Food Addiction: How To Retrain Your Brain

(BlackDoctor.org) – You hear about it all the time. Or, you go through this personally – eating something, anything all day long, drowning in chocolate or any other food that honestly feels like it’s helping you get through your day. And many pounds later, you wonder if there’s any way to stop. It seems that everywhere you turn—dinner parties, your best friend’s kitchen, bookstores, even talk shows—someone is confessing to having a food addiction. For years, experts scoffed at the notion that you could actually be hooked on chocolate or chips. Some still do. But recently, high-tech medical scans have revealed surprising similarities in the brain chemistry of drug addicts and chronic overeaters—resemblances that have caught the attention of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

“We’re involved in studies of brain changes associated with obesity,” says Nora D. Volkow, MD, director of NIDA, whose 2001 study pioneered some of the food-addiction research. “We’re doing it because many compounds that inhibit compulsive eating may also inhibit compulsive drug intake. The neurocircuitry overlaps.”

The behavior of compulsive eaters also lends some new support to this idea of addiction—the cravings and preoccupation with food, the guilt, the way these overeaters use food to relieve bad feelings, and the fact that binges are frequently conducted at night or in secret. Now some addiction and obesity experts have started to use the “A” word in connection with food and even to speculate that it may be partly responsible for America’s rising obesity rate.

“Food might be the substance in a substance-abuse disorder that we see today as obesity,” says Mark Gold, MD, chief of addiction medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine.
No one—Gold included—is suggesting that an addiction to food could be as strong as the one that drives people addicted to cocaine or heroin. Still, the research into the connection between overeating and addiction isn’t just academic. It may finally put to rest the idea that anyone who eats excessively simply suffers from a lack of self-discipline. More important, the emerging evidence points to some very concrete steps anyone can take to eat in a saner, healthier way.

Blame It on the Brain

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