The trouble with "food addiction"

I’m really, really, really bored with this topic, but apparently it won’t die in the circles I’m moving in, so here’s another take.

But first, just to be clear–it never ceases to amaze me that I have to say this, but evidently I do–if you find the concept of food addiction useful, or you want to go to OA, I am not here to tell you you can’t. Seriously, where would I get that kind of power, to prevent you from believing or doing something? It’s not as if I’m going to lead the radical feminist army over to your house to cleanse your mind of antifeminist thoughts, confiscate your empowerful high heels and thong panties, and hold you down until your armpit hair grows in. I’d love it if everyone could give up the mythology of radical feminists as some kind of irresistible force for censorship and mind control. All I’m doing is stating my opinion, just like any other blogger (or any other human being). If someone stating an opinion contrary to yours is so threatening to you, I suggest you take a long hard look at exactly where and when you abandoned your capacity for independent thought and why you think I’m responsible for that.

So with that bit of business taken care of, let’s take a gander at the current wisdom about The Great-Granddaddy of Addiction, alcoholism. Please note that I have not studied alcoholism to any great extent and I am not current with the research and theories of the field. I’m not trying to get the science perfect here; I’m trying to delineate the understanding of the woman on the street with regard to alcoholism as addiction.

Everybody knows alcoholism is an addiction, right? Certain people are addicted, though we might disagree about why–it could be genetic predisposition, some chemical intolerance in their bodies, or some kind of psychological problem.* But what we all know is that alcoholics can’t drink at all. If they have one drink, they can’t stop. They drink more and more until they have all sorts of problems–they go on benders, they miss work, spend all their time in bars, they have car accidents and DWIs, they have blackouts, they get liver disease and die.

Therefore, food addiction must be the same thing, right? Certain people are addicted to food, for whatever reason. Food addicts can’t eat at all. Ooops, wait, problem number one, because if you don’t eat, you die. You don’t need alcohol to live, but you sure as hell need food. So, okay, it’s not exactly the same. It’s just certain foods that food addicts can’t handle–mostly sugar, less often white flour or other foods. Food addicts can’t eat these certain foods at all. If they have one donut, they can’t stop. They eat more and more–well, oops, you know, not exactly, because some people might have escalating binges, but really most don’t, they kind of just binge every now and then or they eat the “wrong” things over time. So they give up these certain foods to become “abstinent”–although, oops, sometimes even if they stop eating sugar they will “binge” on other things like brown rice, so it’s really just that they eat, you know, they eat until they get–oops. No no, my friend, do go on! Exactly what is the outcome of this dreaded difficulty, this scourge, this victimizer of so many unfortunates? Do food addicts miss work because they can’t tear themselves away from the supermarket? Do the staties pull them over for operating under the influence of pudding? Do they crash their cars into bridge abutments after knocking back too many M&Ms? Do they wake up on the sidewalk covered in powdered sugar without remembering how they got there?

Despite the occasional anecdote concerning car accidents due to hypoglycemia, people who fall asleep after binges (because no normal person ever gets sleepy after a large meal), and the OA rhetoric about recovery or death!–in other words, despite attempts to raise the cred of struggles with food to the level of life devastation reached by some (but by no means all) full-blown alcoholics–the real-world results of indulgence in food addiction that I hear most people complaining about are minor physical and/or emotional ailments–stomachaches, vague twinges, feeling fuzzy-headed, low energy, low mood, being cranky or preoccupied with food. Setting aside the fact that these could also all be symptoms of diet-induced malnutrition, let’s be honest here. What’s the real, dreaded result of an unrestrained “food addiction”? According to Jane Snackpack, what happens to you if you eat too much? That’s right, you get fat. Fat, my friends, is physical evidence of food addiction–it is the food addiction equivalent of broken facial capillaries and liver cirrhosis. Even though not all “food addicts” are fat, all fat people are “food addicts.” If you don’t believe me, look, it’s right there in the literature of OA, the major institutional proponent of the “food addiction” concept: “We keep in mind that if we are not reaching a healthy body weight, we need to re-examine our plan of eating and question whether we are being honest with ourselves about our food.” In actuality, most fat people have a life history of being on diets, and behaviors like preoccupation with food and bingeing–whether in fat or thin people–are a result of ongoing attempts at food restriction and a response of the organism to its perception that it is starving.

Bingeing may be viewed … as maladaptive behavior, when in fact it may be a normal adaptive response to caloric restriction. Certainly, this behavior is seen in opportunistic social carnivores such as dogs, which “wolf” down their food in large quantities, oftentimes vomiting it up soon after. Caloric restriction, whether imposed by famine or self-imposed due to dieting, will tend to increase the likelihood of this behavior.

The biggest oops of all, of course, is that fat is in no way medically similar to cirrhosis of the liver, or any other disease, because no one, scientist or not, has been able to reliably demonstrate any significant difference in health, mortality, lifestyle, or type or amount of food consumption between groups of fat and thin people. There are fat people AND thin people who eat a lot, and fat and thin people who eat hardly anything. There are fat AND thin people who die young, and fat and thin people who live long lives. There are fat AND thin people who exercise a lot, fat AND thin people who are sedentary, fat AND thin people with high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and all the other problems we’re all supposed to be so worried about these days. So when you take a look at the evidence surrounding you, “food addiction” is nothing more than subconscious fear of getting fat tricked out to look respectable in a white lab coat, and “abstinence” is just another diet.

I’m sick and tired of the concept of “addiction” being used to comfort people coping with anything that’s hard. I know perfectly well that desires and cravings for food can feel really strong, can feel like they are overwhelming and controlling us, but to grab a little piece of wisdom straight from “the program,” feelings aren’t facts. Just because we feel like we can’t resist eating a particular food doesn’t mean we really can’t (and certainly doesn’t give us any information about why we shouldn’t). As Julia Penelope says, “…appealing to feelings is one way of resisting change.” “I just feel that way” is an argument for nothing except doing what you want (or in this case, NOT doing what you want) without examining the way patriarchy shapes all our beliefs and desires. I categorically reject the notion that people with regular access to food don’t have control of what we put in our mouths. We sometimes may make choices we wish we hadn’t, we may not always like the consequences of our decisions, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t making choices.

I don’t even believe the conventional AA wisdom about alcoholism, because I’ve seen too many different kinds of “problem drinking”–people who drink a bottle of wine a night with no apparent effect, people who drink a lot occasionally, people who drink a lot daily for a while and then not at all for a while–and all of these people have handled their alcohol problems differently. (Someone with a really formidable axe to grind has compiled this impressive collection of AA- and alcoholism-related statistics.) Some people have been helped by AA, and others haven’t; some have stopped drinking entirely, some have found their way to drinking in moderation, and some have continued to drink to excess despite the resources available to them. So if the model of addiction and recovery put forth by AA doesn’t even hold universally for alcoholism, why am I supposed to believe it applies to the vast array of behaviors and “substances” supposedly comprising food addiction, let alone other behaviors like pornography use and gambling?

What I am here to tell you is that the concept of “food addiction” is used to mark fat women as inevitably, irretrievably fucked up. Read Amber’s story for an example of a woman whose family used “food addiction” against her in an effort to make her conform to their expectations. Oprah, champion fat- and self-hater and tool of the patriarchy, had a show a week or so ago on weight loss surgery where she said that fat women have to “resolve our issues” because “fat is a manifestation of our issues” and that fat women “need psychological therapy to understand why they let themselves get fat in the first place.”** If you’re fat, so goes the refrain, you’re obviously eating too much–because you have “issues”–so you’re addicted to food, so you need help to overcome your addiction so you can become thin, like everyone else. If you’re thin, obviously you have no “issues,” you’re perfectly sane and content and entitled to feel superior to those of us who can’t “control ourselves.” The problem is, this logic does not explain the existence of both happy healthy well-adjusted fat women and thin eating-disordered psychologically distressed or physically ill women. Once more, with feeling–you can’t tell by looking! The conventional wisdom of “food addiction”–>overeating–>weight gain–>fatness–>life of misery makes no sense. When you treat the concept of “food addiction” as though it has meaning, you are simultaneously following the dictates of and helping to maintain an anorexic culture wherein fat women experience great difficulty achieving the economic, social and sexual lives thin women take for granted. If that’s okay by you, then please, abstain away–but do not expect agreement or support from this fat woman for your decision.

________
*It’s convenient for those who make huge profits selling alcohol, isn’t it, that only some people are addicted, and it’s something innate, not transferable, in them that makes this happen. That leaves the rest of us free to drink with impunity. Thanks to Rebecca for this insight.
**Thanks to Sandy S. for the Oprah quotes.

Filed under: fat politics, feminism as politics, graphics by Amy's Brain Today