Food Addiction

Food addiction is the use of food substances and processes for mood-altering effect rather than primarily for nutrition and culinary pleasure. Some foods (sugar and refined, white, flour) have a mood-altering effect so that they act as a drug in some people although not in others. Some processes (bingeing, starving, vomiting or purging) also have a mood-altering effect in some people. Remarkably, they feel temporarily relieved of stress when they indulge in these behaviours. The relief may not last long but the memory of the relief does last and therefore the behaviour is repeated.

In this way, food addiction is no different from any other addiction, such as to alcohol or to gambling. People with an addictive nature very commonly discover a whole range of mood-altering substances and processes and may choose several at once because they find them equally effective. People with eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia or compulsive overeating) commonly are also addicted to shopping and spending, work and exercise. They may also use nicotine and caffeine for their mood-altering properties as well as using them for appetite suppression.

At the same time people with eating disorders often suffer from body dysmorphia, the belief that they are a different shape and size than is in fact the case. Thus, people who are grossly over weight may see themselves as thinner than they really are and people who are anorexic often see themselves as being fatter.

The crucial issue is that once a craving is set up then the food addict is powerless to switch it off. Through absolute determination he or she may be able to resist bingeing but the craving persists. People with anorexia are absolutely terrified of this condition. They know that if they were to give into the craving then they would be powerless to prevent themselves becoming progressively fatter. This is indeed precisely what happens to some of them: their anorexia may be "cured" but they go straight out the other side and become compulsive overeaters and develop massive obesity. Correspondingly, people who slim down from being massively obese very commonly put the weight back on again because they find that they cannot after all resist the cravings in the long term. Some of them become bulimic, giving in to the cravings but then vomiting or purging or alternating periods of bingeing with periods of starvation in order to keep their body weight more or less constant.

Eating disorders are therefore not primarily about food and body weight but are about feelings. If the individual sufferer feels wretched, lonely, miserable and empty emotionally and knows from previous experience that some food substances and processes have the capacity to fill that sense of inner void, the the ultimate choice is between self-satisfaction by giving into the urges or self-destruction.

Treating these patients as if they were unintelligent by teaching them about calories (when they know all about them already) or by helping them to cut the food up small and eat "sensibly" plays into the disease itself. It tries to re-establish control when there is none. It criticises, cajoles, punishes and rewards as if the suffering human being were no more than a domestic animal - and even animals deserve better treatment that that.

Like it or not (and most food addicts and their families certainly do not like it) food addiction is no different from any other form of addiction in the underlying cause and process. Each form of addiction my have its own particular characteristics: people with alcohol problems tend to become violent or morose, people with problems with illegal drugs tend to commit crime, people with prescription drug addictions tend to become zombies with no spontaneity of feeling one way or the other and people with eating disorders become slaves to the scale or to food fads. Each addictive process is different in the particular but not in the general characteristics of addictive behaviour: using a mood-altering substance or process not for its primary effect for which anyone else would use it but for purposes of mood-alteration. In this way food addicts do not use food for the taste or for the nutritional content but because it make them feel better emotionally. This is exactly comparable to the alcoholic’s use of alcohol and the drug addict’s use of various illegal drugs.

People often believe that food addicts have a particularly difficult time because they have to eat to stay alive and therefore have to confront their problem several times a day. This is the same as saying that alcoholics have to drink to stay alive. That is precisely true - but they don’t have to drink alcohol. Correspondingly, people with eating disorders do not have to eat the mood-altering foods (sugar and refined flour). Once these substances are avoided the cravings disappear (in time). Food addicts also need to eat normal portion sizes on a regular basis in three meals a day and avoid having any food substances in between meals. The body dysmorphia (the distorted perception of fatness or thinness) gradually corrects itself in time as the obsession is lifted.