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.