Chew it up and spit it out

You are awesome. Have I mentioned that? You're awesome!

Thank you!  I remembered! Pam Tremble!  I wonder where she has been.  Talk about awesome.
Here is a link to the article I was talking about.  Explains it perfectly.  A must read for anyone who thinks this could be a good idea.
http://pamtremble.blogspot.com/2008/10/chew-and-spit-habit-you-dont-want-to.html


I hear so many people on OH asking if "chewing and spitting" is alright. Basically, instead of actually eating bad food, they want to know if they can chew it up to get the taste of it, then spit it out so it doesn't go into the stomach pouch. 


There was a recent thread on OH with this question and I posted an answer. Since I'm lazy and don't like to type stuff over and over again, I figured I'd post it here too. 


There are two issues with this. 


First, this behavior is the first steps of bulemia and getting into the habit of chewing food and spitting it out can lead to a very serious eating disorder. After WLS we are already dealing with changing the way we relate to food, so we want to instill good habits all along the way and avoid the bad ones as much as possible. 


Second, there's a biological reason not to do this too. Let me see if I can explain it as well as someone else who I originally read it from...When you smell food and when it enters your mouth and you begin to chew, the body goes into Prep Mode to receive food. Your salivary glands produce saliva, your pancreas produces insulin, your liver produces gastric acid and your brain begins to calculate how much nutrition you're about to receive from the food you eat so it can keep track of it's daily needs/calories --- the body is a well tuned machine and it knows how to deal with food when it knows it's coming. But then you spit out the food. Your body still has excess saliva, insulin, gastric acid and it can't figure out why it didn't get the nutrition it thought it was going to get so the brain accountants go nuts. 


Excess insulin in your body causes your appetite to increase so you'll eat more food to soak up all that extra hormone. Excess gastric acid in the stomach -- now released at the Y of your common channel -- can cause indigestion or heartburn or ulcers. And those brain accountants are now doing some creative math to recalculate the nutritional value of food because it thought it was going to get a certain number of calories, but none came, so next time you try to eat that same food the brain thinks you need twice as much to get the same nutrition as it thought it should have gotten last time. 


So not only is the whole "chew and spit" habit a training ground for bulemia, it's also a way to tease your body into thinking it's getting food when it really isn't. Bulemia is a very serious illness and not something you want to play around with. My cousin Teresa died from heart failure brought on by her illness of bulemia. I don't ever want a family to live through what we had to in losing a loved one so young to a disease that can be treated. 


 Please be careful. Be kind to yourself. 

 Bad habit to get into.  Scary. I'm laughing a litte about the watermelon.  It's called "water"melon for a reason.  You're pretty much eating it.  Might as well swallow the 0.05% you are spitting out.

I had eating disorders when I was in my 20s that started out from doing this very thing. I would chew food to feel like I was eating it and then spit it out. When I wanted the joy of swallowing the food, I graduated to bulimia. Took me years of counseling to stop doing. Bad habit. Don't start it.

I am so glad you were able to get the help you needed to stop.  Many never escape the disordered eating even with therapy.  Of all the clients I have ever worked with, the ones who suffered with eating disorders have been the hardest for me to work with emotionally... more so than those with a history of trauma or childhood abuse, or those with anger issues, and even those with psychotic disorders.  Eating disorders are extremely hard to overcome, are frequently not helped by medication, and it is almost always a slow and painful process where both the client's mental health and physical health are in jeopardy.

Lora

I'm glad too, Lora! At the time my mom forced me into therapy and I resented her for it but am so glad she was there for me and got me the help I needed. I wasnt able to stop on my own. I was miserable and felt like I had a demon inside me telling me to throw up or spit it out every time I ate. It was an unstoppable force of guilt and self hatred. I've overcome that now but I was worried when I saw the original poster's comment since I started out the same way. It's a very slippery slope.