First, I want to give you my background in recovery. I got sober in 1985 at age fifteen, and I'm fifty-seven now. Forty and a half years clean. My drug of choice wasn't food, but I'll say plainly that I have used food in addictive ways, both under-eating and over-eating. So I have some sense of the psychology involved in all flavors of substance abuse.
My father and my sister also had food issues. I've spent my whole life trying to help them, and I have. They've made great improvements. For the three of us it was a journey into various addictions, and we all got sober and put down secondary ones too: cigarettes, sex, compulsive spending.
One thing became obvious to me. The chronically anxious person will eventually look for a substance, a behavior, or a mental pattern to change the mood. We become addicted because the substance or behavior is working for us. It's helping us manage anxiety. But when it stops doing that, and starts creating anxiety on its own, that's when we finally take a hard look at it.
There should be no more shame in an eating disorder than in any of the other addictions humans have invented.
The one place food addiction differs sharply from alcohol and drugs is this: with alcohol and drugs, you quit. You don't regulate it or drink only on weekends. Abstinence means out of sight, out of mind. But with food, money, relationships, and sex, we still have to engage with the thing. So in this kind of addiction we have to develop self-control. We have to regulate the nervous system so we don't drift into the red zone, get stuck in anxiety, and abandon the recovery tools that hold us up, writing, therapy, meditation, exercise.
The first step is to become aware you have a problem and to admit it to yourself. One powerful way to do this is to write a small book, a hundred and fifty pages, ten chapters, about the story of your addiction. Go deep into your behavior patterns, the mentors who taught you the addiction, your bottoms. Write about the anxiety it causes you as an adult. Just write. Give it time to integrate into your mind. It will.
The next step is the willingness to change and to take every step self-help requires. If that means morning routines, gratitude lists the moment you wake up, breathing exercises two or three times a day, you do them without a fight, because now you understand these are the support columns holding up the house of your mind. People with no trauma and no chronic anxiety still use these tools, because life is difficult for everyone.
When we let ourselves continue self-destructive patterns into adulthood, it's only because we're unconscious, living in the reactivity of the mind instead of being present, having agency, and making real choices.
People like to label addiction a disease. Some are born with genetic predispositions, a tendency toward a behavior or a particular way their chemistry handles certain foods. But ultimately the whole thing falls back on the difficulties of our childhood. Not feeling safe, carrying chronic anxiety, tuning the nervous system to react, learning addictive patterns from our caretakers and our society. Then, when we took control as adults, we kept perpetuating those mindsets through habit. Those are the habits we break over time. Follow the disciplines for a number of years and your situation improves dramatically.
Now listen to this. All the work you're going to do really centers on one thing: learning to regulate your nervous system on your own, relaxing the mind out of chaotic, obsessive thinking. That is the first tool to master.
The second tool is self-examination, learning to explore your character, especially the defects and defenses you've used as survival mechanisms to cope with an anxious reality. When we learn to look at ourselves deeply, we find the shortest path to improving our character and building traits that enhance our life. We'd have to do this work anyway. To mature, to become compassionate and regulated, to cope with life on life's terms, we'd have to look at ourselves regardless of whether addiction was ever part of the picture.
The process is not perfect. We make progress, then get held back. We procrastinate, then move forward. We have moments of strength and moments of weakness. But there is hope. If you do the work and stay with all of it, you get better fairly quickly. You get stronger. You change the patterns and the habits, and in their place positive habits grow. The things that used to challenge us lose their hold.
It doesn't matter how late in life you find these systems. As long as you have the capacity to do the work, it will work.
If you're struggling with an eating disorder or disordered eating right now, you don't have to navigate it alone, and I can help you find real support and resources if you'd like.
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