality is one of the only things not driving my addictions. My neurology and biology are certainly out to destroy me, but I prefer to think of my personality as warm and engaging, although perhaps a little overwhelming. I have been told by those closest to me on more than a few occasions that I am a lot. My personality is something to which no one has ever become addicted.

I prefer to think of myself as having a penchant for compulsivity. When I find things I like, I tend to embrace them with the tenacity of a locked-jaw pitbull. The fact that I spent a decade trying to moderate my consumption of alcohol is laughable. I can’t moderate anything I like. In fact, believe it or not, I recently overdosed on cabbage.

I have preferred cabbage over all varieties of lettuce for many years now. In an attempt to remain healthy and achieve my goal of living into my triple digits, I eat a salad for lunch on most days. Sometimes my salad is topped with chicken, beef, or pork, and sometimes I just toss on a handful of mixed nuts to get my protein. But always, my salad starts with about a gallon of shredded cabbage.

I have long considered cabbage to be in the category of foods that are unlimited in a healthy diet. In fact, lots of diet plans that give specific limits on proteins, fats, carbs, and even fruits list green-leafy vegetables as unlimited in quantity. So imagine my surprise when I learned that I could, in fact, overdose on cabbage.

The OD was slow and subtle in its development. My mom and sister both have the autoimmune disease called celiac, so I naturally started to worry about my gluten consumption when my symptoms slowly started to appear. If you are not familiar with what happens to a celiac when they consume gluten, the impact is gastrointestinal discomfort, to put it politely. It can cause a person to start carrying a clean pair of underwear in their glove compartment if the sensitivity is severe.

My issues eventually evolved to remind me of one of my favorite Kevin Hart jokes. His plane lands and he feels an urgent need for a stall, not a urinal, in a bathroom. He tells his body that he’ll be home in 20 minutes. His body replies, “You got 20 seconds. Clock starts now.” I’ve been there, and it didn’t end well. It turns out I was more than 20 seconds from a toilet.

What was the culprit? Was it gluten? Maybe dairy? Am I just getting old and losing control? Is this what the next 50 years are going to look like? What the hell is Crohn’s disease? I’m not sure, but the people on the pharma commercials don’t look very relaxed in public.

It turns out that you can, in fact, eat too much cabbage. But you’ve got to be really dedicated. You might even say a person would have to eat cabbage compulsively. Cabbage is billed in the nutrition community as an unsung hero – a forgotten superfood providing an intense supply of antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals. It also has a ton of fiber. And when you regularly eat a gallon of it a day, the fiber eventually takes command of the speed lever on the conveyor belt that is your digestive system.

This article isn’t really about cabbage. Cabbage isn’t the point. Cabbage is just the latest in a long list of compulsions and addictions for me.

As a kid I had to be hospitalized with a severe migraine. The emergency room docs were baffled. I had never had a severe headache before. I had not suffered a blow to the head or been exposed to bright light or loud noises or noxious fumes. At a follow-up visit with our family doctor a few days after the incident, the nurse had me circle all the foods on a several-page list that I had consumed the day of the migraine. The only food I circled was banana. The doc confirmed, “You only had a banana that day before your head started hurting.” “Yes,” I replied. “Well not one banana. I ate seven.” A potassium overdose presents a little differently than a fiber overdose.

As an adult, I was leary of caffeine overdose. I successfully avoided coffee compulsivity, until I switched to decaf. With the caffeine removed, I decided to move coffee into the unlimited category. “It’s just hot brown water,” I proclaimed to my wife. So I proceeded to drink between a pot and two pots of decaf per day. I started to remind myself of that old uncle who comes to the Independence Day barbeque and drinks coffee in the blazing sun all afternoon. If I was upright, it was a good time for a cup of decaf.

I eventually drank enough decaf coffee to blow out my sphincter. My upper sphincter, that is. Did you know humans have two sphincters? There is one at the top of our throats to keep stomach acid from backing up into our mouths. It turns out that coffee, even decaf coffee, is incredibly acidic, and it overwhelmed the closing power of my poor throat backflow valve. My kids now take great delight telling people that I have a broken sphincter. “It’s the upper sphincter! The upper sphincter!” I usually exclaim defensively. But alas, my cries cannot be heard over the laughter of my offspring.

When I quit drinking, I would buy cookies and cream ice cream at Safeway in a five-gallon bucket, and eat it straight from the container at night. I would yell at my kids if they even looked at my ice cream bucket. Those four ingrates had their own pint they could share. Couldn’t they see that the frozen sugar cream was keeping me from drinking alcohol?

I have blamed my alcoholism on my childhood Doritos consumption. I am a reluctantly victimized member of the first generation to be subjected to processed food. The wonders of food chemistry that extended shelf life exponentially and made meal prep a breeze was considered all upside. We didn’t really think about nutritional impact back then. So I ate Doritos like it was my after-school job, and the added sugars carved a nice little groove in my dopamine pathways that would later hold an excessive flow of alcohol.

I was always destined for alcoholism, but I am fortunate that my penchant for compulsivity helped speed up the progression of my addiction. At the turn of the century, I was 40 pounds overweight and determined to do something about it. I started exercising twice a day (an easy task for a compulsive person on a mission), and followed the most popular nutrition fad of the time by eliminating fat from my diet. Still woefully ignorant about the dangers of processed foods, and the body’s desperate need for us to consume fat, my diet consisted of three things: fat-free pretzels, fat-free cream cheese, and vodka. The percentage of my caloric intake derived from alcohol shot way up. With nothing to dilute my intake, my neurotransmitter abduction by alcohol was greatly accelerated. The six months it took me to lose the 40 pounds sped up my descent into alcoholism like nothing else. In the long run, my penchant for compulsivity was a huge blessing. I would not be in my ninth year of sobriety now if not for my weight-loss strategy back then. That diet was among a handful of factors that sped up my progression into addiction and forced me to take action while I still had many years ahead of me. As traumatic as parts of my story are, it would have been far more tragic had my decline into alcoholism taken longer robbing me of more time sober while I wallowed in the futility of moderation in my retirement years. Yuk! I consider myself blessed to have engaged compulsively with my holy trinity of fat-free weight loss.

By far the biggest neurological and cognitive compulsion I have faced was my addiction to alcohol. Ice cream takes some effort to avoid, but I can navigate severe limitation of my sweet-treat of choice with relative ease.

Cabbage moderation will be the easiest of all. There is no siren song calling me to the refrigerator now that I’ve connected the dots between being a cabbage glutton and a terrifying 20 seconds leading to the need for a clean pair of underwear stashed in my glove compartment.

And you’ll find there is nothing wrong with my personality. Unless, of course, you are trapped in a conversation with me discussing one of the many topics about which I have taken a compulsively obsessive interest.

I can go on about sphincter blowout for days.

If you have a penchant for compulsivity, and you are ready to consider where alcohol, and other substances or behaviors, fall on the spectrum of addiction for you, please consider joining us in SHOUT Sobriety.

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