One of the things that is important to realize about recovery from food addiction – and this is especially true if you’ve come from another 12 Step program – is this important fact: this is hard! Recovery from food addiction – not all the time, but in the beginning particularly – can be very, very difficult.

Addictive diseases have many weapons in their arsenals, but food has more of them. Firstly, no matter how bad an alcoholic, addict or whatever was, they probably didn’t pick up that substance or habit until their teens at the earliest. Food, however, goes all the way back to the beginning. It represents mother, nurture, peace, contentment, love, approval, and reward (to name a few). Almost everyone has happy memories of meals and food at some point. Most of us remember hearing “If you are good, you’ll get <fill in the goodie>.”

Here’s another simple fact: we all have to eat! In a way, I find the phrase “food addict” humorous. Think about it – have you ever met anyone that has “kicked” the food habit? I know people say “alcoholics have to drink, they just don’t drink alcohol.” Speaking for this alcoholic, I’ve never had a drink of any liquid that then made me think about drinking alcohol. On the other hand, when I’ve been upset and not in a fit spiritual condition, I’ve had abstinent meals that made me want to keep eating.

If you’re in a food program like O.A. which doesn’t have a specific food plan dictated, you have another problem: the ambiguous nature of some abstinences. It’s not like A.A. people don’t have slips. I can tell you that if a person has a slip in A.A., he knows he’s having one. I’ve known people in O.A. who have had problems with their food for months before realizing it!

Another factor weighing against your recovery is the proliferation of “easier, softer ways.” Most of society has come to believe the 12 Step method is the most effective for recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction. That means that groups like A.A. and N.A. have little competition. There aren’t a lot alternative groups out there trying to convince alcoholics that they can drink safely again. If there were, my guess is every alcoholic would have at least given it a shot before making it to A.A. Now imagine that there are hundreds, even thousands of such alternatives. That’s part of the problem a compulsive eater faces. The plethora of “easier, softer ways” that constantly bombard the active compulsive eater is staggering. There is a billion dollar industry out there trying to convince eater that they can have their cake and eat it too.

My disease also likes to use the wonderful weapon of minimization. “After all, it’s just food!” it will try to tell me. Eating and even overeating is socially acceptable. Ever watch some of that food porn that passes as TV commercials? They’re almost begging you to overeat. You don’t see this with booze. “Please drink responsibly” is what you hear. Where is “Please eat responsibly” with food?

The irony of the verbiage we use in these programs is not lost on me. In A.A., people talk about sobriety, while in the food programs, we speak of abstinence. Alcoholics are not sober with their drinking, they abstain. It’s the food people that need to develop a sober relationship with the food, because to abstain means to stay away from it entirely.

The most important reason I believe that recovery from food is harder has to do with the pain involved, or more accurately the manner in which the food delivers its pain.

If there is anything good to be said about drugs and alcohol, it’s that these substances usually manage to slam their victims face down into the pavement (figuratively, but sometimes literally) with the pain they cause. If the addict survives, there is a point – some point – at which he or she usually has some moment of lucidity where the situation becomes obvious. Whether it involves waking up in jail or a hospital or next to someone they don’t know (or don’t want to know) – they find themselves with a brief period of honesty where they ask themselves “What the hell am I doing with my life?”

Food is not so nice.

The pain that food causes isn’t the acute type that drugs and alcohol provide, it’s the dull chronic type that will allow a person (especially if they are smart) to keep moving the goalposts of acceptability. With each day, and each increasing number on the scale – that which was previously unacceptable – becomes acceptable. “I’ll never get to 200 pounds!” the person says on Monday. On Tuesday, after looking at 205 on the scale, the same person says “Okay, but no more than 210.”

That’s the main problem with food as an addiction. Food addiction makes you uncomfortable enough to know you should do something about the problem, but not uncomfortable enough to actually be willing to go to any lengths to do something about it.

Scientists found out a long time ago that if you take a live frog and bring it toward boiling water, it will thrash to try to move away from it.  It’s not dumb, and realizes that boiling water is not its friend.  However, scientists realized that if you put that same frog into a put of room temperature water and slowly bring up the temperature, that frog will never jump out of the pot.  He will die in a pot of boiling water – the same pot we would have never jumped in.

This is the perfect analogy for the food.  A slow, gradual slide that – if you’re smart enough – you can adjust to faster that it brings you down.  You set a goal on the scale (“If I ever get to 200 pounds I’ll really get serious about losing weight!”).  After you hit that number, a while later you adjust it upwards.  Or you start wearing elastic waist clothes and always looking at yourself in the mirror from the neck up.  And onward and onward – or rather downward and downward.

What is the answer?  It’s still surrender, whether you’re in AA or a food program.  And since chances are -- unless you're 500 pounds or more -- you’ll never be in that acute pain many people need to get better, you might just have to “act as if.”  Act as if you’re 500 pounds and getting abstinence is a matter of life and death.

Abstinence is a matter of life and death, both physically and spiritually.  I have seen dozens of people die in my 33 years in program – including two sponsees.  I’ve seen large people die of strokes, and anorexic girls in their teens die of heart attacks.  One of my sponsees was 600 pounds and died in a fire because he was too big to get out.

Then there’s the spiritual death – and I mean the death of your spirit, not the textbook definition of “spiritual.”  As a good friend who also leads retreats says:  “I’m not afraid of dying from this disease, but of becoming one of the walking dead.”  By that he means becoming the kind of person whose whole life involves getting up, going to work, coming home, sitting in front of the TV and eating all night (or surfing the net).  Then going to bed, sleeping and getting up in the morning and starting the cycle all over again.  Those people, on their deathbed, will be asking themselves what they had done for the last years of their lives.

For me, there has to be more to life than that.  No food is worth that kind of life.