Addiction is the Answer
What is the question? There are more than one, including:
- Why do people keep smoking when they know it is killing them?
- Why do people seek out excuses to cheat on their diets?
- Why do people gamble with money they can’t afford to lose?
- Why is porn damaging so many peoples’ sex lives?
- How is putting a Starbucks on every corner a sustainable business model?
Informally, addiction is just a bad habit that is exceptionally hard to break. Good habits are rarely called addictions—maybe obsessions? There may be a physiological component, as in the case of caffeine, heroin or benzodiazepines. When there is, breaking the habit means going through a very unpleasant and sometimes dangerous withdrawal. In many cases, the withdrawal should be carefully managed with medical supervision.
According to me, virtually all Americans have food addictions. These are the World’s Most Addictive Foods.
Cheese is probably the hardest habit to break for most of us! The snack food and fast food industries devote virtually all their research and development efforts into how to get more salt, fat, and sugar into their products.
Habits are so important to human psychology that there must have been an evolutionary reproductive advantage to them. It has often been observed that enjoying sweets and fats would have led to reproductive success in the environment in which we evolved, since high calorie density would have been rare. One reference for this is The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health and Happiness, by Douglas J. Lisle. In the modern world, we are nearly immersed in opportunities to indulge in “hyper-palatable” processed foods that hijack that preference mechanism, to our detriment and for the profit of the purveyors.
I never picked up the habit of smoking, so I never had to go through the withdrawal of quitting. I know it can take many attempts before ultimate success is achieved. On the other hand, I have been addicted to, and gone through withdrawal over coffee and chocolate. I still indulge in a cup of coffee and a small square of chocolate a day, but I now consider them drugs. I have also broken food addictions to sugar, soda, sweeteners, butter, chips, nuts, pizza, cheese, processed meats like bacon, turkey breast, and corned beef, and french fries.
If you want to start breaking food addictions, take it easy, one at a time. Let me know how you’re doing. If you suffer (or enjoy) a setback, try to get the most out of it, and then get back to your plan for doing better going forward.
