Are you suffering from a food addiction disorder?
Are you recovering from a food addiction disorder?
In nature, addictive substances don’t just pop up ready to hook us. Instead, its stuff we took from nature, tweaked it, making it super-potent and addictive as a quick hit to our brains.
Take tobacco, for example. Nobody munches on raw tobacco leaves, right? But when you dry them, process them, and roll them into cigarettes – BAM 💥 – you’ve got a fast track to nicotine addiction.
As cigarettes became cheaper and more available, smoking rates shot up with over 1000%. At the same time came along the surge in diet-related health problems.
Our brains are wired to love sugar and fat. Way back when, finding these goodies meant survival.
For much of human existence, the highest sugar reward you could get was maybe some berries. A fat reward was hunting down an eland or a moose. In fact, you rarely find high carbohydrate and high fat combined in natural food products, take steak and vegetables as example.
The food industry is brilliant in re-engineering healthy, real food by using refined carbohydrates and fats to enhance the taste, flavour, palatability and shelf life. The results is ultra-processed junk food that hits the dopamine release centres in our brains at high levels.
Our brains never evolved to handle the reward profile of these highly rewarding processed substances.
And get this: in the ’80s and ’90s, it was actually Big Tobacco driving the processed food scene. The tobacco-owned food companies explicitly created more hyperpalatable food products in their portfolio and marketed those more aggressively.
There’s evidence that the non-tobacco food companies saw how successful this approach was and followed suit by also hyper-engineering their foods.
Despite knowing these foods are bad for us, many find it tough to stop eating them. We are aware that many of these “foods” are not great for our health, but we’re unable to cut down and quit.
That’s where food addiction comes in.
Food addiction wasn’t a big deal back in the early 2000s, but now, tons of research are pouring in with over 100 articles published annually.
The main finding is that consuming ultra-processed food have the same effect on the brain as addictive drugs.
Looking at the list of foods that researchers identified as highly addictive, it is not surprising to find that these are all on our FIRE Red List, like chocolate, ice cream, ‘slap chips’, pizza, cookies, chips, cake, popcorn, hamburgers, and muffins.
As expected, the Green List is well presented in the list of non-addictive foods. This is unfortunate; just imagine how easy it would have been if the Green List was addictive!
How do know if you have a food addiction?
Well, we use similar criteria to how we diagnose other addictions, like alcohol-use disorder.
Key indicators are symptoms like…
- Extreme cravings
- Loss of control over consumption
- Inability to cut down despite a desire to do so
- Continuous use despite negative consequences
- An increased tolerance, where you almost need more and more of the substance to get the same reward
- Withdrawal when you try and cut down – you feel irritable, agitated, depressed and have heightened cravings (remember keto flu?)
In 2009, a scale called the Yale Food Addiction Scale was developed to help measure food addiction. They applied the diagnostic criteria of substance use disorders to develop the scale.
When we think about it, the stuff in processed foods isn’t all that magical. It just triggers our brain’s reward centres in the same way nicotine and alcohol do, releasing dopamine like crazy.
And that is what gets us hooked. Highly processed foods are drugs hijacking our brains and leaving us craving more.
How do we manage food addiction disorder?
STEP 1:
Just like any addiction, your first step is to face reality and admit that you may have a food addiction.
STEP 2:
Secondly, put measures in place to prevent yourself from accessing and consuming those food types. For example, “Clean out your pantry!” Sounds familiar?
It’s one of the first steps in the 40-Day Journey pre-training. The reasoning behind this is simple:
“If it is not there, you can’t eat it.”
Just like the home of a person recovering from alcohol use disorder needs to be alcohol-free, the home of a person recovering from food addiction needs to be free from processed foods.
STEP 3:
And lastly, don’t go shopping when you are not in an emotional safe space. Delegate grocery shopping to someone else. Then you cannot be tempted to buy addictive food to “help you feel better”.
For many of our FIRE Circle members, diverging from the Green List once in a while may not have a significant impact on their overall health, but for those of us who are recovering from food addiction, it is critical to stay on the Green List. Finish en klaar!
Be honest with yourself. If you know taking one bite of chocolate will trigger cravings for more, then Don’t Take That Bite!
