When someone walks into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting submitted to their desire to quit drinking, the definition of abstinence is pretty obvious: no alcohol.
I don’t need to tell you that everyone needs to eat. Indeed, this is why many professionals don’t even recognize food addiction as a real condition. How can you be addicted to something necessary for survival?
Of course, you and I know how. It’s not the lentils and carrots we’re addicted to, it’s the potato chips and tiramisu.
Where does “Never” fit?
Still then – does abstinence mean never again having fried foods or sugary desserts?
For some, yes, that’s exactly what it means. Some brains do much better with clear boundaries – what Susan Pierce Thompson calls “Bright Lines”.
I have a Focusing colleague who found the framework of abstinence to be incredibly liberating. She was struggling with obesity and wanted to cut out all sugary and fried foods, but she’d been so close to the eating disorder world that kept her thinking she needed to learn how to fit them in.
In her case, she found it so freeing to give herself permission to never eat those things again. The food noise disappeared and her relationship to food felt peaceful for the first time ever.
What my Abstinence looks like
I’m still exploring which foods feel good to be completely abstinent from, which ones I feel comfortable having when I’m out in the company of others, and which foods I want to have in the home.
One thing I’m really clear with myself is that force and rules don’t work. I recently watched “Food Inc. 2” and got inspired to cut out all processed food entirely. I was so angry at the UPF industry, and I had a big “Fuck Those Guys” moment.
But when I was at the grocery store, shopping for food while I’m cat sitting for my friend in another city, I realized I wasn’t quite there yet, and that forcing myself to go there would just be another version of the battle.
Still, I was clear that I wanted to stop eating meat. So I selected a couple frozen vegetarian entrees and some veggie spring rolls. I’m not sure if the spring rolls will work – they’re pretty close to fried foods, and fried foods always give me cravings.
It’s an experiment.
I’m also recovering from a nasty cold, and I’m grateful to have these easy, convenient options available when I’m not really up to cooking from scratch. At the same time, something in me knows my body would feel better if I ate real food. So it’s an ongoing exploration.
Coming back to the question
In my work, abstinence and moderation are deeply personal definitions, specific to the individual I’m working with. For those with a restrictive eating disorder past, abstinence at all might be too triggering.
This might be frustrating for some. Maybe you just want a clear definition: “Here’s the list of foods you can never eat.” I’m not going to do that. My abstinent list is what works for my body, and not something to be imposed on others just because it’s working for me.
Abstinence is not Restriction
The biggest reason OA never worked for me was that it had me forcing myself into a restrictive abstinence, and my inner rebel pushed so hard against that; it was a constant battle.
It’s not like that for me now. Through Focusing and Untangling, almost by magic, I stopped wanting the foods that I used to binge on. I got to the bottom of what needs they were meeting, and I connected directly to the feeling I was trying to get from those foods.
I learned how to call up that feeling from within, and somehow just knowing I can do that was all I needed to stop seeking it from the outside.
Other foods, like the hashbrowns I had with breakfast on the road the other day, are a grey area. They incited that physiological response that hyper palatable foods do, and they left me craving “something, anything” later that day.
They had me realize that my life is just smoother when I don’t eat anything that comes out of a deep fryer. But that’s not coming from an “I’m not allowed” or “I’ll never have those again”, but rather a recognition that next time I’m presented with the opportunity, I can reflect and decide: “do I want to sign up for the effects that eating this will have?”
My journey through the world of eating disorder treatment has been a complex one, marked by moments where I felt profoundly marginalized and dismissed. While I wouldn’t have used those exact words at the time, reflecting now, that’s precisely how it felt. I experienced what I can only describe as emotional and psychological violence when my deepest truths about my body and my recovery were simply brushed aside.
For years, I engaged in behaviours that were almost indistinguishable from binge eating disorder (BED). However, I now understand that my struggle wasn’t purely BED; it was rooted in something distinct: junk food addiction and processed food addiction. The diagnostic criteria to differentiate these two weren’t widely accessible or used when I first sought help, making it incredibly difficult to find the right support.
The Eating Disorder Treatment Centre Experience: A Deep Dive into Misunderstanding
I once spent a month in an eating disorder treatment centre that aimed to treat all eating disorders under one roof. We had individuals with anorexia, ARFID, bulimia, and many diagnosed with binge eating disorder. While I’m certain the BED diagnosis fit for some, it did not fit for me.
My personal truth was this: I had achieved incredible success through a whole food plant-based (WFPB) way of eating for six months to a year. During this period, I abstained from sugar, oil, and most ultra-processed foods. I felt “amazing,” my “food noise had vanished,” and I was in peak physical and mental health. This was everything I wanted for myself in addiction recovery.
However, when I shared this in the treatment facility, it was dismissed. My successful approach was labelled as “restrictive eating” or even “orthorexia”. Desperate for help and in pain, I suspended my own truth because these “professionals” told me I was wrong. In hindsight, this was incredibly damaging, setting my recovery back for months, if not years. The advice I received – “all foods fit” and “food neutrality” – was precisely the opposite of what I needed to learn for my specific challenge.
The Crucial Distinction: Food Addiction vs. Binge Eating Disorder
This experience highlighted a critical misunderstanding that continues to plague the treatment community: the difference between food addiction and binge eating disorder.
• Binge Eating Disorder (BED), as I understand it, often stems from a history of restrictive eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia. It carries an underlying belief that some foods are “bad,” immoral, or unethical, and that eating them is wrong.
• Food Addiction, particularly to junk and processed foods, is a different beast entirely. For me, it’s about recognizing that ultra-processed food isn’t true nourishment; it’s a product. These items are dreamt up by food scientists with the sole intention of creating profit, designed to make you consume more and change your state, much like other substances. I don’t see them as “bad” or “immoral”; I see them as not food at all, no more food than marijuana is air.
I know in my heart that I feel better when I don’t eat these specific foods. My food noise drops, and I function optimally. This isn’t about restriction driven by a fear of “bad” foods; it’s about recognizing that certain “products” interfere with my well-being.
A Recent Reminder of the Dismissal
Just this spring, I had another unsettling encounter during a breathwork training. Partnered with a therapist specializing in eating disorders, I expressed my intention to “unravel my food addiction”. Her dismissive response, implying that “people who use that terminology” were simply using a different word for something she already understood, left me feeling incredibly upset and unheard. It reinforced the pervasive lack of understanding.
Trust Your Truth: A Message to Fellow Travellers
If you’re reading this and recognize your own experience, please know this: if you know in your heart that cutting out certain foods is what you need for your optimal health, do not let anybody convince you otherwise.
Of course, if you have a history of anorexia or severe restrictive dieting, it’s always crucial to seek professional guidance. But if you’re dealing with food addiction, you know you’re still getting enough calories and nutrients, and you feel that abstaining from specific ultra-processed foods is essential for your well-being, you deserve to have your truth acknowledged.
It is incredibly important to work with a professional who genuinely understands and can differentiate between binge eating disorder and food addiction, recognizing both as valid conditions and able to run through proper diagnostic criteria. Your recovery journey is uniquely yours, and your internal wisdom about your body’s needs is invaluable.
For a long time, I thought of my work as addressing Junk Food Addiction. This is because my own experience with junk food mirrored my previous experiences with addiction, and because my junk food consumption really picked up when I quit smoking weed.
Addiction: Because Food Industry
I have a lot of space in my heart for people who identify with having a food addiction. I myself have, for many years, identified that way; and it’s only as I’ve found recovery that it feels better to shift into new language for myself.
But the truth is that the food industry is incredibly diligent at creating food products that are biochemically addictive. They add artificial chemicals with the deliberate intent to make them harder to stop eating, to make you crave them, and to build tolerance, requiring larger and larger doses to get the same fix.
Downside: Addiction is Stigmatizing
“Addiction” carries a lot of stigma, and not everyone wants to identify as having an addiction, let along being “an addict”. Even when I was very active in Twelve Steps, I always felt incredibly uncomfortable saying “Hi, my name is Mercedes and I’m an addict”. Even now, I feel my stomach turn over just from writing that.
I do find that “habit” and “habit change” are less stigmatizing perspectives, and more accessible to more people. Everyone has had a bad habit that they’ve eventually changed, so I believe it’s more relatable to people who may not have overcome other addictions in their past.
I used to bite my nails. No one ever suggested I had a nail biting addiction. When I stopped that, I started biting the inside of my cheeks. No one said I had a cheek biting addiction. Both were clearly bad habits that were soothing when I did them but caused then caused harm, and were hard to stop. Now I just gently stroke the area around my mouth with my fingertips, and this is both soothing and harmless.
Nonetheless, you might feel that the addiction framework feels like a better fit for you – and if it does, you’re welcome here! For myself, I switch between both terms depending on the context and how I’m feeling that day.
The Neuroscience Supports Either
I strongly believe in Marc Lewis’s Learning Model of Addiction, which describes addiction as a learned behaviour that mirrors any other habit formation pattern.
Neurologically, acquiring “addictive habits” follows the same process as learning to brush our teeth every day or using our turning signal when driving – it started consciously and deliberately, and eventually became automatic.
In this sense, the two terms are neurologically interchangeable; so then the difference becomes how else this habit is affecting you. I like Jan Winhall’s view that an addiction is any behaviour that helps you in the short-term, harms you in the long-terms, and that you have trouble stopping on your own.
Habit: Because it’s Food
One argument for the “habit” orientation is that food and eating are fundamentally different from literally every other substance or behaviour someone might be addicted to. For someone who wants to choose abstinence, it’s not as cut & dry as “don’t drink” or “don’t smoke”.
You still have to eat, and you’re always going to have eating habits. There’s no way to do something 3-5 times a day and not have a habit around it. So the idea of changing your food habits just fits more with that reality.
For me, this supports a framework where a “processed food addiction” is a sub-type of “food habits”. In other words, you’ll always have food habits, but you need not always have an addiction.
Where it gets fuzzy
Some people put sugar itself in that category. I think it’s more subtle than that. For example, I’m able to put sugar and cream in my coffee and just have two cups most mornings, which I savour over about 20 minutes each. But if I use a flavoured creamer – even though it has a horrible aftertaste – I can easily down a cup in a couple minutes, and insatiably go back for more.
If I’m at a high quality restaurant, I’ve been known not to finish my fries, even though they’re delicious. But when I still ate fast food fries, I would scarf them back in seconds. So it wasn’t the potatoes, it wasn’t the oil, and it wasn’t even the salt. It was some other je ne sais quoi that they’d added to make them irresistable.
So while I feel like I have a pretty healthy eating habit – mostly vegetables and whole foods, with the occasional sweet treat when I’m out – I do treat foods like potato chips, commercial ice cream, and fast food as though they’re addictive drugs that I want to avoid. And that framework seems to serve me.
Final thoughts
When I created this website, I was using the food addiction framework. I found this perspective useful because it helped me approach it the way I would approach any addiction, which is the validity of choose between abstinence or moderation.
For example, I’ve been addicted to scrolling shorts. I considered cutting them completely, because most of the time it’s a total waste of time. But there are a couple channels I really enjoy. So I installed an app on my phone that blocks them on there, and I can hop on my computer every few weeks to catch up on the ones I like. Turns out, they’re not as stimulating as I thought they were, and so even that much consumption is naturally falling off once it’s taken out of the distraction context.
There are places where I refer to it as a habit. It acknowledges both perspectives and leaves space for people to find their own truth within the landscape – and at the end of the day, helping you find your own truth and make your own choices is my number one goal with this work.
I was introduced to Susan Pierce Thompson’s work through my Focusing buddy, who came across her through the Crappy Childhood Fairy.
Bright Line Eating Book explains why people who are desperate to lose weight fail again and again: it’s because the brain blocks weight loss.
Pros
De-shaming around food addiction
Provides rigorous structure for people who need to be told exactly what to do, and don’t want to make any choices for themselves
Neutral
Abstinence-based
More focused on Weight Loss than Food Addiction
Cons
Encourages eating disorder behaviour
Abolishes empowerment & choice
Requires lifelong commitment to her program “or else”
A more expensive way to do Twelve Steps
In a nutshell…
At its core, BLE is based on the twelve steps, minus the rigorous spirituality and with the addition of some neuroscience that explains how food addiction works.
It’s worth noting that Susan was in her early 20’s when she recovered from her flour & sugar addiction, which she acquired after getting sober from meth and narcotics in Twelve Steps. So in my opinion, her addiction was never that engrained – compared to someone who’s been addicted to junk food for 40+ years.
De-shaming
What I do love about the BLE approach is the de-shaming that comes from understanding the neurobiology of addiction. I use this in my own work, because it was tremendously liberating to learn that my brain was behaving totally normally for the food environment it’ living in.
Rigorous structure
BLE consists of a Boot Camp where she goes into depth about her strategies and approaches, which are outlined briefly in her book.
The approach basically tells people they’re enslaved to food, and they have to give over total control of their eating to her program.
She provides a food plan, because she felt she needed that when she was in OA herself. My problem with her food plan is that it’s not tailored for the individual. The only variation is “men vs women”. If you’re vegetarian, you have to figure out substitutions yourself.
It’s a no-flour-no-sugar abstinence strategy; but then she includes potato chips as “flour” so the whole thing is a bit hap hazard.
The food plan is in two stages: the weight loss stage, and the maintenance stage. The weight loss stage is designed for rapid weight loss, contrary to what literally every nutritionist believes is optimal for sustained change. (She’s a psychologist, not a nutritionist or dietician).
As far as I’m concerned, her whole system is a diet that calls itself a lifestyle. And research has shown time and time again that diets don’t work.
She claims to have 70% success rate, but then reading deeper, we learn that’s based on self-reported surveys from people who complete her program and write in a year later. You don’t need a PhD in Statistical Methods to know that self-selected populations are not representative, and that people for whom the program fails miserably are in no rush to respond.
Abstinence
My own recovery is abstinence-based, and I do believe that’s going to be the case for most people who have been addicted to junk food long enough to have formed biochemical dependency on the substances in them – especially refined carbohydrates, added fats, and flavour enhancers.
That said, I think each person needs to define their own abstinence based on where they’re suffering. Some people will be able to eat home made cookies from time to time, others won’t. Some people can eat chips but not candy.
From BLE’s perspective, the hard lines she draws are a feature not a bug. She’s working with people who want to turn their recovery over to someone else, to make the decisions for them because they don’t want to.
And as far as I’m concerned, if that works for them, then power to them. However, I’m far too independent and rebellious for that!
Weight-loss is primary focus
BLE is an abstinence-based approach that is primarily focused on weight loss, and names food addiction being the reason people can’t lose weight. So far so good.
In my case, weight loss is a secondary symptom to the obsession and emotional suffering my food addiction has caused; but I’d be lying if I said I was totally cool with my weight.
That said, I think her writing puts too much emphasis on “being slim” and – worse – how being slim will make you happy (which, by itself, it won’t).
Eating Disorder Behaviour
One of her principles is “No licks, bites, or tastes while preparing food” and “Never ever snack between meals”. These are both pulled directly from the more extreme versions of Twelve Steps, such as Grey Sheet and HOW. Neither has a high success rate for long-term recovery.
More than anything though, it’s the general message that you’re unhappy because you’re fat, and that getting slim will make you happy. That’s body dysmorphia in a nutshell, and it’s simply not true.
Her weight loss stage meal plan is extremely calorie restrictive; and while there’s no evidence that abstaining from addictive foods leads to increased binging later, there’s tons of evidence that severe calorie restricting does. This is precisely why yo-yo dieting is a thing.
Disempowering
Twelve Steps is disempowering because it requires you to turn your life and choices over to a higher power. I tried that, and I found that it gave me free license to eat like crap, because I had offloaded any kind of personal responsibility.
BLE is disempowering because it says over and over that you’re doomed unless you follow her plan, to the letter, for the rest of your life.
Look – food addiction recovery is really hard. Many people do feel powerless. So this message might resonate with them, and it might resonate with you. It doesn’t resonate with me, and that’s why my work is all about empowering people to take control of their own lives instead of submitting to yet other authority.
Lifelong Commitment
This is another BLE carryover from the Twelve Step paradigm. You get to have recovery from your drug of choice (in this case, flour & sugar & overeating) as long as you stay in the program.
In the case of Twelve Steps, I think this gets in the way of actual recovery from the addiction, and transfers that addiction to meetings and the fellowship. Twelve Steppers argue that they’re totally fine with that, and hey, power to them. Personally, I’m not.
In the case of BLE, I think this is a great business move: it guarantees ongoing revenue from her membership.
This is reinforced by people who leave, regain the weight, and come back in with their tails between their legs. These people become warnings for the rest of them.
In my not-so-humble opinion, true recovery from addiction means you don’t have to keep working on it for the rest of your life. You get comfortable with your abstinence or moderation, where it’s not effortful or even conscious really. And the rest of the time, you’re just living your life, with all the usual slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You’ve learned healthier ways to cope with stress and process emotions, and you make choices that are in alignment with your values.
Since I personally align with a need for abstinence from certain processed food-like substances, I resonate with that part of her message.
Twelve Steps
I’ve touched on this above, but just to make it clear – BLE doesn’t mask its attempt to re-create the benefits of Twelve Steps, but in a different way: by using “science” and “psychology” instead of the actual twelve steps.
I suppose that’s a step in the right direction: Twelve Steps has about a 4% success rate, so really anything is an improvement (aside: 40% of people recover spontaneously from drug and alcohol addiction, so 4% is abjectly low).
But for something that’s effectively a repackaging of something that’s basically free, the whole thing sits poorly with me. If you wanted to go this route, you could join Grey Sheet or OA-HOW for essentially free, and use the rest of your money for 1-1 addictions therapy, and you’d be much further ahead.
Conslusion
If it’s not obvious by now, I don’t recommend Bright Line Eating. Some people swear by it, and it’s worth hearing their perspective because obviously they’ve experienced something I haven’t.
I think it does have a place for people who are just desperate to lose weight, and are willing to do whatever it takes. In that sense, I think it’s a better weight loss approach that Weight Watchers or surgery.
But I think it puts the cart before the horse in recommending abstinence too early in the process. I believe we need to unravel the shame spiral first, and get in touch with our inner parts and untangle the needs being met by food in addition to withdrawal avoidance. Only then does it make sense to start enacting abstinence, if at all.
Over the next few posts, I’m going to dive my experience with trying to find food recovery through 12-step programs. The good & the bad, the ugly & the beautiful.
Sponsorship makes all the difference
Abstinence is different for food than drugs & alcohol
Some steps might trigger relapse if the other supports aren’t in place
Normalizes the experience of addiction (de-shaming)
Service provides meaning and belonging
The slogan for 12 steps programs is “It works when you work it.” That has not been my experience. I would rephrase it as “If it’s going to work, you have to work it,” with the unspoken implication that it doesn’t work for everyone even when you work it.
I first came into the rooms in earnest when I got sober from weed. But what got me over the hump of getting sober was two back-to-back 25-day residential programs at a personal transformation centre that had nothing to do with addiction, explicitly. They used a holistic model to teach and practice self-awareness, interpersonal connection, self-compassion, interconnectedness, and self-expression. The Last Stance in my weed addiction happened this one morning in the middle of the second program where we had the day off, and I thought “I could take that gummy I have in my drawer.” Then a little voice whispered “What you really need is connection. You could reach out to someone and ask for that.” By then I had done enough groundwork that this little voice could get a toehold, and I was able to make the healthier choice. I can’t remember if I threw the gummy out right then or at the end of the program, but that was really the last time I had to effortfully choose not to consume cannabis.
When the program ended, I wanted to protect my sobriety so I joined the local 12-step group and got a sponsor. This was in late 2020 so it was all online. Before long, that sponsor ran a step group. It being my first time through, she encouraged me to think of it as a “dry run” to get a sense of the steps without putting too much pressure to do them thoroughly. The whole thing took about 14 weeks and we didn’t go deep. It didn’t take long for my commitment to that 12-step program to wane, and yet my weed compulsions never came back.
Mind you, I instantly replaced weed with junk food. My sponsor encouraged this – “One thing at a time! You’re sober, that’s all that matters.” Of course, the part of me that wanted to consume junk food heard that and ran with it. My food addiction was off to the races.
I’ve been in and out of 12-step rooms ever since. When I moved to that local community permanently, joining the local 12-step group was one of my first orders of business. I was deep in my food behaviours at that point, and I already had a couple friends in that group. They welcomed me with open arms and I welcomed the immediate sense of belonging and acceptance I found in the rooms. They became my first social group and source of support in my new home. When my ex-husband and I had our last blow-up, they were the people who rescued me from despair and gave me a sense of hope. So I will love them until the end of time, and I’m eternally grateful that they were there to catch me.
That being said, I kept trying to “work the program” with my food behaviours, and kept finding no success. I white-knuckled it for a few months while I worked the steps with a sponsor from one of the abstinence-based 12-step food fellowships, but she pretty much went AWOL right when I needed her the most. I “relapsed” and then shortly after, left that fellowship.
Others in my 12-step group have had incredible sponsorship relationships, where they say just the right thing, are always there for them, and really guide them through their recovery. So this makes me realize that one of the critical elements of successful 12-step recovery is a baller sponsor. If you could work the program successfully without one, you probably didn’t really need the program in the first place.
Another reason 12-steps didn’t work for me is that I deeply believe that abstinence is different for food than it is for other substances or behaviours. At least, it certainly was for me. Some people are able to just give up sugar, have that rough 4-6 weeks, and then never think about it again. Kudos to them. But my constitution is such that making anything “off-limits” just makes me want it more. Eventually willpower wears out and I’m back into the daily family-sized bag of chips.
I want to talk about a fundamental problem I see with many food addiction recovery programs today. The biggest issue, in my opinion, is that they deny your agency, your sense of choice, and ultimately, your empowerment.
Many programs tend to treat individuals as “helpless victims” who desperately need their specific “mastery” or else they’re “doomed”. You might see this in some 12-step programs or even certain companies that use very aggressive tactics, acting as if without their support, recovery is impossible.
But I believe something fundamentally different.
You Are the Best Expert on You
At the end of the day, you are the best expert on yourself. While education and information are crucial to understand your options, your own internal “felt sense” will guide you to the approach that’s the right fit for you right now.
This brings me to another critical point: there isn’t one magical approach that will solve your problem now and forever. Recovery is not a linear path; it’s more like peeling back layers of an onion. What you need today – perhaps emotional processing tools, coping strategies for stress, or even practical skills like healthy cooking – might be entirely different from what you need down the road. For instance, what’s the point of going abstinent if you don’t know what healthy foods to replace it with?
The Problem with “One-Size-Fits-All” and Scare Tactics
The idea that one program is the only path to recovery is simply untrue. Every single method works for some people, but absolutely zero of them work for all people. I strongly object to the kind of “scare tactic marketing” that suggests you’re doomed if you don’t join a particular program or membership. It’s just not true; countless people have found recovery in countless ways.
Consider the success rate of 12-step programs: they have a reported 4% success rate among those surveyed. Many individuals take one look and decide it’s not for them. This low success rate, I believe, speaks volumes about the issue of choice and agency.
Reclaiming Your Agency for Lasting Recovery
For real, deep, long-lasting recovery to be successful, you need to feel like you’re making a choice, not being forced into something.
Recovery, at its core, is about reclaiming your agency:
Over the choices you make, like deciding not to eat foods you find addictive.
Over whether you choose abstinence versus moderation as your approach.
Over which programs or support systems you decide to use.
And most importantly, the agency to know, internally, “for me right now, this is what I need”.
To make these choices, you need education, training, and information. That’s what informed choice is all about – having the knowledge to decide what truly aligns with your personal journey.
If you have questions or want to explore content that supports this approach to recovery, feel free to visit junkthehabit.com. I have lots of free resources there, and I’d love to connect.
I kept wanting to wait to record this until I was “recovered enough” to have some credibility in my work of helping other people break the junk food habit. That being said, what I bring to the table isn’t a guarantee that I can change your behaviour. Only you can do that. But what I can do is help you feel more self-compassion and self-forgiveness about the eating choices you make that don’t align with your ultimate goals. Because shame & self-blame only hinder the process, they never help you make better choices in the long-run.
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 me 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 compulsive eating.
By now you’ve gotten yourself to where the 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 people 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.
In my research for this work, I stumbled upon Kathryn Hansen’s Brain over Binge in a Reddit post.
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. There’s this little thing called Relativism… it can be summarized as “different strokes for different folks”. What’s good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander.
I’ve got a longer review of Brain over Binge <here> because this really was the book that turned the corner for me and there’s are a ton of problems with that book.
I know without question that when I was stressed about my Step 9, I turned to junk food to soothe my anxiety and fear about being exposed.
I know without question that when I quit using weed during the pandemic and I was living with an vegan older woman who had no emotional capacity, I turned to junk food to soothe my loneliness.
To say that emotional eating is never a thing is blatantly stupid. In her reflection, it wasn’t a thing for her and a therapeutic approach of dealing with her underlying issues in order to dislodge her bulimia was not the right approach. The binges that started her bulimia were induced by her anorexia which was induced by extreme dieting.
She lumps bulimia and binge eating disorder into the same pot, while barely spending 3 short paragraphs on the causes of BED. She admits that BED often isn’t induced by dieting, but then dismisses that fact in the rest of her book.
And yet…
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?
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”.
The technique is basically Mindfulness applied to addictive cravings. This technique has been successful in treating OCD, with brain imaging scans to support the claim that it creates real neurological changes in the regions of the brain responsible for impulse control.
More to Come…
I’m still reading the book and I have tons of notes on my Kindle. I just needed this page to link to in my other post, so I’m putting down what I have so far. I’m going to feel really silly if anyone reads this before I actually finish the book!!
Buddhists talk about the second arrow. The first arrow is the shit that happens to you in your life, and the second arrow is the “woe is me” some people indulge when that shit happens. I think there’s a third arrow too. It’s the one where you beat yourself up because you won’t stop stabbing yourself with the second arrow. The third arrow is self-hatred.
I’ve been drawn to coaching for the past 7 years. I love connecting with people, I’m an incredible listener and I’m insightful. I took coaching courses and learned the tools to help people uncover their inner workings and find the leverage points where they could have more agency and choice in their lives. When I went to start a coaching business, every resource said “find a niche, find a niche”. “Your deepest wound is your truest niche” says Tad Hargrave.
Well, my deepest wound is my binge eating. I was in a window of micro-recovery so I felt some competency around it, and it was definitely something there was a market for. So I got started building “Food Freedom Recovery”. But as that progressed, I found myself back in the thick of it. My insecurity crept in because I knew I didn’t have a real hold on this food thing yet.
It wasn’t so much that I had imposter syndrome (a feeling I was more than familiar with from my grad school days); it’s that I was recognizing the truth that I really wasn’t any kind of expert in actually achieving recovery; I was an expert in seeking recovery.
I’ve had days, even weeks, sometimes a few months, of drastically changing my food behaviours. Each time, I felt like I had cracked the nut and that phase of my life was well and truly over. And then something would happen and the binges would creep in again.
The food addiction industry is insane
When I was trying to find exactly what my message would be around food recovery, it dawned on me that the whole time, I had still been obsessed with food. If I wasn’t obsessed with what to eat – or what not to eat – then I was obsessed with building a food recovery business, or creating food recovery content, or reading food recovery books.
If I wasn’t consumed by my consumption, I was consumed by my recovery.
Each guru claims to have cracked the nut and have the answer; and yet so many of them are in direct contradiction to one another. Abstain from sugar. Deprivation causes binging. You’re eating to solve emotional problems. It’s just a biophysical process. Eat intuitively. Don’t trust yourself, trust God. OA. Smart Recovery. Eating disorder clinics. Whole food clinics. Rational modalities. Spiritual modalities. Emotional modalities. Psychological modalities.
My god, it’s enough to drive anyone mad.
A month in an eating disorder clinic convinced me that restricting food groups is the thing that causes binging. Sugar addiction professionals claim that giving up sugar removes cravings. Today I know they’re both right andneither is right for everyone.
My relationship to food became a prominent thing in 2016, when I had my whole food plant based phase. Before then I had dabbled with the occasional “new lifestyle” (because I had received the message that “dieting is bad”) and my weight had fluctuated up and down about 20-30lbs since adolescence. But with this WFPB thing, I’d found the holy grail to health and wellness. I became obsessed. A total religious zealot. The obnoxious vegan trope up to the hilt.
At the time I thought I was so healthy and that my weight struggles were over. And then it all came crashing down at a Halloween party where one “I’ve done really well, one little treat won’t kill me” vegan Oreo cheesecake turned into 12 and over the next few weeks, I was back to where I had started – living on fried food and ice cream.
For a long time, I still looked at those as my glory days with food. I was convinced that if I could just get back to that healthy diet, I could put this thing behind me and focus on more important issues like meaning and purpose and community.
My food relationship became obsessive about 4 years ago when I got sober from weed. When I was ready to quit weed, I just quit.
I didn’t go to therapy. I went to some 12 steps meetings but I didn’t take it seriously. I had been hating the experience of getting high more and more for the past couple years.
My last stand with weed was in an environment where I had an alternative to getting high. It dawned on me that what I wanted was connection, not weed. I reached out to a friend, we went for a walk, and the craving passed. By the end of that program (I was at yet another transformational retreat), I was just ready to let it go. I never seriously craved it again after that, and I didn’t obsess about it or even think about it at all unless I smelled it, and then I mostly noticed my surprise that I hadn’t thought of it in months and relief that I had no desire to partake.
I keep waiting for that to happen with binging. I do feel like I’m getting closer every time I get a little bit of space from it. But as to what the magic secret is for recovery? Today, I’m more confused than ever.
My superpower is loving myself enough to keep on trying
And yet through all that, I realized something really important. I was no longer beating myself up for not having a handle on my binging.
This morning, lying in bed, I realized what makes me different from many other people on this food recovery journey. My gift isn’t that I’ve figured out this food thing and that I can help you stop binging too. I don’t know if I can. Food is one of our most sacred, complicated, enmeshed relationships. It’s woven into the fabric of our cultures, our families, our friendships, our whole lives. It’s the one substance you can’t completely quit. Everyone has their own history with food and restriction and binging. For some it’s emotional. For others it’s physical. Because of that, there are hundreds of approaches to food recovery.
As I sit here this morning, having leapt out of bed struck by the muse, I realized something. I don’t have this food thing figured out. I’m still hopeful that I will. I’m still working really really hard at it. But I’m no recovery expert. It’s ludicrous and inauthentic for me to sit here and pretend I am.
But I realized something else. I’ve learned to love myself despite all that. I binged on junk food last night, drove to the convenience store for chips and then ate all the Christmas baking I had taken home from the community dinner on Sunday. Then I roasted some almonds and ate those too. I went to bed feeling sick and still have a food hangover as I write.
And yet despite all that, I don’t feel ashamed. I don’t feel like a piece of shit. I’m meeting myself with love and compassion.
I do feel sad and a bit bummed out that this is still a thing. But I’m not blaming myself for it anymore. I’m not seeing myself as weak and powerless and hopeless. I’m seeing myself as a tender human being who’s working through one of the trickiest things a person can work through. I’m seeing myself as someone who’s deserving of love and compassion and patience.
I now have understanding that this food thing is fucking hard. It’s complicated. It’s complex. It’s not one-size-fits-all (no matter what each of the gurus tries to claim). It’s biological. It’s social. It’s emotional. It’s psychological. There’s a trillion dollar industry committed to keeping us hooked, and that’s a hard thing to fight against. Maybe fighting isn’t the answer. Maybe it is. I still don’t know.
But what I do know is that I am worthy of love. I am not a bad person just because I can’t figure out how to stop binging. I am worthy of self-compassion, of connection. I am a child of the universe just doing the damned best she can.
Bashar said that being born on Earth is like going to grad school. It’s a hard curriculum down here. When I heard that, I thought “Cool! I loved grad school!” But then, I didn’t have the typical grad school experience. I had an incredible research group, I was good at the whole game of school and research, I got to travel all over the world, and I was married to a workaholic who was more than happy to pay my expenses while I lived my best life.
It doesn’t feel like that any more. I’m addicted to junk food, my life sometimes feels empty, I get lonely even though I have some amazing friends. This grad school curriculum is hard and I don’t feel competent at it all.
And yet, I still love myself. And where is food is concerned, I’m going to keep on trying until I get there.
I’m an expert in learning to love myself
I should state for the record, that wasn’t always the case. It was 2022 when I realized I hated myself. It took that long because my inner critic is subtle and manipulative. She doesn’t say “You’re a piece of shit.” She just subtly tsk-tsks every decision I make as ever-so-slightly inadequate. In 2022, I was in a convenience store in Austin TX buying chips, I got out to my car and felt helpless, hopeless, and full of self-loathing and shame.
It dawned on me in that moment… “I think I hate myself.” It was a realization that really caught me by surprise. I had been so identified with my inner critic that I was never actually hearing it speak, until that moment. I was in the middle of a Relateful immersion, and that 9-month training had really been teaching me about self-awareness and honesty.
So I brought that to my Level Up coach, who turned out to have known a thing or two about self-hatred herself, but who no longer felt that way. We spent months working through the beliefs I had about myself, and gradually it came together. I won’t claim that my self-hatred just vanished in the space of a few months. But what did happen was that I finally saw it clearly and could start to work with it.
I learned some other tools for engaging it instead of pushing it away, and gradually as it began to feel heard and not dismissed, it began to soften. It got to take on a more loving role where it could express the care and concern it had always felt for me, in a gentler softer way. It learned how to say what it really felt, because I learned to let it speak.
In the last couple years, I catch myself having the sweetest responses to my painful feelings. “Oh sweety, I know you’re hurting. That’s ok. I still love you.”
I still struggle with food. I still hope and pray that one day, I’ll feel qualified to write the book where I give an overview of all the different approaches to food recovery and help people uncover which ones feel right to them and which ones make them want to puke. I have so many ideas about that book, but it’s not ready to be written yet.
And that’s ok, because I know that in the meantime, what I’m really good at is loving people up and helping them see that their ashamed parts are just as lovable as their celebrated parts. And I’m good at helping people unravel the binds that are holding them back from loving themselves.
I don’t know for sure if loving myself is a pre-requisite for recovering from food addiction, but I do know that it makes the whole experience an order of magnitude less sufferable. The physical discomfort and mental confusion are bad enough without shame and self-hatred in the mix.
