How To Overcome Food Addictions - 5 Step Plan - Habitual

Unlike addictions such as smoking or drinking, the reality of being human is that we need to have a relationship with food, we cannot simply give it up. It would be like quitting smoking but needing to take a single puff—and no more—three times a day.

The challenge therefore is not resisting food entirely, but rather changing your relationship with food from a destructive to a positive one, and that’s much more difficult psychologically than simply turning off entirely. Before we think about how to change our relationship with food, let’s take a closer look at why we feel pleasure from eating and how that can lead us to develop addictive urges.

Why can eating become addictive?

The story begins with a chemical neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is made by our bodies and used by our nervous systems to send messages. Dopamine is often discussed in the context of drug addictions, but less frequently discussed in relation to eating.

To put it simply, when dopamine is released, it positively impacts the areas of your brain associated with pleasure and rewards. Even simpler: It makes you feel good!

So why does eating release dopamine? Let’s think about this from an evolutionary perspective. Our human ancestors had to scavenge for food to survive, and their lives often depended on their ability to do so. To encourage us to continue pursuing behaviours which promoted survival, our brains made eating a pleasurable experience; Dopamine release in response to eating acts as a reward system for taking positive actions towards survival.

In today’s world, however, food is abundant. Instead of being at risk of not having enough food, we tend to experience the opposite, with a prevalence of harmful foods such as fast food and processed sugars that actually put us in danger (as evidenced by diseases like type 2 diabetes).

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that our brains release even more dopamine when we consume sugary and/or fatty foods than whole foods. In fact, some research has found that sugar can release as much, if not more, dopamine than cocaine. And as we eat more of these types of foods, our dopamine systems get used to them—we effectively build a “tolerance” to sugars and fats, requiring a larger amount of these foods to achieve the same feelings of pleasure.

The main point here is that our addictions to different types of foods don’t represent a mental weakness or inability on our part to resist cravings, but rather a physiological mechanism that we have no control over.

What we do have control over, however, is how we respond to these addictions. Many of us will be cruel to ourselves when we have cravings, saying things like “you’re not strong enough to resist it” or “I can’t believe you’re still obsessed with [insert food]”. But by understanding the role that our brain plays in creating addictive urges, we can start practicing something we call “compassionate curiosity” (more on that below)—an important part of reinventing our relationships with food.