I was reading Darya Pino’s column in the Huffington Post yesterday. It focused on a book written by former FDA commissioner, Dr. David Kessler.
According to the article, Kessler’s book, The End of Overeating, outlines the basic steps of habit reversal and advocates, among other things, “developing positive associations with healthier foods while demonizing the hyperpalatable foods we have been conditioned to crave…”.
Dr. Kessler uses two terms, hypereating and hyperpalatable, that I had never heard before. At first sound, hypereating sounds like overeating, eating quickly, or an eating disorder that makes you eat faster than the rules allow.
Hyperpalatable foods can only be those very tasty, fat-, salt-, or sugar-laden foods that seem to be the first ones food addicts grab when an emotional trigger clicks.
I can’t in all fairness take exception to Dr. Kessler’s opinions and suggestions without reading his book in its entirety. Out of context, you can make the spoken or written word mean anything you want.
I’m not so sure, however, that using the same techniques that make you loathe cigarettes work when it comes to comfort food. I am an ex-smoker and I will never feel about my comfort foods the way I feel about tobacco.
The article caught my attention so I decided to mention it here. To read the entire article, click here.
Not everybody who is fat has a food addiction, this is true. And no professional wants to label people without first categorizing them or their ailment.
Nevertheless, a food addict has a food addiction, or multiple ones depending on how you look at things, and that’s just the way it is.
Only someone who has a food addiction, or has had one and healed it can be an expert on how it feels, what it does to your life, and how you live with it while learning how to heal it.
I say “heal it” because a food addiction is caused by unresolved emotional trauma that stays with you until your heart heals and the pain is banished.
While the brain circuits may respond in similar ways to certain stimuli, the underlying cause of a food addiction is what must be discovered and understood in order for true healing to take place.
You can’t think your way out of a food addiction. Mind control and reprogramming will not succeed unless your goal is to ignore and forget.
True, food addicts may eat foods that aren’t good for them, and in unhealthy amounts. But understand that we are eating for comfort, for that moment of peace when the emotional, and sometimes physical, pain is gone.
We don’t eat to forget. We eat to be free, and we pay a high price for that moment of freedom.
The sooner we get to the bottom of what is causing the addiction, the sooner we can string together those moments of freedom until we have a life again.
No diet in the world will ever work until the heart is healed. There is only one way to heal the heart and that is with love.