Ketamine and Food Addiction
Talk Recovery RadioThis week on Talk Recovery Radio
This week on Talk Recovery Radio Dr. Daniel Barton joins the show to talk about The Nashville Ketamine Centre and ketamine infusion therapy, on the second half of the show Dr. Sheila Forman talks about the question “Do you use Food to Cope?” on Coop Radio 100.5fm and on Facebook Live.
Dr. Daniel Barton
My name is Daniel Barton and I come from a long line of “Bartons” that have cared for the mental health needs of Nashvillians for over 3 decades. My father is a psychiatrist and educator, and one of the three founders of Alive Hospice. My mother is a clinical social worker, marital therapist, who along with a few colleagues, was responsible for bringing the mediation movement to the state of Tennessee. My brother practices psychiatry in Nashville as well. I am honored to carry on this tradition by sitting on the frontier of a new and exciting chapter in psychiatry and being one of the few psychiatrists in the state to offer ketamine therapy for patients in the Nashville community and beyond.
Dr. Daniel Barton speaks about Ketamine about it originally being invented as a battlefield anesthetic in the 1960s, it was supposed to be used for the Vietnam War. Dr. Barton says it is closely similar to PCP, but they wanted something safer, he says the best thing about Ketamine is that it doesn’t suppress the gag reflex or the respiration rate. As a result of that Dr. Barton says they can do it in an outpatient setting and not worry about having to intubate anyone, Dr. Barton says it is very safe.
Dr. Barton talks about how medication for people who struggle with depression can take about 3-6 weeks to kick in, ketamine can take full effect in as quick as 24 hours. Dr. Barton clarifies, someone who has been depressed for over 20 years and when they start ketamine treatment they are not going to be just fine right away. Ketamine is considered a non-traditional psychedelic, like LSD and psilocybin would be more traditional psychedelics because they hit different receptors. Ketamine works with the glutamate receptor, most of the Nashville Ketamine Centre’s medicines that they work with is serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, which are neurotransmitters. Dr. Barton says that a lot of those medications do not respond to medications that work with those neurotransmitters. So, when those do not work, they have the Ketamine Infusion Therapy as a back up which can be very helpful.
Nashville Ketamine Centre
About The Nashville Ketamine Center: The Nashville Ketamine Center offers cutting edge ketamine infusion therapy for those dealing with treatment resistant depression of both unipolar and bipolar depression. Ketamine offers fast relief of symptoms for those that have been suffering for too long. We treat patients in the comfortable and calming environment of our Nashville, Tennessee office. We also serve the communities of our neighboring cities of Memphis, Chattanooga, and Knoxville as well as the nearby states of Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Mississippi.
A big piece with Ketamine Infusion Therapy is the setting they are doing treatment in. A lot of people who have used Ketamine in the past do not use it in a safe or comfortable setting. What the Nashville Ketamine Centre do is they for instance will play music to fit the persons headspace, and where they are at. People come in, and the dissociative experience of the treatment lasts about 40 minutes. To be given the Ketamine, a lot of them are via injection. There are many ways to be given the treatment, it depends on the individual on how comfortable they are taking the treatment.
Dr. Barton was asked by Giuseppe, why is Ketamine so low down the priority for prescribing medications when it comes to dealing with depression? Lots of medications are first to be offered or suggested and Ketamine Infusion Therapy is considered to be a last resort option. Dr. Barton says a big reason is because they are fighting stigmas, also Dr. Barton who is a psychiatrist says that Psychiatrists are very slow on taking on new treatments because their old one’s work to some extent. Dr. Barton says sometimes they are just very slow to adapt.
Ketamine is usually six treatments over the course of 2 weeks. Sometimes people get boosters as needed. Dr. Barton emphasizes, ketamine is not a cure to depression, in any kind of mental health issue there is a biological part, psychological part, social or environmental kind of aspect of it. Treatment for substance abuse treatment as evolved over time when Dr. Barton started in his practice most of treatment centers were 12 step based and then they became a dual diagnosis.
Dr. Sheila Forman
Are you tired of gaining and losing the same pounds? Are you weary of starting yet another diet? Would you like a chance to change your relationship with food using a new approach based on both science and age-old wisdom? If yes, it’s time for you to learn the art of mindful eating.Mindful eating does not focus on weight loss per se, but rather on becoming more aware of patterns of inappropriate eating, and provides tools for making sustainable changes in these patterns. It is a non-diet approach, designed to increase mindful awareness of experiences related to eating and to decrease mindlessness and unhealthy habits.
Based on a foundation of daily mindful meditation, our mindfulness-based eating program, TAME Your Appetite: The Art of Mindful Eating, teaches you a new way of relating to yourself, your food, your eating and your body.
You will learn to balance your eating and experience true culinary delight and satisfaction.
As a result, you will find that you choose quality over quantity, enjoy food more, eat less, and end the cycle of deprivation, overeating, and guilt.As you gradually shift away from your current eating habits into healthy mindful ones, TAME Your Appetite becomes your path to peace with food and freedom from emotional overeating. You will go from policing yourself to honoring yourself. From mindlessly reacting to mindfully responding.
Weight loss is an inevitable by-product of naturally eating less food, which happens as you become more mindful of your choices, sense of fullness and taste satisfaction. By creating new day-to-day patterns of eating less food and sustaining these new patterns indefinitely into the future, your body will find its natural right weight. In time your weight will reflect what is right for you.
So, if you are tired of yet another round of diets, make a commitment to mindful-based eating and once and for all, TAME Your Appetite.
Dr. Sheila Forman is a former Attorney, and she tells us she got through law school eating peanut M&M’s, Dr. Forman says that she ate so many peanut M&M’s throughout her journey in school. She did not realize until later that she was using food to cope. Later in her life when Dr. Forman decided to leave law and go into psychology and started to learn about eating behavior, eating disorders, that is when it clicked for Dr. Forman, she was using food to cope. Dr. Forman wrote her doctoral dissertation on the relationship between eating and coping behaviors that turned into a book called “Do You Use Food to Cope”. When Dr. Forman started in her clinical practice, she started in the world of eating disorders to help other people understand that there is a difference between physically hungry and being emotionally hungry. When you are psychically hungry you eat and when you are emotionally hungry you deal with emotions. The difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger is that physical hunger is where we need to eat to keep going, for energy. Emotional hunger is when we need to sooth ourselves when we want to feel better about what is happening in our lives. Dr. Forman said she would never take food away from people. If you sometimes are using food to cope occasionally and have a late-night snack that is not healthy then that is okay. But if it is your go to coping mechanism then there is a problem. You know it is a problem when you are going to food all the time instead of getting a better sleep, calling a friend, meditating, yoga or playing a sport.
Tame your Appetite stands for (The Art of Mindful Eating) and mindful eating has a couple of components, one component is being mindful of what your body needs. When you want to meet your needs, what are you truly hungry for? Your body with permission will guide you, sometimes someone many need a burger sometimes someone may need a salad. Mindful eating is about tuning into the body using your inner wisdom to help guide you to make the choices that are appropriate for you. When you are eating but you are not physically hungry you are eating emotionally.
Benefits of Mindful eating include having a healthy relationship with food meaning, not going on a diet, and restricting yourself from certain foods and telling yourself you can not have that kind of food. What happens Dr. Forman says is that when people restrict themselves to foods, they will end up binge eating food when they allow themselves to eat the food for a short period of time. Instead of having a healthy relationship with food and not completely restricting yourself to foods, let yourself eat the unhealthy food sometimes so you do not leave yourself craving it later.
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