Help! I have a food addiction!
How to recover from an unhealthy relationship with food
First of all, I just want to congratulate you for taking a step towards food freedom by reading this article! I understand how terrifyingly soul crushing food addiction can be, and trust me, you are not alone.
Thirty million people in the United States are currently suffering from an eating disorder (including an estimated 2.8 million struggling with BED, or binge eating disorder). Food addiction and or eating disorders can be caused by numerous factors including but not limited to, sexual trauma, physical or emotional abuse, childhood trauma, diet culture, weight stigma, and or a genetic proclivity towards depression or addiction. The important take away here: your food addiction is NOT your fault.
My food addiction manifested itself as restrictive eating, bulimia, and binge eating for nearly fifteen years. Even after I cured myself of my bulimia, I still struggled with binge eating until just a couple of years ago. The bad news: food addiction, eating disorders, and or an obsession with weight and food will not go away over night. In many cases these issues can take years to overcome.
The good news: they are HIGHLY treatable. My healing took so many years because I wasn’t ready to surrender my body and mind to true recovery. I started therapy for bulimia at 21, went to in-patient treatment at 23, and continued to relapse on and off for many years. Like a two-year-old child clutching tightly to a favorite toy, I desperately held on to a perfect idea of what my body and food habits should look like, even in “recovery”.
What helped me loosen my grip on this perfect ideal? Three things: I let go of my “goal weight”, I educated myself on diet culture and the science of bingeing, and I found an online community of people who were willing to release the societal standard of beauty in order to accept their own. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has also helped, but it can get expensive. The rest of this article outlines the free or next to nothing solutions I have found to help heal my food addiction.
Let Go
I’m not going to lie, letting go of the number on the scale was hard af. One thing that lead me to this process was that I wasn’t able to go out and have fun with my friends because I knew I was going to have to come home and weigh in the next day. If I didn’t like the number on the scale, I would be in a serious funk until I tortured myself hard enough to get the number back down to where I wanted it to go. Sound familiar? Throwing away my scale was terrifying at first, but it soon gave me a freedom and confidence that made me feel greater than any number on the scale ever could. It is important to note that while I did struggle with food addiction for many years, I have never been ‘overweight’.
If you are struggling with food addiction and have been shamed into losing weight by a doctor (who obviously doesn’t understand food addiction and or eating disorders because one cannot simply lose the weight…not to mention the BMI is a lie) I highly recommend you read the book Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon. Health at Every Size is a, “continuously evolving alternative to the weight-centered approach to treating clients and patients of all sizes. It is also a movement working to promote size-acceptance, to end weight discrimination, and to lesson the cultural obsession with weight loss and thinness.” If you are unable to buy a new book at this time I recommend buying it used from thriftbooks.com or to check out all the free the online resources at https://haescommunity.com or https://www.sizediversityandhealth.org/content.asp?id=19 .
Diet culture
One of the best definitions of ‘diet culture’ I’ve read is by Christy Harrison, anti-diet registered dietician and certified intuitive eating counselor. Harrison defines diet culture as, “a system of beliefs that: Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you're irreparably broken just because you don't look like the impossibly thin “ideal.” Your co-workers describing their new calorie restrictive crash diets? Diet culture. Your mother in law talking about “empty calories” in front of your kids? Diet culture. The countless examples of fat shaming in movies, T.V. and social media? Diet culture. Once I started waking up to the fact that I have been brainwashed by diet culture since childhood I was able to start deciphering the negative thoughts I was having about my body – they weren’t really coming from me.
These negative neural pathways were programmed by the thousands of photo-shopped images I saw every day as well as familial diet talk alike. I started re-wiring my brain by reading books like Body Positive Power by Megan Jayne Crabbe, I unfollowed any social media accounts that triggered negative body image thoughts, I started following people with all different body types to remind me that representation matters and not everyone looks like a skinny waif (not that skinny waifs are bad…they’re just not the only body that exists like the media would like us to think ;-), and I started listening to podcasts about intuitive eating from a non-diet perspective like Nutrition Matters by Paige Smathers. While I’m on the topic of education - learning about the science of binge eating completely blew my mind. The science on binge eating helped convince me that my addiction was NOT my fault. I recommend reading Brain Over Binge by Kathryn Hansen. She also offers free resources on her website.
Find your people
Recent studies suggest feelings of loneliness and isolation are at an all time high. One 2018 study from the United States reported that half of it’s 20,000 participants reported sometimes or always feeling alone. Last year the U.K. appointed a loneliness minister to help fight this country’s growing problem. The U.S. has labeled it as an epidemic. I feel this issue is even more pressing when dealing with overcoming a food addiction because we most often binge when we are alone. Finding an online community of like minded people who are recovering from a food addiction has been invaluable to my recovery. I found my particular community on Instagram, but people have also found support on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. No matter where you find your community, your shame will start to soften and slip away as you listen to others who have also faced the difficulties of food addiction.
From reading this article I hope that you have learned, or a least softened towards the idea that, your food addiction is not your fault. Past trauma, our society’s diet culture, and the chemical make up of your brain can easily create a food addiction. Luckily, there is a way out of the suffering. You absolutely have the power to break free from your food addiction. Please be kind and compassionate with yourself. I know this isn’t easy, but I also know you can do it.
Sources:
https://anad.org/education-and-awareness/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/
https://www.eatingdisorder.org/eating-disorder-information/underlying-causes/
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/05/ce-corner-isolation
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/loneliness-an-epidemic/
https://www.positive-nutrition.com/podcast
https://haescommunity.com