20. Food addicts struggle with control

By Tom O'Connell

When I consider exploring the subject of food addiction I reach back some years to notes I took on this topic at the Northeast Conference on Addictions in Albany, NY. The presenter, psychotherapist Robin Adair Aston of Bangor, Maine, gave one of the finest overviews on food disorders that I have heard.

Aston reported that people turn to eating disorders as an attempt to cope, but they have "amazing learning deficits" and "do not have effective life skills." They need to learn what a feeling actually feels like, be able to sit with a feeling, and decide what to do about it, she explained. "They need to be taught about emotions."

"The issue is not eating," she said, "it's what's going on underneath." Food addicts have strong feelings of shame and desperation plus a high suicide risk. "Five to 15% of all individuals with an eating disorder die from it."

Indecisiveness and impulsivity are common symptoms of this steadily increasing disorder.  Also, many patients who show up in treatment to deal with  food disorders turn out to be poly-addicted to substances and other unhealthy behaviors, including kleptomania.

Aston explained, "The issue for the anorexic is control. And loss of control results in  eating binges." Anorexics suffer from severe weight loss and can literally starve themselves to death, she noted. It is estimated that from 30 to 50 percent of anorexics will become bulimic, and bulimia is defined as "insatiable overeating." Control is an issue here too. "The bulimic is in control and then blows it," she explained. And the common pattern for these addicts is bingeing followed by purging.

It's typical for food addicts to come from dysfunctional families, according to Aston. "Colleges are riddled with students who have eating disorders, and they're from successful high achieving families." Obviously, high achievement does not mean that a family is emotionally healthy. Food addicts tend to suffer from black-or-white thinking. They set super-high standards, and when they fall short their self-esteem is affected. They also personalize everything. "No matter what goes on, they have something to do with it."

In the dysfunctional families of food addicts, boundaries are fuzzy and there is a lack of privacy. "Family members even finish each other's sentences and intrude on each other's thoughts and feelings," said Aston. Over-protectiveness is another characteristic of the malfunctioning family that produces offspring with eating disorders. "These are parents who live through their children. Their message is that the outside world is not a safe place." These families tend to be rigid, resist change, and have major problems resolving conflicts. They either avoid conflict or fight constantly. And although there is an underlying sense of tension, they show a calm exterior.

Aston asserted that the dysfunctional families had given the addicts "a basic feeling of ineffectiveness." The result? "When people feel ineffective they need to do something powerful. And bingeing is powerful." In their addiction, they also find security in the predictability of the experience. So, in recovery they need to learn to empower themselves.

Noting a recent trend in bulimia, which used to be a "closet disorder," Aston said bulimics were doing more "acting out." She concluded that this phenomenon "finds the family uniting in desperation around the sick child."

It is apparent, as we begin the 21st Century, that eating disorders of all kinds continue to adversely affect vast numbers of people in these times of high stress, job insecurity, and fractured families. The feeling of desperation that Robin Adair Aston mentioned is undoubtedly having an impact on contemporary relationships in the home, at work, and even in the way we relate on the highways. Also, we should become more aware of the  enormous impact of food addictions on the number and severity of a host of physical and mental health problems.

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