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Every day as we walk around our world we see food addiction. We hear people proclaiming that whenever they eat pasta, or home-baked bread, or chocolate cake they just can’t stop. People are even prone to laugh at themselves and tell you flat out, they are addicted to something. But perhaps, when you really look at it, food addiction is not a funny thing. Perhaps if you look closely, you might even call food addiction a debilitating disease.

‘Debilitating,’ you might say. ‘That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’ Well maybe not.

It is often said that society favors thin people, and that the model for beauty is skin-and-bones. Now this is probably true and I don’t deny it. But you may be a size 14, and you want to be a size 8, and you know this is your ideal size, as well as very achievable. And yet you can’t get there because of all the cookies, pasta, and bread you eat, even as you say you don’t want to. Then you have a problem. And the problem is that you are fighting food cravings.

At this point you may wonder what it wrong with you. You may wonder why you have no will power. You might try diets and feel your mood swing, as you starve yourself and your blood sugar goes down. You may become irritable and grouchy as you ‘white-knuckle it’ with your family. Then you might give up and go eat all you want for a few weeks. You then might watch the pounds you lost come back on, with extra pounds as interest. And once again you are bound to feel there is something wrong with you.

All of this is what I would call a low-level food addiction, or the onset of more serious problems. Later down the line the cycles often get worse and worse. Your relatively harmless binging may turn life-threatening and bulimic. If not, your binges may become so extreme as to cause obesity. This in turn has you lethargic all day long, as well as lackluster and prone to sleeping. Your disposition is grouchy because your blood sugar is constantly shooting up and shooting down. And after a while your metabolism is destroyed, along with your self-esteem, and no diets will work any more.

People who take another path in food addiction often become anorexic. They decide it is better not to eat at all, than to fight the cravings, or be fat. This of course is life threatening. Now if you don’t become anorexic or bulimic, but you do continue in your addiction, by the age 60 you will be a diabetic. Your body will have used up its supply of insulin over the many years of carb abuse, and it will begin to deteriorate rapidly. In this case you will lessen the very years of your life, and those last years will be painful in myriad ways.

And this is the direction in which we are headed, even as we joke about being addicted to chocolates.

Fighting food cravings is no laughing matter for a lot of people. But there are sources of help. There is a program called Overeaters Anonymous, which I attended for many years. There is also a program called Food Addicts Anonymous. Both of these will give you the support of other people on a similar path, as well as their experience strength and hope. You will also need a food plan that deals with food as an addictive substance. And there are many other tools I will give you in subsequent articles. But to those of you who suffer, I will just say, yes you can live a healthy happy life with food addiction. But you need to reach out.