Food Addiction | Signs, Effects & Treatment

Anyone can develop a food addiction, there is no one cause. However, several factors increase your risk of developing one:

• Emotional or sexual abuse, trauma, grief or loss
• Co-occurring disorders such as anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or depression
• Genetics – according to studies, there are genes that increase a person’s likelihood of developing any addiction, including a food addiction.
• Being overweight as a child
• Family history of addiction – being exposed to addictive behaviours increases the likelihood of you developing a food addiction
• Personal factors such as perfectionism, low self-esteem, and impulsiveness
• Bullying
• Loneliness and isolation

Recognising the signs of an eating addiction could help you acknowledge that you or a loved one is struggling and needs support. Many people with addictions will try to hide their symptoms, so it may not always be easy to see signs. You may think you will be able to recognise that someone has a food addiction due to their weight, but not everyone with a food addiction is overweight, and not all people who are overweight have a food addiction. We will note some common signs to look out for in yourself or loved ones:

• Eating more than intended
• Continuing to eat when no longer hungry
• Eating until feeling sick
• Going out of way to get certain types of food when they are not available
• Prioritising food over responsibilities and hobbies
• Inability to stop eating
• Secretiveness such as lying about food and eating in secret
• Decreased performance at work or school
• Withdrawing from loved ones
• Eating quickly
• Spending large amounts of money on food
• Spending an excessive amount of time eating or thinking about it

• Developing tolerance – needing to eat more food to get the same effect
• Difficulty concentrating
• Digestive problems
• Gaining weight quickly

• Low self-esteem
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Self-loathing and guilt
• Irritability
• Emotional detachment

Food addiction can create a vicious cycle. You use food to deal with emotional discomfort, but with time, your food addiction causes your mental health to become worse. This causes you to eat more, and the problem continues.

Although the terminology can sometimes be confusing, food addiction is a type of eating disorder. Eating disorders are mental health conditions that cause problematic eating patterns that can have negative consequences on your physical and mental health. They include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. It is unlikely that people with anorexia nervosa have a food addiction as they tend to limit the amount of food they eat. However, people with bulimia nervosa or binge eating disorders may also have food addictions.

Getting treatment for food addiction can be difficult as you may feel some amount of shame surrounding your addiction. If you have read to this point, this is a great step. You feel that you or a loved one has a food addiction, and you are taking the step to find out more and potentially think about treatment. This step is one of the hardest parts of recovery, so well done!

Some people argue that recovering from food addiction is harder than any other type of addiction because you cannot completely abstain from the focus of your addiction. While people who are addicted to substances can stop taking the substance to which they are addicted, everyone needs to eat.

However, there is a 12-step programme similar to those helping people recover from alcohol or drug addiction. This normally includes strict diets that require you to abstain from problem foods such as sugar, refined flour, and wheat.

Other treatment options include therapy. Food addictions normally stem from emotional problems. Once you manage to cut down on eating, the next step to recovery is fully dealing with the reasons why you developed a food addiction. Talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, can help you deal with the reasons you developed an addiction. They can help you identify unhealthy thoughts and behaviours and replace them with new healthy thoughts so your relationship with food can change. If you can find different ways to manage emotional problems, you are less likely to use food to cope.

If you are not responding to these types of treatment, you may be prescribed certain anti-obesity medications. If you were overweight as a child, this leads to treatment resistance the longer your food addiction lasts. Anti-obesity medications in combination with therapy and support groups may help you to achieve long-term recovery.