Food addiction means you’re missing something important that you need

By David McElroy · March 11, 2012

My name is David, and I’m a sugarholic.

I’ve battled for decades with an almost uncontrollable craving to eat sweet things at times. For the most part, I make a joke of it, simply because that’s the easiest way to deal with it. If I can’t get it under control, the least I can do is get a laugh about it, right?

I guess so, but I’ve been thinking about addiction a lot lately — of various kinds — and it’s really not funny. We can make an alcoholic into a joke in movies at times. And I can turn my “sugar addiction” into jokes. It’s a good way to deflect attention from the subject. It’s a good way to laugh about the battle that sees my weight go up and down, depending on what’s going on in my life. But it doesn’t do any good in the long run, because laughing about it isn’t filling the need that created the addiction in the first place.

As I’ve started talking about this more publicly, I’ve come to find that a substantial percentage of the people I know suffer from similar addictions. Everybody knows about alcoholics, because alcohol abuse is the most common addiction in the public mind. Fortunately, I never had to deal with that one. I’ve seen alcohol abuse in plenty of other people. I know of at least four people in my family who have had problems with it. When I was a teen-ager, I decided that the potential benefits of alcohol were tiny compared to the potential risk, so I never even started drinking. I think it’s a smart decision.

But I find a lot of people who share my problem with food — people who feel compelled to eat, not because they’re hungry or even that they just want the taste of the food. They eat because they feel compelled to fill some empty spot with something — and something in them chose food at some point as the substitute. But despite the programming that tells us that more food will meet the need we’re feeling, it’s like trying to fill a bucket with water when there are holes in the bottom. No matter how fast we shovel, the hole doesn’t stay filled — but our stomachs are full and that turns to fat.

So what causes addictions and what can we do about them? Many people who have academic and medical letters after their names have written extensively on the subject — and they can’t even agree — so I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I’m going to tell you what I think based on talking extensively to others who’ve talked to me about their addictions and based on thinking about my own addiction and needs. I can’t claim to know all the answers. I can’t even claim it’s all fresh and original thinking. I just know that it feels true — because it’s what genuinely goes on inside of me.

I’ve come to see an addiction as a matter of confusion in the mind’s programming. Let’s say that your mind somehow became confused about the hunger for food and the thirst for water. Let’s say that every time you were starving, your mind believed you were thirsty. So you would drink water, over and over again. But because it didn’t satisfy the actual need — the hunger for food — you would keep feeling the same desire for water. And as you got hungrier, you would drink more and more water, in a frantic effort to meet a need that was very real.

Now let’s take a different sort of need, but let’s say it’s a psychological need. It could be the desire to be loved or to be accepted or a hundred other things. Our emotional and psychological needs are complex and we’re frequently not even aware of some of them, especially in cases in which we’ve gone our entire lives without having a particular need met. What if the mind’s programming becomes confused about those signals? What if a person’s need to be loved and accepted, for instance, came to be seen as a need for alcohol or for food?

If that were true, it might mean that there would be times when the addiction was under control — the times when the basic need was being fulfilled in some way. But in times of deprivation of that need — or during times when there was an intense reminder of the need — the programming calling for the substitute (the food or alcohol or whatever) would kick in. And so life would be a roller coaster.

When it comes to food, that’s the way it’s been for me. My weight is like a very public indication of what my emotional life has been for the previous months. And that’s why it’s easier to laugh about it than to talk about it — because who wants to talk to the world about his unmet emotional needs?

Addictions are a complex bunch of things to deal with. I don’t claim to have the answers. For me, though — and for some of the people I’ve talked to — I think they’re purely substitutions for things we either can’t have or don’t know how to get.

So I think I’ve figured out — for me, anyway — why the addictive behavior is there. I know what’s missing in my life that would cause me to quit eating so much at times. What to do about those underlying unmet needs is another matter. It’s far more complicated, though, than just saying, “Hey, put that ice cream away.”

In the meantime, I’ll keep joking about the half-gallon container of ice cream being “the single-serving size.” As long as people are laughing, maybe they won’t notice what’s really missing.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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