Is the term Food Addiction actually a real thing? Can we class it in the same league as drug and alcohol addiction, hoarding and so on? Does it even matter what language you use?

Shownotes

Podcast of The Week

I am loving How To Be A Girl, the audio diary of one mother raising her transgender daughter through childhood, pre teens and adolescence.

Main section

While some foods can definitely be addictive, it is massively unhelpful to see food in general as addictive – because we need it to stay alive. Why create more conflict around your eating than you already have?

I give you a much more useful replacement phrase to use.

It’s not about the food, but rather about conflicting drives within us and how that conflict plays out when we stop using the food (or the alcohol, or the cigarettes) to manage our lives.

I also discuss how scientists see addiction (clue: it is ruled by an either or principle), and the valid reasons for filtering their truths in order to not feel like victims of the evil Food X – and be in an empowered position to dismantle our own addictions.

What scientists seem to be presenting is a choice between either no human power to change things, where the drug ‘turns off controls’ – or complete control in the case of substances like sugar which are not seen as addictive and therefore we should be easily able to resist.

Last Word – from Blackadder The Second