The world of food addiction recovery is complex and full of contradictions. The more you understand, the more empowered you become.
One week I’m reading Geneen Roth, who says all overeating is emotional eating. The next week I’m reading Kathryn Hansen, who says overeating is never about the underlying feelings. For fucks sake gals, get your stories straight!
You’d be forgiven for just wanting to throw your hands up at the whole thing, give in to that little voice that says this is hopeless and you’ll be addicted for life, and go back to your late night Stream’n’Binge.
Except you don’t have to! It turns out the recovery world is complex because – wait for it – human being are complex. Who knew??
I’m here taking a stand for the existence of spectrums and nuance and relativism. I’m here to tell you that what worked for me may or may not work for you, but that doesn’t mean nothing will work for you.
If you’ve been at this a while, you’ll already have an intuitive sense of which approaches work for you and which don’t.
Some may have worked for a while but then stopped working, maybe because some other piece was missing to take it to the finish line. Or maybe you do have all the pieces but you’re struggling to put them all together.
Personal Growth did not bring me Food Addiction Recovery.
That was me. I’d been doing personal growth work for a couple years when I quit weed and picked up food.
Food had always been part of my addiction landscape, but because I was smoking so much weed, my appetite was suppressed when I wasn’t high and then raging when I was; so I was blaming the weed for my munchies and not aware that it was its own thing too.
Undeterred by my eating – possibly driven by it – I kept on the personal growth train. I kept going to workshops and retreats and getting certifications in all the things I thought I needed to learn for my own healing.
I became an expert on nervous systems and self-regulation. I learned how to connect deeply with other humans and break out from the trap of loneliness and isolation. I learned embodiment and how to be with and describe my somatic experiences. I dabbled in IFS and started to tease out my different parts.
I did all the things. And still I couldn’t put down the food.
It made no sense to me! The standard perspective in addiction recovery is that substances are used to cope with challenging life. When you learn how to actually cope with life, you’re supposed to be recovered. Right?
But it wasn’t working out like that. While I got better and better at self-compassion and not shaming myself for my binges, I didn’t get much better at actually not binging.
Overeaters Anonymous only made it worse.
Desperate, I went to OA. I came up with a definition of abstinence that I felt like I could sustain. I still binged on less-junky foods, but at least I was “staying abstinent” because I wasn’t eating my forbidden foods. My sponsor kept trying to get me to do a food plan, but I couldn’t get past my abject horror at even the idea.
Then I got to Step 9 (amends) and it all fell apart. My sponsor didn’t offer me any emotional support whatsoever in this step, as she had in Step 5 (confession). All she gave me was instructions on how to do it: in person, not over the phone, if possible.
I had been kinda sorta ok with the idea of writing a letter and sending it off, but when I though I had to actually see these people as I told them what a horrible person I had been? No fucking way.
In hindsight, that’s the point I realize I had been white-knuckling it the whole time. I’d been fighting my cravings, and one thing all the experts agree on is that fighting cravings does not work.
The main problem with OA is that it begs the solution. You have to start out with abstinence. Meal plans. Deprivation. The idea is that through working the program, you’re supposed to start being ok with those things. The deprivation is supposed to go away.
I never made it that far.
The only reason I was in OA in the first place was because in a moment of desperation, I had gotten down on my knees and prayed for a solution. A voice in my head said “Get a sponsor. Work the steps.” That was my OA story for months after that. It was why I was there: because God told me to.
I now believe the reason I was called to go through that process was specifically so that I could speak from experience about it, and not because it was ever going to work for me. And I’m not saying it never works – OA was full of people, long-timers, who had serenity around their food, who no longer overate, and who were spiritually fulfilled by working their program.
And I honestly am happy to know that. I will never shit on anything that works for people. I will only shit on the belief that if it works for some people, then it must work for everyone. Because that’s bullshit.
Resigned to my dis-ease that isn’t a disease.
Behaviourally, I resigned myself for the next several months. I stopped waging the day-to-day battles. I was exhausted and I didn’t have any more fight left in me.
But I was also fucking determined. I wasn’t going to fight, but I wasn’t going to give in either.
In the midst of my OA trip, I had started an addiction recovery program for therapists. It contradicted so much of the 12 Step philosophy but also seemed evidence based. It was Harm Reduction oriented and taught me a whole lot about self-compassion around my behaviours.
It also introduced to Marc Lewis’ work on the Learning Model of Addiction. I was still hooked into the OA philosophy at the time, and his model is completely different from theirs, which sent me into a whole existential conundrum about what the hell is addiction anyway?
I couldn’t rectify these two perspectives and I was dedicated to OA so I set Lewis’ work aside for the time-being. I picked it up again a few months later when it was included in a Holistic Recovery course I was taking. By then, I was clear that OA was not working, and I was much more receptive to his alternative views.
Reading The Biology of Desire was the first time I actually started to really understand what was happening for me at a neurological level. He does an incredible job of breaking down the brain processes through the trajectory of addictions.
Realizing I have Choice around my Behaviour
The gist of Lewis’ work is that addiction is not a disease, but a result of a totally normally functioning brain in its learning process, where the thing it learned happens to be destructive in other areas of your life.
He maps the history of how people have related to addiction over time. The Disease Model was theoretically an improvement over the Moral Failing model, in that in principle it was supposed to absolve addicts of their moral failings and reframe it as a biological condition.
The problem is, that’s not how it plays out in society. The average person still looks at drunk homeless dudes as if they’re scum. The average wife still expects her gambler husband to stop if he really loves her. The average binge eater still wakes up with self-blame and shame for all the crap they ate last night.
As a society, disease model notwithstanding, we still look at addiction as a choice. Even within 12 Steps, which officially subscribes to the disease model, there are all kinds of choices and actions baked in that implicitly expect you to make different choices.
“Don’t drink and go to meetings” pre-supposes that you already know how not to drink. Any drinker who already knew how to do that wouldn’t be an alcoholic, so there are detox programs where people can’t drink.
Marc Lewis looks at addiction as a choice too, but not in the same moral-failings way that society does. He champions self-empowerment and the importance of self-understanding in overcoming addiction; that people recover by finding new goals, meaning, and ways of fulfilling their emotional and psychological needs.
Something happened in me by reading his book where I started to feel empowered to change my behaviour. I started to reclaim my sense of agency and choice. Behaviourally, I immediately started noticing small changes.
I was still binging, but they weren’t as frantic and dissociative as they used to be. I was kind of watching them from a distance and using all my introspection tools to get a handle on what was happening in me.
The importance of following your own intuition.
I could sense this whole thing was finally coming to an end. I don’t know how I knew, I just had this sense that it was on its last legs.
And then I started reading Geneen Roth’s Breaking Free from Emotional Eating and it set me back a notch. On its surface this book seemed congruent with the work I was doing. It invites overeaters to follow some simple guidelines and to bring more awareness to their eating.
Two things about this didn’t work for me.
One was that it’s the same core problem as OA: it puts the cart before the horse; just a different cart and horse.
Where OA preaches abstinence from foods that trigger overeating, Roth preaches eating literally whatever you want, but only when you’re hungry.
Damn girl, if I knew how to eat only when I’m hungry, I wouldn’t be in this mess! Adding chips and cake into the mix did not make it easier for me to stop eating when I was full!
Nonetheless, I gave it the old college try. But my binging urges got worse, and importantly, the foods I was binging on was getting much worse. While I could eat a single bowl of chips for lunch, having that bag of chips in the house made it inevitable that I would crave it all evening.
My own intuition tells me that having junk food in the house is not the right choice for me. It’s too tempting and sets me up for cravings late at night.
I still related to my cravings as a battle and I lost every time.
The Hope of Empowerment
The only reason I was reading Roth’s book was that I had read her other book Women Food and God during my OA days, when a temporary AA sponsor had loaned me a copy after hearing about my food struggles. At the time, it felt really good to bring surrender to a higher power so directly into my food journey.
I realize now, that what felt so good was to stop feeling the burden of responsibility. All I had to do was stay spiritually fit, and then whatever happened with my food was beyond my control. After wrestling control with my addiction for so long, that was a huge relief.
I don’t feel like that now.
While it’s not the intention of the program, the result of Step 1’s admission that I’m powerless over food actually let my addiction trick me into thinking I don’t have to be responsible for my eating. It turned my felt sense of powerlessness into a choice to be powerless.
Big difference!
Feeling powerless is not the same thing as being powerless. Empowerment is possible for everyone, when you find the right leverage point for your personal makeup, personality, and stage of addiction development or recovery.
Empowerment looks like different things at different stages of recovery.
My first stage of my own empowerment was self-compassion. I could choose to stop shaming myself for eating too much. No doubt that came easily enough because I had done a lot of work with my inner critic and it no longer held court.
Next stage of my empowerment was believing I do have the innate capacity to make different choices. That doesn’t mean I immediately knew how to make those choices; but it was tremendously relieving and supportive just to think that was a possibility.
From that place, I was empowered to think differently about my addiction. I made the choice to believe it was on its last legs. That already started to deflate its own power over me.
Emotional Eating is not the right framework for any more.
Right before it got worse, I was actually feeling better. I felt close enough to recovery that I could start building a business in food addiction recovery. I threw myself into creating content, leading to late late nights and letting my hunger build to ravenous proportions. I think it’s that ravenous hunger that actually set off my binge habit again.
In my research for this work, I stumbled upon Hansen’s Brain over Binge in a Reddit post. I have a longer review of this book, so I’ll be brief here.
Her main thesis is that binge eating is never about some deeper, psychological reason. It’s not a coping mechanism for difficult emotions or an overwhelming life.
I’m sorry Kathryn, but you’re full of shit.
To say that emotional eating is never a thing is blatantly stupid.
In her biography, she explains why emotional eating wasn’t the root cause of her bingeing. But then commits the fallacy of generalizing her personal experience to all people with the same behavioural outcome. And that’s just terrible science!
And yet…
I could resonate in part with her perspective.
While I maintain that there was a time where what I needed was absolutely to learn how to be an emotionally mature adult, it’s also true that doing that didn’t spontaneously grace me with food addiction recovery.
Having done all the deep emotional healing work and getting myself to a place where I love feeling my feelings, can easily ground myself and regulate my nervous system in challenging life situations, and have a strong support network of friends…
I was baffled by why my food addiction was still a thing. There was something really resonant about the idea that all I needed to recover from binge eating was to stop binge eating.
Like duh. Why didn’t I think of that?
Food Addiction Recovery through Mindfulness
What’s different from the white knuckling I had done before was the way to relate to urges (i.e. cravings). Based on Jack Trimpey’s book Rational Recovery, she proposes a method of quitting binge eating by disengaging with the addictive voice that’s rooted in the limbic system, and dismissing it as “neurological junk”.
On the surface, this is a minor change in perspective. But it’s revolutionary to how I was relating to my bingeing.
I knew from experience that fighting my cravings did not work. It was exhausting when I won and disheartening when I didn’t.
I knew from my experiment with Roth’s work that following my food cravings increased my cravings to where fighting them wasn’t even an option.
But what I had not tried was the same strategy I use with big feelings: detachment. I had learned to allow big emotions to move through my body and watch them from a distance, not getting caught up in them. Not fighting them but not letting them take over either.
And because I had done so much legwork in recovery, healing, and mindfulness, it was actually really easy for me to flip this switch with my cravings.
Your mileage may vary. I say this not to scare you but to prepare you. If you’re already good at mindfulness, you might be able to flip that switch like I did. Or you might need help learning mindfulness as it relates to food cravings. Either way, I’m here to help you walk the path.
Didn’t you say something about 3 Steps?
I did. They’re in there, but not obviously, so let’s spell that out…
- Figure out the root cause of your Food Addiction
- Did your bingeing behaviours begin in response to extreme dieting?
- Did your overeating start as a way to cope with overwhelming feelings?
- Did you start eating out of boredom and loneliness?
- Have you always had a sweet tooth, and binge eating is the natural progression of a biologically based dependence of refined sugar? Or a salt tooth with potato chips?
- Address the root cause of your Food Addiction
- Do you need to learn to eat regular, filling meals before you’re ravenous?
- Do you need to learn emotional regulation?
- Do you need to create more fun in your life and a supportive network of great people?
- Do you need to cut refined sugar from your diet by replacing it with healthier sweets like fruits and dates? Or replace chips with toasted tortilla triangles and whole food crackers?
- Use mindfulness to address the causal link between cravings and bingeing.
- By now you’ve gotten yourself to where the only thing holding you back from food addiction recovery is the habit of giving in to food or binge cravings.
- You’ve realized that fighting your cravings doesn’t work; that exploring them on equal footing to your True Self only validates them, and giving in to them only bolsters their army.
- Now you can make the subtle but powerful pivot of relating to your cravings from your impassionate witness
For some of you, this mindfulness approach will be revolutionary and easy.
For others, it will take some work to learn about mindfulness and to lay the groundwork for mindfulness to feel safe and accessible.
For example, mindfulness isn’t accessible when your nervous system is freaking out. Or a lonely and totally unfulfilling might just be too much to bear when you’re alone in your apartment at night.
The good news is that you don’t have to do this alone.
I’m a certified Relateful Coach and I specialize in guiding women through Food Addiction Recovery using a holistic approach that first addresses the root causes of your particular addiction, and then guides you through the final steps of actually changing your behaviour.