Food Addiction

This post was stimulated from  http://www.mendosa.com/blog/?p=3533

Food addiction is real, but what I speak of as food addiction may not be quite what David Kessler had in mind in his book. I mean any food that we ( I or the subject) is unwilling to give up, either physically or is unwilling to give up mentally. It may be only a few hundred calories each day, but a hundred calories a day is 10 pounds a year, crudely. Processed foods, sugar, starches, wheat, chocolate, alcohol, nuts, perhaps dairy products or carbohydrate rich fruits, are typical foods.

The cause of food addiction is not clear. For some it is that we like the food a bit too much, or it is a environment thing, always available, always good tasting; we crave it; we may lose any resistance to eating it after we have just a taste. It may have flavor, salt, sugar, fats, and/or starches. It may contain proteins that are broken into opioid or opioid like proteins. It make cause the release of feel good chemicals. These foods are tough to get off of, and tough to stay off of. The only solution is to get off of them, and then stay off them.

Food addiction is the first thing that must go  in weight reduction, and it must be deal with before and separately from the other four big issues: food and physiological knowledge, physical cause of excess appetite, environmental conditions, and maladaptive eating behaviors as eating disorders.

Getting off them requires a change in thinking. We need to accept these foods as addicting and stop consuming them, stop considering them as foods. We need to clean our environment of them to the extent possible, and make our values known to others. We may need to separate ourselves from unhealthy environments and situations if we plan on recovering. We must place recover very high on our priority lists. Perhaps we need to leave no stone unturned, and explore many place we would not go before. OA, FA, FAA, and the like can offer help, and for some these help. These may provide an food clean extended social system, and a belief system. I came to realize that all religions are man made, and gods are man made, 12 step systems miss the problem and at best are a management system for the problem without solving the problem. Much of the solution is a major change in our belief system, priorities, values, opinions, mental concepts, and those things truly within our own power. 

For some people recovery may be just one of the five, and for other it may require knowledge of all five issues. Start with not considering anything with sugar to be food, and if you are unwilling to give it up, you may be a food addict. If it is easy to give up, try it for about 3 weeks and see if it makes a difference. Then move on to the next food. A journal where you record each food, and amount before you eat it, may also be of help in the beginning. It is all about becoming willing to make the necessary changes.

There are many tools that may help with motivation, knowledge, change, the processes of change, of evaluating our current beliefs, values. and concepts. It take time to learn enough to recover, and enough to maintain recover after that. If anyone has specific question, I will attempt to answer my version of those issues.