My Origin Story

My first conscious memory of addictive eating is me hiding behind the couch with a jar of peanut butter and a spoon.

I was a picky eater and my dad was a gourmet home chef. It broke his heart that I would turn up my nose at all the delicious home made meals he crafted, in favour of the highly processed junk food my palette preferred.

My mom couldn’t say no to me, and I quickly learned how to manipulate my environment to soothe my unmet emotional needs through crappy food-like substances.

Most of my childhood is a blur though, so I don’t have a pile of memories I can trace back to when all this started or how it progressed. I think I was actually a happy-enough kid until my parents split up when I was 13.

A Family Divided

I read somewhere that divorce is harder on teenagers than it is on young kids, since their identities are really beginning to form and they’re also more inclined to take on responsibilities beyond themselves. That was definitely true for me.

I don’t remember thinking about my weight as a kid. I noticed it more in adolescence but even then I don’t remember any of the stereotypical turmoil of yo-yo dieting.

Photographic evidence shows that my chubbiness fluctuated throughout my first two decades, and I vaguely remember the thrill of fitting a size M at Le Chateau, which was a Canadian fashion store that was all the rage when I was a teenager.

So while food and weight were obviously on my radar, I wasn’t obsessed with them. Yet.

The Dope Years

In late adolescence, I discovered cannabis and it wasn’t long before that turned into a raging addiction. With the weed came the munchies, and boy could I do munchies!

Over the next two decades of my life—through my 20s & 30s—I knew I was addicted to weed and that it was a problem. But it wasn’t enough of a problem to do something drastic like get help. Do they even have treatment for potheads? I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

I certainly never considered getting help for my eating; after all, I reasoned, it was just munchies and that if I could just quit weed then the food would take care of itself.

Spoiler alert: if it had been that simple, I wouldn’t be here writing this and you wouldn’t be here reading it.

My Year being Whole Food Plant-Based

By some grace, in 2016 I managed to quit all processed food, including sugar and oil, for about a year.

I felt amazing, and ever since, I’ve held this way of eating as my gold standard for how I feel the best in my body. My cravings were totally gone, I binged on broccoli and hummus instead of chips and candy, and I actually had energy to start jogging, which is nuts!

I say grace because being able to transition to this way of eating was heavily dependent on exceptionally great life circumstances combined with the verve of a newly converted vegan. (I still cringe remembering how utterly intolerable I was at the time!!)

My marriage was going well, grad school was super engaging, and I was still smoking weed to let off steam on weekends. I used Intermittent Fasting to get over the physical dependency of junk food, and I used intensive learning and cooking to keep my mind busy and engaged in this new obsession.

And then it all came crashing down.

I didn’t yet know about food addiction, so when I went to a party in spring of 2017 and someone had made vegan Oreo “cheesecake”, I didn’t know that it would send me into a downward spiral that would eventually take me into the hardest eating years of my life.

Fixing Myself (or so I thought)

I started trying to quit weed in my later 30s. And by “trying to quit” I mostly mean doing a ton of personal development programs and workshops, yoga retreats, and communication courses. God forbid I get therapy or something sensible like that. Nope, I was gonna do it all by myself. Ha. Ha.

In late 2020, I attended two 25-day programs at The Haven to put my life back together after my dad died that spring and my whole world imploded over the summer (I also heard something about a bad cold going around that year, but I didn’t notice because I was too busy drowning in despair over my broken house, broken marriage, and broken life).

Somehow, miraculously, in the middle of all the introspection and connection facilitated by those programs, I was finally ready to give up weed. I didn’t even have to try, it just kinda left me.

More Than Munchies

So, now… remember when I thought I just had to quit weed and the food would take care of itself? This was the point in my journey where I discovered my relationship to food was its Own Thing. And probably the original thing, given that jar of peanut butter from before.

Well shucks.

I had joined an AA group over the weed, not trusting this spontaneous recovery to last if I didn’t grasp help like a drowning man. And I noticed my junk food intake creeping up right away. Before long, it wasn’t just creeping but full-on raging.

I was walking to the grocery store daily for a family size bag of chips and a box of pastries. I told my sponsor at the time that I think I’m developing a problem with food. And she told me the standard AA party line about such things: “Oh, don’t worry about that. One thing at a time. You’re sober! That’s all that matters!”

It’s Not About the Peanuts

She was wrong. I knew she was wrong. I knew she didn’t know what I was talking about the moment she told me she “had the same thing” because she keeps a bag of peanuts in the car and eats them mindlessly when she’s driving on the highway.

I knew it wasn’t the same thing, because she left the peanuts in the car. Like, who does that?!?

Every self-loathing food addict knows: The peanuts come in the house not the car. How can you eat them in front of the TV if they’re in the damn car? How can you gorge yourself until you’re bursting if they’re not in a mixing bowl beside you on the couch?!?

The peanuts go on the couch. The peanuts go in the mouth until the bag is empty and the mouth burns from the salt. Then the person goes out and buys more peanuts.

One does not simply leave the peanuts in the car.

I digress.

The Road is Long

I was obsessed with bodies. Specifically bodies that mine would never have looked like even if I’d eaten nothing but kale and turnips from the time I was 6.

I resented runners for looking good while running, because they were out there earning their toned butts and I hated running and it just wasn’t fair.

I basically spiralled deep into my junk food addiction. I mean, there was this whole pandemic thing happening and everyone was reporting weight gain, so I felt in good company.

But eventually I realized this was something I needed to actually deal with. So over the next four years, I tried everything I could find to deal with this beast.

I spent a month in an eating disorder clinic.
I got obsessed with intuitive eating.

I spent 6 months in Overeaters Anonymous.
I got obsessed with abstinence.

I did a stint with some other food addiction coaches.
I got obsessed with my food obsession.

I even tried therapy with a food addiction specialist.
I got obsessed with being hopeless.

With Many a Winding Turn

My journey took all kinds of twists and turns. It even went into spontaneous remission briefly when I fell in love, and then roared up ferociously when that relationship got turbulent.

I deeply wish I could hand you a solution on a silver platter and that you wouldn’t have to spend one more day with the insanity of your own obsessive food thoughts.

The truth is that my path necessarily included all these detours in order to figure out which things worked for me and which didn’t.

And while I do know the final pieces that came along to bring it all together, I can’t be sure I didn’t need each and every one of those other approaches to chip away at this beast bit by bit.

Lessons Learned

The ED clinic taught me that “all foods fit” does not fit for all people.

OA taught me that putting abstinence on a pedestal was a surefire way to antagonize my inner rebel and make me feel shitty about myself when I couldn’t maintain perfection.

Food addiction coaches taught me about the insidiousness of the global industrial food complex.

Therapy taught me that I need to trust myself more than the experts, even when they want the best for me.

Falling in love (again) with my college sweetheart taught me that amazing sex is a fantastic substitute for junk food, but not a sustainable recovery strategy when you use it instead of doing the inner healing work.

Where I’m At Now

My food freedom can be described on two levels:

1. I no longer use food as an emotional coping strategy.
2. My eating behaviours finally align with my higher values.

How it Feels Internally

This doesn’t mean I eat perfectly. Nor does it mean I always eat every meal mindfully and consciously and intentionally.

We still live in a toxic food environment, so especially when I travel, my eating is not always how I’d prefer it to be.

When I do eat something out of alignment, I hold that experience (and especially the aftermath) with curiosity, self-compassion, and understanding.

I still experience cravings, but they’re drastically reduced especially when I minimize UPFs in my diet. More importantly, they no longer drive compulsive takeovers; they’re more like subtle nudges that I can easily be present with. They’ve become signposts that tell me something is up.

My grace is that I no longer obsess about food all day (instead I obsess over silly things like “my purpose” and “the true meaning of life” and “what does it mean to be a spiritual being having a human experience anyway?” But hey, I’ll take existential philosophy over hopeless despair any day!!)

How it Looks Behaviourally

My dietary lifestyle is an ongoing work-in-progress. When I’m at the store and I really want something, I remind myself that I’m allowed to have it if I want. Often, that’s all my Craving Part needed. When it’s more persistent, I choose inner peace over dogma.

Before I list the specifics of how I eat nowadays, I want to be clear that none of these are “food rules”. These are all choices I make on an ongoing basis, in alignment with what really matters to me, which is health and sanity.

And sometimes sanity means grabbing something a bit junky before I start eating my left arm.

I’ve cut out chips (and cheezies and anything like them) and UPF sweets. I almost never eat in the car, and when I do, it’s mostly fruit. Taking the time to stop and get out to eat makes a big difference mentally!

I avoid fast food as much as practical, and I steer towards the slightly-less-junky brands (e.g. A&W over McDonald’s, BarBurrito over Taco Bell, etc).

When I’m travelling, I mostly try to stop at grocery stores and get deli items. These are often still UPF, but at least recognizable as food-shaped.

I’ve always had a “grease tooth” more than a “sweet tooth”, so fries and hash browns are dicey. I sometimes have them at sit-down restaurants, but I don’t buy the frozen ones you bake yourself.

I do occasionally eat homemade desserts when I’m out and in the social company of other humans, but I never make them at home myself.

I keep a close eye on my cravings, and when they arise, I trace back which foods triggered them (hint: it’s not always the food I’m craving!). Then I try to eat those foods more cautiously, if at all.

When I find myself eating a UPF compulsively even when I’m full, I usually choose to let go of that product. Most recently, this meant ramen noodles.

My cravings have gotten much more subtle. I also keep an eye on which foods seem to trigger them—either for something specific (“That was really good. I want more of it!”) or for nothing in particular (“I feel like eating… something… not sure what… I’m not even hungry… ohhh right, I had cubed hash browns at Smitty’s this morning. This is just a dopamine crash, it will pass.”)

Footnote: The ED Treatment Fiasco

I want to go a little more into detail about this part of my story, because I think it’s crucial to determine whether you’re dealing with Ultra-Processed Food Addiction (UPFA) or Binge Eating Disorder (BED).

I am not a clinician or diagnostician; my clients self-select and I trust their own inner knowing. What I offer here is my own ED treatment story, and you can decide if it resonates or not.

The ED clinic was a trip.

Even going in, I knew I was dealing with UPFA and not ED. But that was the only public health care I could access at the time, and I knew I needed something.

They actually taught a lot of great tools for coping with the underlying stress that drives people to eating disorders, but like most ED clinicians, they had a very narrow view of what causes it and what the universal solution is.

Specifically, they said that binge eating is unilaterally caused by former restrictive eating (even though I’d been pigging out on junk food long before I had ever restricted anything) and that the only solution was all foods fit / intuitive eating / food neutrality.

Pause to note: I do agree with food neutrality, i.e. that food is not moral and that eating “bad food” doesn’t mean “you’re bad.” That being said, I find the label “junk food” incredibly helpful for reminding me that these are commercial products created for the sake of high shareholder profit, not to feed and nourish the public.

My “all foods fit” disaster.

But the real disaster was that I let them convince me that my own inner knowing was not reliable. I was so desperate for help, for answers. I know they were trying to help, using the only techniques they had available. But it was the wrong help for me.

They prescribed me the “keep it in the house” approach to “normalize” my relationship with my “trigger foods”. So, if chips made me nervous, then I was supposed to keep chips in the house. You can guess how that went:

• Day 1: I buy a bag of chips to keep in the house.
• Day 1: I eat that whole bag of chips. Like, duh.
• Day 2: I buy another bag of chips and swear I’m only going to have one bowl.
• Day 2: I eat the whole bag of chips, one bowl at a time. Shocking.
• Day 3: I buy two so that I have one to keep in the house after I eat the first.
• Day 3: I eat one bag of chips. I obsess all night over the other bag and eat everything else in the house instead.
• Day 4: I eat the other bag for breakfast.
• Day 4: I buy three bags of chips…
• Day 5: I realize this strategy is going downhill faster than an olympic luge. Maybe it works for others, but it’s not a good fit for me.

Five days might not seem like a very rigorous scientific experiment, and fairly, it wasn’t. I knew before I started that it wasn’t the right fit for me, that I had always done better physically and psychologically when I cut my binge foods out completely.

I Was Complicit

The truth is, my addiction heard their advice and ran with it before my prefrontal cortex could say “uhm, hold on…”

It would be easy enough for me to go into victim mode and say they brainwashed me into believing my stint with a whole food plant-based diet was actually orthorexia.

But a more honest account is that I’m the one who chose to dismiss my own inner knowing.

Yes, I was desperate. Yes, I looked up to them as experts. But at the end of the day, I’m the only one who gave up my inner authority. And they were doing their best to help. There’s no blame to be had.

Regarding ED vs UPFA Diagnosis

I’m not a clinician and I’m certainly not a diagnostician. If you’re not sure where you fall on this spectrum, check out the work of Dr David Wiss and his Eight Step Process for Clinicians, which I’ve found very affirming of what I already knew: I didn’t have an eating disorder, I was addicted to ultra-processed food.

(Yes, I diagnosed myself. No, that’s not clinically valid. Yes, this approach has worked for me. No, it doesn’t work for everyone.)