Boo!
The holidays are upon us, starting with the most sugar-intensive one, Halloween.
While I love the tradition for its creativity (I have made the kids' costumes every year since they began trick-or-treating), it's become a dreaded holiday for obvious reasons. Luckily, we have long practiced allowing the kids to keep only about a dozen pieces of candy to be eaten no faster than one piece per day. The remaining candy [gets eaten by their dad (kidding...sort of) and] gets officially taken away by the "Pumpkin Fairy" who disperses the candy to "poor kids"- in its place, the PF leaves a non-food toy/book.
Now that the kids are older and no longer believe in things like fairies and Santa, we just allow them to choose a dozen pieces of candy, lock it up for safe keeping, disperse the candy up to one piece per day, and take the remaining candy to work. We intend to keep the same practice for tomorrow but I am dreading the effect that the sugar may have on Sasha... Prohibiting all candy is out of the question so for the sake of providing a somewhat "normal" experience, we will allow him a limited amount per usual. Even if we decided to disallow the candy, he will also likely be exposed to more candy at school with his classmates bringing candy in their lunches for the next several weeks. Honestly, I don't believe there's much we can really do to run interference between candy and Sasha during/after Halloween and I am bracing myself for the re-appearance of HO Monster. Since he has been exhibiting signs of continued food sneaking these past few weeks, I can only imagine it will get worse when the candy shows up in full force.
What better time, then, to add Naltrexone to our cocktail of drugs? Ironically, it is a drug that is used to decrease the high as well as cravings for alcohol and opiates in addicts. It has also been used, with some limited success, in treating people with binge eating disorder and has been shown to cause loss/decrease in appetite (mainly as a side effect of the drug).
Here is an academic scientific paper that describes the relationship between sugar and opioid intake:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3109725/
Here is a comprehensive summary (non-academic) of Naltrexone's possible impact on weight loss:
http://mentalhealthdaily.com/2016/04/30/naltrexone-weight-loss-what-should-you-expect/
We have returned Sasha to the 6 iu dose because his food seeking intensity was quite high in the last 2-3 weeks. Rather than keep the 9 iu or increase the dose, we decided to return him to the 6 iu dose because we recalled how his food seeking became worse when he started in May/June on a too-high dose. Additionally, we were warned by Dr. Jennifer Miller that using a too-high dose was not recommended due to oxytocin researchers learning that it could cause down regulation of oxytocin receptors, rendering them to become non-functional. We will monitor him to see if we can lower the intensity of the food seeking back to his prior level (still seeking but with less intensity) and we are gradually adding Naltrexone to see if it will help reduce cravings.
P.S. Trees continued to fall silently in the forest: Sasha's weight stayed stable this week despite his increased food seeking intensity. We'll see what happens after Halloween...
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