"It's a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears." Plutarch
Think of it this way. If you are addicted to food a lot of your day is spent thinking about what you are going to eat, when you're going to eat, and whether or not you will have exactly the right food in front to satisfy your food addiction. In your mind's eye, you are looking at food as much more than something that tastes good, or gives you energy to survive. In your mind's eye food is the substance of soothing and relief. In your food-addicted view, you believe food can do for you what we all wish our mothers had done for us when we were infants: provide loads and loads of unconditional love.
Food Trance Is The Hidden Core Of Food Addiction.
Over the years, I asked people who suffer from food addiction what food does for them psychologically. These food addicts tell me that if they eat enough of the "right" things fast enough, they go into what sounds like a time-out bubble or a trance. They describe it as an escape from worldly problems, but more than that, they tell me it is escape from their own inner critic. When they are in a bubble, they can believe that there is nothing wrong with them, at least for a while. Nobody is making demands on them. No one can reach them.
Some of my patients with food addiction go even further and tell me that they feel like they are in another world. For people addicted to food, the food is the friend who gives them unconditional love. Or, at least it feels like that in the moments when they are eating.
Is Being Addicted To Food the Same as Drug Addiction?
All addiction stems from a place of arrested psychological development. It represents a place where people didn't learn to soothe themselves and so they seek that comfort in a substance, whether it's food, drugs or alcohol. Although the degree is different, this food trance is very similar to the same kind of mental space the heroin addict is trying to achieve. In the case of food addiction, the chemical shifts that food (like sugar and carbohydrates) induce have a much more subtle effect than drugs so it makes it an easier addiction to break.
OK, I'm Addicted To Food: What's So Wrong About Going Into A Food Trance?
Actually, it sounds pretty good if that were the end of it. But it's not. After the food trance is over, there is regret, guilt, and often self-loathing, not to mention weight gain that presents so many health problems. For food addicts the problems you escape from by using the food trance, are still there waiting to be resolved. People with food addiction avoid the hard work of facing reality and resolving their problems and thus suffer all the consequences. Every adult who has a responsibility for his or her life has to deal with reality as competently as they can, and going into a food trance makes that almost impossible. Each time you avoid dealing with reality by overeating, you lose confidence that you can in fact face reality. Overtime this lack of confidence has you reach for the comfort of food more and more often.
The Cure for Food Addiction
You need someone or something to gradually help you change mental directions. You will need to face up to the reality of your life enough times to convince yourself that you can successfully handle what you have been avoiding by being addicted to food. A good therapist can do that, or you can do that yourself with the program.
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