Winning the battle against food addiction.

Some people who are overweight might not be aware that they’re addicted to certain food through no fault of their own. That does not make them lack a back-bone, gluttonous or a bad person. Although food addiction is usually regarded as a psychological or emotional problem, in fact it is often a biochemical issue. To put it bluntly, your taste buds, hormones, and brain chemistry have been kidnapped by the food industry.

So if you’ve been blaming yourself for having weight problems, don’t. It’s true that you require willpower and personal responsibility, but usually standing on their own is not enough to defend against the constant onslaught of super-processed, tasty, extremely addictive foods that food manufacturers through at us for sheer financial gain.

Whether you consume sugary or processed foods, refined carbs (such as pasta, bread etc.), artificial sweeteners or any other such highly-palatable foods and high glycaemic food, all turn into sugar in our body and cause blood sugar levels to spike. Recent research demonstrates that sugar affects the pleasure centres in the brain in the same way cocaine or heroin do. This means that sugar is addictive and therefore for most of us very hard to resist. That also explains why many of us eat foods known to be bad for us, make us feel guilty, cause bluntness and inflammation and inspire chronic disease.

As a matter of fact, this actually explains why 70% of Americans and nearly the same percentage of Europeans are overweight. The reality is that almost one in two people has a condition known as diabesity. This can be anywhere from mild insulin resistance to fully blown type 2 diabetes.

Many people turn to fad diets or sometimes even to surgery to battle the weight and health issues brought about by food addictions. However, many such ‘remedies’ fail because they are unsuccessful in fixing the underlying mechanism of food addictions. When we eat these foods, our biological programming causes us to consume a lot of them and to store the excess calories as belly fat for a forthcoming ‘famine’. The problem is that the ‘famine’ never arrives. This mechanism that saved our lives when we were hunters-gatherers is not killing us.

In order to reprogram our biology so we can stop overeating we need to detox from the types of food and drinks we’re addicted to. This is not an easy task because the food industry spends huge amounts of money to make sure that we can’t get cleaned from our food addictions. And judging by the results, they’re doing quite a good job of it.

If you look at any rehab ‘manual’ you will never find it saying ‘practice moderation’. It’s a known fact that to breakaway from addictions you need to go ‘cold turkey’.