Here’s a food addiction QoTD two-fer. First, Kurt Harris in a comment over at Free the Animal:
I think the big problem with food as an addiction, which I think it can be, is not that addiction is so severe or intense, but that we cannot use total avoidance as a treatment. Starvation is not an acceptable side effect.
Zoe Harcombe was unhappy with me for saying in a post a while back that “food is not addictive like cocaine or heroin.” I think she misunderstood me (understandably). I didn’t mean food isn’t addictive, like cocaine or heroin. I meant what Kurt said … food addiction is not as severe or intense as cocaine or heroin addiction.
But yeah, not being able to abstain is a real complication. Fortunately, it’s generally not “food” that people are addicted to but “food stuffs” that are highly processed and refined.
In theory, these could be “avoided” … however, that’s easier said than done. Enter QoTD #2 from Yale’s Ashley Gearhardt in The New Science of Sugar Addiction last year (around the 21:00 mark):
The role of cues is especially important … think about the amount of floods of advertisements and food cues that you saw today. Just imagine, shifting in your head, thinking if those were all alcohol cues and you were someone who was struggling to control your alcohol use. That’s going to be a really difficult challenge. The role of cues, potentially dealing with the cues in our environment, is an especially important area to look at in the future.
Coming soon, a post in which I compare food addiction to Nanny McPhee. Really!
This is why I worked on changing my thinking, and how I thought of food; we always have to eat and you can’t go anywhere without seeing junk food advertising and highly processed food is everywhere. In any case, now that I no longer obsessively think about food, it so much easier to make healthier choices.
I find that if I eat a nutrient-dense diet, get my physical activity in as planned and practice my assisted meditation it takes a lot to trigger me. And if that happens infrequently, it’s a lot easier to respond differently! Over the holidays, I let all of those go to the wayside and yeesh, it was right back to old (bad) behaviors. But it was an interesting learning experience.
You know, I’ve noticed that now I’m eating better food, (minimal processed food - nutrient dense) I crave those foods now as well. I agree, it’s easy to slip back into old habits after the holidays. I think it took a couple of weeks, even a month to get back in the groove.
The good thing is that we’ve both learned that an occasional lapse in eating can be temporary…
To me, food addiction is psychological and not physiological. There is no such thing as true withdrawal from food — “low carb flu” doesn’t count. Food is not “mind altering” like many addictive drugs and certainly not in terms of activity. By that I mean, drugs often have powerful effects at nanogram/ml levels. That’s not how food addictions work. Hope that makes sense.
It makes sense, but I don’t agree. I think food addiction is certainly physiological in the sense that it is related to reward circuits in the brain gone awry. It’s not *just* physiological (which Stanton Peele likes to point out every time Nora Volkow comes out with one of her MRI studies), as I think there’s very much a learned aspect to it (where we teach the lizard brain that food==stress relief) but IMO, it’s not just psychological either.
I, too, try to eat nutrient-dense food and rarely have cravings. However, there are certain foods that I can’t have around the house. If I buy cheddar cheese for a recipe, I buy the smallest package that I can find because I know that I will eat the remainder in a short period of time. For the same reason, we can’t have chips, particularly tortilla chips, in the house.
There is also the issue of “liking” food, which I have heard many times. My best friend, who is extremely overweight, and I have had the discussion that food shouldn’t be so important to her. Your path, Beth, sounds good (nutritious food, exercise, meditation), but I think that a person has to have some resolve to follow it.
What I have found is that if you get the pieces dialed in for yourself, it takes less resolve … it’s not always white-knuckling it over the next meal. But yeah, it’s not effort-less.