Food as an Addiction

Alex Campisi

Food as a Metaphor

Imagine being double the size of a football linebacker, or the size of a full-grown male gorilla. How about being unable to leave your house, walk around, or participate in other everyday activities due to your weight? That was the reality of 600 pound Melissa. As a child, weight was always an issue, but never did she dream of the size she became. She struggled daily with lack of control through food consumption. Melissa’s enormous appetite was caused by her addiction to food, which stemmed from something deeper. She knew that her food addiction resulted from her troubled past, but could not escape the satisfaction she only felt through consumption. The mind is a very powerful tool, and mental associations can often trigger a person to crave foods. Food addicts eat for every reason. Food helps one relax, celebrate, and defocus on an emotional situation. People who suffer from a food addiction eat to fulfil emotional needs like safety and comfort, but they also eat because they are angry or they just enjoy eating because it makes them feel better. Next, imagine Stephanie, a 25 year old 98 pound woman who suffers anorexia. She too has a food addiction, but in a polar opposite way. She fears food but thinks about it as much, if not more than Melissa. She has suffered this food obsession for six years. Melissa and Stephanie’s food struggle is an example of how addiction is a metaphor for food. Both women reached a pivotal moment in their lives where they had to change their lifestyles to survive.

Addiction has a social stigma. One who is addicted could be addicted to different things for different reasons. Society is body image obsessed. The pop culture celebrates people based upon their appearance. The social standard drives people in different directions of addiction to be accepted. There are two extremes in this situation, a woman who fears food and is weakened both mentally and physically and a woman who obsesses food and is weakened in the same way.

Emotions are usually at the root of the food addiction, especially if you consider certain foods “comfort foods.” It would be normal for Melissa to eat 2 Big Macs, 20 Mcnuggets, chocolate, and soda. She would eat because she was afraid to deal with her feelings, to reward herself when she was frustrated or unfulfilled, and to fill emptiness. She longed to have children and her struggle with food addiction prevented her from conceiving. Filling this emptiness with food that made her comfort propelled this addiction. Her marriage became a crutch to her addiction. Her relationship with her husband was based on her eating habits because he was the enabler to her food addiction. Dependence is a symptom of addiction and Melissa depended on him for everything. Her husband did everything from feeding her to bathing her and helping her use the restroom. Her over reliance on him propelled the cycle of addiction causing Melissa to use food to try and make herself feel better. Food was a way to self medicate.

Melissa’s real journey began when she realized that her unhealthy relationship with food was taking a toll on her life. She decided to undergo gastric bypass surgery, which allowed her to start losing weight. To become “normal” she endured many struggles to regain control of her life. Food had weakened her emotional and physical strength. Her real battle was not only physical, but also mental. This high-risk surgery did not produce overnight results. Although it slowly changed her appearance it did not change her relationship with food. Finding independence from her addiction took extensive therapy and work. She was used to eating if she was happy, sad, and bored. Melissa had to acknowledge where her real issues stemmed from and figure out why she was using food to self medicate. . After seven years of recovery, lifestyle change, and determination, Melissa changed her life forever. After dropping over 500 pounds her post- surgery regime allowed her to shift her focus from food to starting a family. Although she struggles daily with her addiction daemons, she is finally in control and able to start a new life.

Stephanie longed to look like the models she saw in magazines and on TV. Her distorted image of what she saw on TV was caused by many factors, including family pressures and emotional disorders. Her addiction to food resulted in major health issues that damaged her body to the point of health issues like organ failure. Still, her fear of food only weakened her. She obsessed daily over what she was allowed to have and often limiting her intake to extreme amounts. Food was the gateway to many issues that she had to address before she could overcome this addiction. Through her addiction, she developed problems with anxiety and depression, which only drove her food obsession issue deeper. Once Stephanie reached an all time low of 72 pounds, and her family threatened to put her in a rehab facility. She realized she had to overcome her weakness to food. She needed to enjoy eating and not fear it

            Although Melissa and Stephanie struggled with food differently food controlled their lives.  Melissa’s extraordinary weight loss reveals the struggles of how an addiction controls your life and the extreme measures you have to take sometimes to gain control of your life back. Stephanie’s struggle lies within her inability to allow herself to eat. She displayed an extreme control of physically eating, but lacked in control of her mental addiction to obsessing over food.

Food addiction, like any other addiction, is a loss of control. People with food addictions crave foods that are unhealthy to their bodies even though they understand the consequences of their actions. Like other food addicts, Melissa used food like a drug, to fulfill emptiness and other unmet needs in her life. People have to eat to live but in a food addict’s life, they live to eat.