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Notes -
Imagine instead of food someone is addicted to cigarettes. This is easy to imagine, many people are. Imagine still that its you who are addicted to smoking; who knows, maybe you actually are or have been.
So you decide that smoking is slowly killing you and you need to quit. You get together with a doctor that helps with this and your family is on board with helping etc. So far so good.
Now imagine that, while you have a great deal of motivation and support to quit smoking, it turns out that you actually need to smoke 2-3 cigarettes a day or your will die.
Food addiction is the only addiction that can never be totally abstained from. From your first days of life at your mothers breast, to the feeding tube in the hospice, man must eat or perish. Every other person is always also eating around you every day. There are massive advertising campaigns displaying savory foods to you everywhere you turn. People love talking about food. The government subsidizes it heavily.
Which feels more difficult? Asking a smoker or drug addict to never use their drug ever again? Or asking them to only get a little bit high a reasonable number of times?
I mean I totally agree with all of that, but I think there’s another huge problem in the sense that nobody, or very few people, seem willing to say that you can absolutely become addicted to food. The dominant idea is that it’s totally under rational control, under the premise that when you choose food you’re perfectly capable of choosing properly and that no other influences are at play. Or that the dominant reason people eat is because they are biologically hungry and therefore have no need to develop coping strategies or deal with underlying mental issues or traumatic experiences or bad coping mechanisms. In fact, quite often well meaning people tend to teach food as a cope. Giving a kid a lollipop after a painful injection is sort of teaching kids that the way to handle an unpleasant experience is to then treat yourself to sweets or food in general. And that’s just a one off. Sometimes you teach kids to do the same when it comes to any unpleasant experiences— eat something and feel better.
And as you mentioned, ads are everywhere. But even more, food itself (at least in the USA) is everywhere. Every public venue has food and drink available. Even public parks often have vending machines selling chips and cookies and sodas. Stores, even those where there’s no obvious connection to food, like hardware stores and craft stores always stock the chips, sodas, and cookies right next to the checkout. Imagine that for the smoker. Every place he goes, he sees cigarettes for sale, cheaply, and not even in a way that he has to ask for them or look for them. Just ready to be picked up and smoked.
I think until we really get the level of crisis and are willing to acknowledge just how addictive foods, especially those that are highly processed, can be, the public health crisis of obesity isn’t going to change. The psychological part has to be a part of this. If the women are using food to cope with something, that cannot change until you deal with that something which might be a really serious psychological issue like being an abuse or rape survivor.
That's how it used to be for smokers, until at least the 1990s.
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