“I would love to read what you think about recovery when the thing you need to recover from is food. Food addiction. It’s real. Not being able to stop. Eating for the wrong reasons. Hunger not going away or coming on so strong late at night it literally hurts.”
I got this message from a reader recently and instantly the little angsty punk rock kid who forever lives inside of me got so sad and so angry. Not at the person who posed the question but at the corruption of the world we live in. I have a lot of thoughts on the topic of Food Addiction - which IS very real and yet it is not recognized as a diagnosable addiction. We will have to come back to that. I have not spoken about Food Addiction before because it falls under the umbrella of “disordered eating” and it is a sensitive subject that I felt nervous talking about but I am no longer nervous and I am glad someone reached out and to start the conversation. So let’s dig in.
Most of us are taught to cope, reward, celebrate and unwind with food. We got lollipops at the doctors office and pizza after the big game. We watched starlets run to pints of ice cream when they got dumped by their boyfriends on tv. Our parents promised us our favorite treat in exchange for good behavior and I personally remember being rewarded with gum balls in kindergarten by my teacher. Silly of her since most of us got it stuck in our hair. Anyway - The message has always been there. A good or bad thing happens and then there is food or perhaps the withholding of food as punishment. Our brains are naturally wired for this reward system to keep us alive and then it is reinforced in our society to keep us in line. It has forever been this way but the rewards have changed.. or perhaps mutated is a better way to put it.
The reality is our society values financial gain beyond anything else and it is making us sick on many levels. When we look at this in regards to food - it comes to mean that most of what ends up on our plate & in our mouths is merely a product and not food at all. In order to “sell sell sell” these products are designed to be highly addictive. Large corporations employ food scientists to create products with a “bliss point” and yes, that is what they call it. A Bliss Point. It describes an unnatural balance of salt, sugar and fat that keep us reaching for more. Why wouldn’t we? It deceptively tastes like survival.
This can be said about the bulk of our Standard American Diet - the acronym for which is SAD. Our ravenous desire for these “foods” puts greater pressure on manufacturing and production which causes the quality of the ingredients to go down. Rendering whatever nutritional value was left after being heavily processed, mutated and transformed to virtually zero. Ultimately these products may turn our crank or scratch an itch but they will do fuxk all to meet our physical needs. So the hunger never goes away and we are left starving. Much like the birds they find dead after feeding in the open ocean. Their autopsy’s show nothing but a belly full of plastic. Stuffed and starved.
Earlier I mentioned that food addiction is not recognized as a clinically diagnosable addiction. If you look in the DSM-5 you will find Alcohol, Tobacco, Stimulants, Cannabis, Opiates & Hallucinogens all of which come with a clinical diagnosis (and probably a prescription if you were open to it) but you will not find food. I believe this is a sneaky and intentional move that probably has something to do with the FDA. Such an obviously harmful omission would only occur because it benefits a powerful few. If they were to recognize much of our western diet as being potentially addictive that would result in the need to regulate something as seemingly harmless as a bag of Doritos or a can of soda. I have to mention that when I typed out the word Doritos it auto capitalized itself - which is eerie AF. The same does not happen when I type broccoli or apples.. because no singular company holds claim to those or profits wildly from the mass consumption (and benefit) of these legit foods. Can you imagine what the world would be like if 90% of the things innocently sitting on the shelves of the grocery store suddenly had to have a warning label printed on the side of the box? Imagine all the money those companies would have to spend on marketing to get their consumers to overlook it. There goes their profit margin.
With 70-75% of Americans being overweight or obese I think we could say that many people are potentially suffering from Food Addiction. I’d like to reframe that though and look at it through the lens of exploitation. Are we addicted or are we being manipulated at our most basic level of survival?
There is of course a heavy emotional component to all this. It would be hard for there not to be when we live in an environment that profits from not meeting our needs, making us sick and then putting the blame on the consumer. And it does not care. If you have ever experienced narcissistic abuse this may sound and feel familiar to you. Which can be extra damning because familiarity breeds acceptance. More on this soon..
I am going to post a follow up on the emotional ramifications of all this and what I believe recovery from Food Addiction can look like. Stay tuned & chime in. I’d love to know what y’all think about this.
P.S. I consciously capitalized Food Addiction throughout this post for the sake of legitimacy since it is so much more real than a gawd damn Dorito and it deserves to be acknowledged as such.