Many Doctors Believe Food Can Be Addictive
Can food be addictive in the same way as, for instance, heroin? Many doctors believe that it can. While some people are not very addiction-prone, others are, but are too busy being junkies involving some other substance, and food doesn’t do a thing for them. Not every person who eats is a food addict. But […]
Let’s Hear It for the Early Adopters
It’s always a pleasure to discover another person who endorses the view that there is such a thing as food addiction; who, in other words, looks at the childhood obesity epidemic through the psychological food dependence-addiction lens. The medical profession tends to resist the idea, sometimes strenuously. Dr. Pretlow’s term for this unfortunate state of […]
Feed Us Not Into Temptation
We’ve seen it on bumper stickers and t-shirts, a saying that is short and to the point: I can resist anything except temptation. Ain’t it the truth! Especially when it’s an obese person wearing the t-shirt. And that goes double when the person in the shirt is a walking statistic in the childhood obesity epidemic. […]
A Psychological Problem, Not a Nutritional Problem
“Will Marriage Make You Fat?” is the question asked by Cynthia Ramnarace in an article that follows the histories of three different couples. She got interested in the emotional basis of obesity because of something she read: A 2008 study in the journal Obesity showed that couples that lived together more than two years — […]
Resistance to the Food Addiction Paradigm, Part 2
Back in May, when Oprah Winfrey publicly announced her food addiction, William Anderson took note. He specializes in helping people shed their extra pounds, and his book, The Anderson Method, deals with the use of psychotherapeutic techniques to achieve permanent weight loss. Sustainability is what it’s all about. Anderson himself has lost 140 pounds, and […]
Food Addiction Paradigm Early Adopters Gettinger and Winfrey
We’ve been going on and on about the difficulty of introducing the concept of food addiction. And it is in many ways an uphill push, but not a hopeless one. Today, we salute some people who have opened their minds enough to look through the psychological food dependence-addiction lens, and see a way out of […]
Reflections on Food Addiction
Huffington Post blogger Jan Shepherd, who had lost 200 pounds and kept it off for nearly 10 years, talks about handling addictive behaviors: As addictive behaviors go, ones dealing with food and eating are among the most complicated and complex. I’m not suggesting that alcoholism is by any means easy, but it is possible to stop […]