Hi, I’m Talia, and I am not a food addict.
I used to think that I might be. Or at least, I thought that I had some sort of emotional problem, or unhealthy relationship, with food.
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I have always known what my edible medicine of choice was, and exactly what it fixed. In high school in Montreal, where I struggled to maintain an aura of perfect composure at all times around my peers and my family, it was poutine. I would eat it with my friends as we sat on a tall cement fence down the street from school, and for an hour or two feel some semblance of the true connectedness I was otherwise avoiding. When I moved to Boston for college and began sleeping three to four hours a night to fit in my overachiever’s schedule of extracurriculars, it was 12-inch meatball subs shared with my best friend in the windowless basement office of the magazine we ran—a remedy for the stress and constant sleep deprivation. Now, it’s a tie between the dollar slices I sneak in at odd hours and extra-crunchy peanut butter, which I keep in a drawer at work. Because being an adult is hard, and we all know that.
This habit, I found out, is not even close to being a true illness, but it is scary in its efficacy. I’m sure the seratonin surge I receive from my covert inhalations of high-calorie foods is on par with an antidepressant, and is far less socially stigmatized. But true food addicts reach an acute, deep, rock-bottom pain. The compulsion to eat, like any other addiction, is a truly logical attempt to adjust to the inherent trauma of living in human skin. As one woman said during her share at a recent Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) meeting I attended, “addicts tend to be sensitive, intelligent, incredibly interesting people, who have suffered a huge amount.”
The difference between myself and a true food addict is that I am able to stop after one slice of pizza, or one 12-inch sub, or a couple spoonfuls of peanut butter. There is an end to my hunger, and I reach it fairly quickly, as though I’ve washed up to shore after some time at sea. Food addicts, however, can feel like they are constantly drowning.
“I would eat until it would hurt to breathe and the containers were piling up around me,” Tara, who was leading an FA meeting I attended, said.
“I’ve eaten an entire cake. I’ve eaten multiple bags of cookies or chips,” Patricia, who has been in Overeaters Anonymous since 1982, told me. “My disease is much stronger than I am. My head is telling me I can do it, that I can just take one bite. But I know just can’t have just one. I’m not craving it until it goes into mouth, but once it goes into my mouth, I can’t stop myself.”
There are several 12-step groups for food addicts, a term which encompasses anyone from binge eaters to bulimics to obsessive-compulsives with a penchant for snacking. Along with FA, the other main organizations are Overeaters Anonymous (OA), and Food Addicts Anonymous (FAA). But the list does not stop there. There’s also Eating Disorders Anonymous (EDA); the National Eating Disorders Association support group; and the Eating Disorder Resource Center (EDRC), to name a select few others. At this rate, there are likely thousands of smaller eating-related support groups unfolding across America at any given time, for people who are suffering from serious food-related mental illness.
These three main programs—OA, FA, and FAA (try saying that three times fast)—are all modeled closely after Alcoholics Anonymous. However, though FA and others owe a large debt to AA, the different types of addictions they address can’t truly be treated in the same way.
“In alcoholism, they know what their drug of choice is. It’s not easy to give up, but it’s easy to define and avoid it entirely,” Patricia tells me. “As food addicts, we have to stare the beast in the face three times a day. And most of us can’t get through three meals a day.”
At an FA meeting I attended at the Realization Center in New York City—a maze of meeting rooms painted a mossy, deep green that hold virtually any kind of support group you may need—copies of the Big Book, AA’s bible, were being sold, as were Little Red Books (essentially the SparkNotes of the Big Book), and thick meditation tomes of daily prayers and thoughts. God, or a Higher Power as you choose to define it, is as instrumental here as it is in AA. You cannot find salvation until you give yourself up to him, her, or it.
“You have to be desperate enough to surrender yourself,” Kate, a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a blunt grey bob, tells me. She has been in FA since last April, but was struggling with an addiction to sugar for almost five years before that. “For years, I kept going to my doctor with different diet books, or telling myself, ‘I’ll just go to the gym.’ If you’re still living with your ego, and telling yourself you’re in control of the situation, this program is never going to work for you.”
Kate was working seven days a week at a high-stress banking job managing mortgages before she actively realized that her relationship with food was unhealthy. When she scaled back her career and moved over to a smaller credit union, her addiction to work was replaced by frequent trips to her favorite Jewish bakery.
“I was eating sugar almost exclusively: before breakfast, for breakfast, after breakfast, in between meals. It got to the point I didn’t even enjoy consuming it anymore. It was like some strange power took over me and led me to the store,” she says. “If they had told me to walk around the block backwards to cure myself, I would have done it. That’s how desperate I was.”
FA deals with the inability to control consumption in several ways, which they call “the tools.” The main tool in combatting the illness is to agree to totally abstain from sugar, flour, and “individual binge foods”—the triggers particular to you. FA members are also required to weigh and measure all of their food and report it to a sponsor.
“Addiction is a disease of isolation,” several people repeat to me. The mantras running through the programs are strong, and though there seems to be some good-natured rivalry between them (FA is seen as the most Draconian, while FAA and OA are considered looser and more forgiving) their messages and strategies are strikingly similar and consistent. Program adherence includes making multiple calls a day to a sponsor or other member; after the meeting, I’m gifted a phone list with the first names and phone numbers of everyone in the New York meeting group I attended.
“I remember hearing about this program and thinking it was too hard for me to do, so I never did it,” Peg, who spoke at one of the meetings I attended. “Now, seven years later, it’s not so hard. It’s doable.”
*all names in this story other than the author’s have been changed to respect the anonymity of the subjects.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating addiction or disorder, visit Food Addicts in Recovery’s website at foodaddicts.org, or call (781) 932-6300.
