It’s that time of year again: the dreaded allergy season that makes me a prisoner in my own home where the windows and doors are shuttered tight and everyone is reminded — loudly — to take their freaking shoes off rather than track pollen and other allergens into my house.

Not that such measures completely remedy the problem. My eyes are still red and weepy. My nose and ears itch insanely. I sneeze so often and so hard that it’s a wonder I don’t have 6-pack abs.

Personally, I’m convinced that I’m not fat at all, I’m swollen: these flappy thighs and ample abdomen are allergic reactions. Yeah, that’s it. Just so happens I have year-round allergies which cause me to look fat, well, year-round.

Of course, this is the only time of year when I actually get miserable enough to start popping allergy medications like they were Tic-Tacs. Well, maybe not quite that often since medical science has yet to invent an allergy pill that doesn’t leave me groggy, lethargic and with a worse case of cotton-mouth than any hippie ever had.

One thing I do like about allergy pills, though: once you’ve built up a tolerance to them so the suckers don’t knock you out, they do almost as good a job as weight loss pills at appetite suppression. And, sure, they also make it impossible to sit still for more than two minutes at a time and my hands get a bit jittery and I walk around clenching my jaw all day and snapping at people who ask why I’m so edgy because, darn it, I’m not edgy I’m on allergy pills and can’t they tell I’m feeling so much less miserable even if I can’t sleep at night, dammit?!

But, hey, I’m not sneezing so what’s the problem, right?

Last night while scrolling through program guide the title of one show on BBC America caught my eye: Super Skinny Me. Obviously, it’s a play on the now-infamous documentary ‘Super Size Me’ which chronicled one man’s month of living on nothing but food from McDonald’s, including every “super size” serving offered to him.

Only the BBC documentary works in reverse: two reporters seek to slim down to a U.S. size 0 (yes, zero) within five weeks by trying numerous extreme weight loss techniques, including food deprivation and over-exercising. Both women began the experiment at normal weight, apparently free of eating disorders. Five weeks later, that wasn’t true of either anymore.

Although both women lost 14 pounds each, only one of them reached the size 0 they’d both been aiming for. (Size 0, they explained, is currently the ‘dream size’ in Hollywood… it is also the same size of jeans that an 8-year-old girl would wear.) The woman who reached the goal was glad to go off the extreme diet, and two weeks later had re-gained 7 pounds… something which she was glad for, having decided that the super skinny look felt unhealthy.

The other woman? Well, she won’t be able to celebrate having reached size 0 but, instead, will be dealing with eating disorders triggered by the 5-week experiment. Evidently, the mental mindset required to pursue that kind of drastic weight loss in that short period rekindled psychological issues from her teenage years when she’d been overweight and miserable.

I must confess to being appalled that the show claimed it was trying to prove the dangers of extreme dieting while carefully documenting, almost in a how-to fashion, how each woman managed to lose so much weight in such a short period. Oh, sure, one of the women got teary as she described how “awful” she felt for girls who seem to celebrate their bony, super skinny frames… and yet that same woman threw a party to celebrate having reached size 0 at the end of the trial.

I’m not sorry to learn this show is over: as far as I’m concerned it was just one more way of continuing to promote size 0 as desirable, one more way to encourage women to deprive themselves until their bodies resemble those of prepubescent girls. The sad thing isn’t that one reporter whose eating disorders were triggered by the experiment — she, at least, got counseling throughout the process and had finally recognized, by the end of the show, that the whole pursuit of size 0 was “a crazy game” that negatively affected her health.

No, it’s the women and girls who watched that show and didn’t receive the counseling that I worry about, because you just know there are plenty of viewers who are now following the same methods the reporters used in their extreme weight loss experiments. Only, unlike those reporters, there won’t be anyone watching them day-to-day to stop them when it gets out of control.

Audrey Hepburn once remarked that she resented food because it controls us; that, unlike other substances one might abuse, food isn’t something you can completely cut out of your life. Those who abuse alcohol or drugs can seek help from places specializing in adult addiction treatment where they’ll learn through counseling that, for an addict, there’s no such thing as “just a little bit”. You want to break an addiction, you have to go whole hog and never touch the stuff again.

With food, that’s simply not possible. Hepburn, after all, tried that approach and wound up suffering from bulimia and anorexia for much of her adult life. So, too, do many people who share her resentment of our bodies’ need to eat, a drive that for many of us has become less about necessity and more about gratifying pleasures or insulating against pain. In that sense, overweight people share a trait in common with those who abuse other substances: we use food to comfort or anesthetize us, giving it an added power over our lives beyond mere fuel for our bodies.

Like people suffering other forms of addiction, many overeaters refuse to see their addiction to food as a substance abuse problem. They claim to be “big boned” or to be baffled why they can’t lose weight (while secretly binging, as if those calories don’t count). Others blame thyroid or hormonal problems which, so they rationalize, means they aren’t personally responsible for being fat. I know: I’ve cited those same reasons myself.

And, as with a drug addict or alcoholic, people with food addictions often fail to see the dire impact their problems are having on their lives or the lives of those around them. I’ve been there, too. I’ve come up with one excuse after another to avoid taking my son to the water park, to the playground, to activities that would inevitably force me to confront how out of shape and overweight I’ve let myself become. The impact doesn’t stop there: it’s affected my marriage since I no longer feel comfortable allowing my spouse to see me undressed, no matter how much he assures me that I’m beautiful.

One thing I’ve recently learned about dealing with food as an addiction is that it can be treated in many of the same ways as other substance abuse problems, starting with a form of family intervention. With many substance abuse problems, that’s really the first step toward recovery but it’s best performed by counselors trained in drug intervention, people who know how to navigate around defense mechanisms, denial and cycles of co-dependency. When conducted by a professional, interventions have over a 95% success rate of prompting the addict to seek treatment.

Ours was less formal: over the Mother’s Day weekend my husband wanted to take me to a swanky restaurant in town. (See the co-dependency there? Feed the addict.) I refused to go, however, and I came up with all sorts of reasons: it was too expensive, I didn’t want to leave our son with the sitter, I was tired, etc. The truth? None of my pretty clothes fit, and I didn’t like the way I looked in the stuff that did. Fortunately, my husband saw through my rationalizations and pointed out how much I’ve been missing out on due to my self-consciousness about my weight.

“Do something,” he said. “You can’t get this time back that you’re missing out on. Yes, it might be boring to exercise. Yes, you might feel deprived going without chips or burgers for a while. But it will be worth it to you once you’re back to a point where you can feel good about yourself again.”

That hit home. Hard.

Hence my decision to streamline my life in a number of areas to reduce the stress which prompts me to turn to food as a source of comfort. Likewise, by reducing the number of demands on my time, I’m eliminating excuses to avoid exercising, the most important key to weight loss.

I’m using another tactic that’s important to other forms of substance abuse treatment, too: I’m cutting out the stuff that I know is harmful to me. Were I in a trained facility with licensed professionals, they’d call it drug detox, a period of time in which the body cleanses itself of toxins and breaks its physiological dependency on harmful substances while the addict works on understanding their emotional and situational triggers.

For me, that’s involved tossing out all forms of temptation in our house. Out went the chips, the crackers and candy. I even cleared out my secret stash of gummi bears. I’m letting my husband do the grocery shopping for a while so I’m not tempted to buy replacements and hide them for “just in case”, and I’ve informed my family that, while they’re welcome to have a burger or fries, they’ll have to do it when I’m not around. And, meanwhile, I’m exercising. A lot. In fact, I’m turning to that now for my source of stress relief and comfort, and the results are already beginning to show.

Why am I sharing all of this with you? Well, because that’s yet another thing that recovering from a food addiction has in common with other forms of substance abuse: the first step is admitting that you have a problem.

My name is Kate, and I’m a food addict.

Now, let the healing begin.

Despite my best-laid plans to keep healthy snacks in my purse, I often find myself tempted by fast-food restaurants while running errands. No doubt my failure to restock the granola bars in my bag has less to do with this than my love of burgers. So when I first read about NYC’s city ordinance requiring food sellers to display calorie counts next to the prices on all menus, including fast food signs, I thought it was a brilliant idea.

Now, ordinarily I’m not much of one for such governmental interference, but let’s face it: keeping track of the calories in various foods could challenge even a math whiz’s memory. And, sure, even if you don’t live in NYC you can still ask for a restaurant’s nutritional information, but that’s no help when you’re sitting in your mini-van with a cranky kid who’s demanding French fries now. That’s when I tend to just order and hope I’m guesstimating the correct calorie count.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s run into such problems, because the folks at Coheso have developed a brilliant little food calorie counter that lets you carry nutritional information for over 35,000 foods in a portable calorie calculator which features a full QWERTY keyboard and number pad. That includes over 500 brand-name items you’d find in the grocery store as well as 250 menu items from restaurants and fast-food places.

As if that’s not already helpful enough, the device not only tracks your calories in, but it serves double-duty as a calorie counter tracking those you burn through exercise, too. With the ability to store up to 12 months of a food diary and enter 1,000 of your own food items’ nutritional info, it’s a powerful aid to weight loss and fitness. And, for you techno-geeks, you can even export your data to your PC to report and chart dieting progress.

Now that’s a brilliant solution to a lazy dieter’s problem!

I’m exhausted today. Come to think of it, I’ve been exhausted for a couple of days but this is really the first chance I have to do something about it… as in doing nothing at all. I walked from the bed to the sofa, and despite drinking a cup of coffee en route I’m still pooped. (Heck, I was so pooped I had to use safety cutters just to open the package of coffee.)

I know I should get up and wash the dishes, do some laundry, exercise on the treadmill and take a shower. I know if I switched out of my PJs into clean ones and ran a comb through my hair I might feel better. But I’m so tired that even thinking about such things is draining.

Bad fibro days suck.