Is Food Addiction Real or Are You Being Lied to About Your Brain and Body?

The oh-so-common question: “can I be addicted to food?” Let’s start out with a quick and dirty answer (and then if you’re satisfied, you can save yourself some time reading the rest of this blog post): NO.

If you’ve made your way here via google, I’d honestly be surprised. Because what usually pops up when you search “food addiction” is an onslaught of food addiction quizzes and articles describing how you are likely addicted to food because of x, y, or z (and don’t worry, we’ll get into why x, y, and z are all severely misinformed). If you were to take a “food addiction quiz,” you might see questions like:

• Do you feel like you can’t keep certain foods in the house in fear you’ll eat them all?

• Can you often not stop eating once you start?

• Do you think about food and your weight constantly?

• Do you eat differently in front of people than you do alone?

• Are you not able to stick to a diet plan no matter how hard you try?

• Do you frequently feel guilty over how much you eat?

• Do you find yourself throwing out food you don’t want to eat any more of (and maybe even retrieving it later to eat)?

• Can you only cope with your emotions by using food?

If any of those resonated with you, don’t stress! You are still not addicted to food, because food addiction truly does not exist. Stick with me, and I’ll explain why.

When I was struggling with what I thought was an addiction to food, I checked every single one of those bullet points above. I was binge eating and thinking about food constantly every day. It wasn’t until I healed my relationship with food through intuitive eating that I realized that food addiction was never my problem. My problem was that I was trying to control my “food addiction” through dieting and restriction, which was only making the problem worse.

It’s important to acknowledge some nuance here, such as “how do we define addiction?” However, no matter how we define it, we cannot be addicted to something we need to survive. Because food is necessary for our survival, whereas true addictive substances are not, we cannot be addicted to food! This is why abstinence-based programs don’t work in healing “food addiction.” Programs like Alcoholics Anonymous have been shown to be wildly successful, whereas Overeaters Anonymous (OA), a similar program, has a severely high failure rate. The only way OA has been shown to be successful is if a participant is vigilant in attending meetings consistently and essentially lifelong. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty darn exhausting. For reference, I lasted 3 weeks in OA.

Are we addicted to food? Or are we addicted to dieting?

All that said, anyone can absolutely feel addicted to food. Feeling addicted to food vs. actually physiologically being addicted to food is very different. The majority of the time someone feels “addicted” to food is actually because they are trapped in the diet cycle, or the binge-restrict cycle. Our body’s biological response to restriction is to binge, or at the very least crave certain foods incessantly while we are in a period of restricting. So we abstain from certain foods, we “fall off track,” which convinces us that we must be addicted, so we abstain again, which only adds fuel to the fire.

In order to qualify as an addiction, the substance must illicit an initial “high,” that is never quite matched by subsequent attempts to achieve that same high. This is what those struggling with substance use continue to chase. We do not see this same effect with food, but you know where we do see this effect? Dieting. Your first diet will usually be your “most successful,” meaning you’ll likely be able to sustain any weight loss the longest, and you’ll be the most successful at losing the most weight the first time you try. After that, your body will start to resist weight loss more and more, since losing more weight than you body wants to (especially if you’re attempting to lose weight below your set point range) will result in a slowed metabolism, an increase in cravings, binge behaviors, and you guessed it: feelings of being addicted to food.

But what about the studies??

You’ve probably heard of or even read studies showing that food can be addictive, so let’s talk about those studies. We can start with the most basic study that shows when given the option, starved rats will choose sugar water over cocaine. My response to that is “duh??!!” After a period of starvation, rats will obviously prioritize nutrients over drugs. In this case, sugar was not acting as a comparison to cocaine, it was literally life or death, and the rats chose life.

The second part of that study, and subsequent studies, have shown that sugar (and other highly palatable foods) light up the same reward center of the brain as addictive substances. Here’s the kicker: pretty much anything that is pleasurable in any way does that. That includes hugs, snuggling with your pet, the list goes on. Just because petting my cat lights up that area of my brain does not mean I am addicted to petting my cat… make sense? Of course, it gets trickier when we start thinking about sex, gambling, or internet addictions, but again, we have to remember that what sets food apart from those things is our biological need for it in order to survive. TLDR: just because it’s pleasurable, doesn’t mean it’s addictive.

Finally, food tasting good and having food preferences has literally been encoded in our brains. This evolutionary adaptation protects us against famine. If food didn’t taste good, we likely wouldn’t eat enough of it, and we as a species would not survive as long. Therefore, by food tasting good, it’s reinforcing our desire to eat it! Which helps us thrive!

What about emotional eating?

It’s common these days to think that if you eat food for any reason aside from responding to physical hunger, you must be addicted. That is so far from true! Emotional eating can actually be an incredible tool for coping with your emotions, and isn’t a bad thing. You can read more about why emotional eating might be a struggle for you and how to fix it here.

Congratulations! You are not addicted to food, because food addiction does not exist. However, if any of the “food addiction” qualifiers above rand true for you, you do deserve to heal your relationship with food.

I have also been a guest on a podcast all about food addiction, and you can listen to it here!