What is Food Addiction

What is food addiction?

How is it that an intelligent, capable person can lose the plot when it comes to exerting control over their eating?

Why do 95% of dieters put weight back on, and more, within the first year of losing it?

How is it, that as a nation, we've never had so many exercise, fitness and health opportunities, but we're getting fatter?

Something's going a-miss.

Food can be as powerful a substance as any other drug. You may have seen programmes like half-ton hospital where patients are bed-bound for years and their sleep interspersed with deliveries of fast food. These are at the extreme end, on the brink of death through overloading their systems to freakish proportions.

So what is the pull with food and what about the rest of us who aren't quite that extreme?

Well there are many systems at work both physically and psychologically when we eat and we often get the signals confused. Like a need for company translating as a need to eat.

For example lets look at carbohydrate cravings. When we could just murder for fresh bread and butter, a gooey chocolate cream cake or a hot bowl of steaming salt 'n' vinegar chips. Some of us can control these urges but for others nothing else will do, control goes AWOL; its no longer a want it's a have to. Sensations are magnified especially when we're on a diet and have been restricting and obsessing about the food even more than usual.

The drive, the urge, the cravings, the salivating, the heart beating, the steely focus, the excitement and the anticipation of the fix of sinking our teeth into the juicy triple cheeseburger, our taste buds are tripping out.

Then we get it in our sweaty hands, the wait is over, our whole day has been leading up to this moment. Our jaw aches and our mouth slobbers, oh my god, the release, the escape, the euphoria, it's practically orgasmic!

It's funny, we only taste the first few bites properly but for some reason we can't stop until everything is finished, gorged down with swigs of coke, then fries, then hot apple pie. Then a couple of bars of chocolate on the way home. Can't breathe, painfully satisfied, feel bad, greedy, dirty as emerge from the bingeing frenzy back to earth with an overweight bang. We've let ourself down. Again. We have no will-power, just a fat pig and we hate ourself even more. There's only one thing for it, we have to diet tomorrow.

But hang on, is it really all our fault?

No it's not all our fault, food addiction like any other addiction needs a multiple level intervention approach to treatment. Recommended medical and blood tests to ensure everything is working as it should.

Brain chemistry, lack of serotonin, the natural mood stabiliser is a massive factor in why we crave carbs. Our hormones are also a factor, if they are out of balance, guess what .... We crave carbs.

There are often also powerful emotional factors at play, as we eat to change the way we feel. And of course when we binge, it blocks stuff out really effectively, especially when the internal chatterbox becomes too unmanageable, too raw, too real.

Of course, our fat can serve us too. We can create a useful barrier between us and the rest of the world. It means that we can keep the opposite sex at bay as deep down, we might not think we deserve intimacy, or have had bad experiences with it.

So many people are caught in food addiction but are too ashamed to seek help.

However, there is good news, people do recover from food addiction, sometimes they take medication alongside working on the psychological factors with a practitioner experienced in working with eating distress, this may be mood stabilising or obesity drug treatment if appropriate and recommended by a good GP .... One that doesn't trot out the calories in vs. calories out line, the one that makes us feel even more inadequate.

When people are ready, willing and able to face up to their addiction, they feast on exploring their needs, beliefs, scripts, and examine their lives in order to put food back where it belongs; as a source of nourishment, not a tool for self-abuse.