A Peek Inside Food Addiction Boot Camp

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FOOD ADDICTION AND EMOTIONAL MATURITY

 

Dr. Matthew Anderson

 

Every recovering alcoholic and drug addict will tell you the same truth:

 

Once an addict begins using her/his process of emotional maturity slows dramatically or stops.

The addict will not begin to mature/grow emotionally until he/she stops using AND gets into recovery.

 

If an addict begins using her/his drug of choice at 10 years old and uses until 30 years old, she/he will lose 20 years of emotional maturation. That individual will then be a 10 year old in a 30 year old body. She will only have a 10 year old’s ability to manage her emotional reactions to life.

 

It is my observation that most food addicts suffer from this condition - being younger than their years (emotionally). Food addicts are often immature in their reactions to the stresses and difficulties of life. Thus, when confronted with life’s difficulties, they often feel overwhelmed (what 10 year old can handle adult life?) and then retreat into comfort food.

 

What causes this condition?

 

Imagine being 10 (you can pick any young age) and living in a highly dysfunctional family. You feel fear, hurt, abandonment, anger, etc. How do you cope? You cannot run away (flight) and you cannot fight. How do you manage the intense emotions that beset you almost daily? Most food addicts find their escape in food. They discover that comfort food eases the pain and takes them away from the painful reality that cannot be handled any other way. Their drug of choice becomes comfort food. This is how a food addict is born. 

 

In a real sense the food addict, who is too young for fight or flight learns to use food to freeze.

The food addict, as a child, freezes her emotions with comfort food in order to survive and to cope. This technique, actually rather creative and adaptive, works in the sense that it makes survival possible. However a great but initially unknown price is paid. Not only does that individual become addicted to certain kinds of food but she also becomes frozen in her maturation process. If she becomes a food addict at 10 then her emotional approach to life will be deeply influenced by this context until and unless she enters recovery. Simply losing weight will not solve this problem.

 

Question: Is any child (from 3 to 19) truly capable of facing and productively managing his/her life?

 

Question: What sort of reactions to life’s stresses will this individual have?

 

Questions: What will occur when this individual (who is far younger internally than her years) attempts to stop using her drug of choice (comfort food)? What chance of success will she have if she is only 10 emotionally?

 

Question: How can any food addict lose weight and keep if off if she or he does not know this information and have help dealing with it?

 

 

Question: Why is it impossible to solve this problem by simply losing weight? 

 

Because losing weight does not cause emotional maturity. A brief encounter with will power (to drop a few or many pounds) is no replacement or compensation for lost emotional maturity. Once deprived of her drug of choice the addict has no buffer from the harsh stresses of life. Unless she finds support, guidance and growth in a recovery process she will almost always revert back to her addiction and re-gain all of the weight she lost.

 

The task for most food addicts is to identify their internal level of maturity and then engage in a meaningful process of support and recovery in order to grow-up in the best sense of that term. An awareness of this reality makes the recovery process easier and greatly increases the addict’s possibility of success.

 

Questions for serious exploration:

 

1- When (what age) did you begin to use comfort food as a drug of choice in order to survive a difficult childhood?

 

2- How does your current internal maturation age affect your ability to face and manage your life?

 

3- Can you identify the child-like attitudes that have carried over from your youth? How do they affect your life today (relationships, work, friendships, self-expression, etc.)?

 

4- In what areas do you want/need to grow up?

 

GOOD NEWS: It does not take one year of growth to make up for one year of immaturity. If you are 15 years behind you don’t need 15 years of inner work to grow up. You can make tremendous progress in a comparably brief amount of time IF you make a deep commitment to your growing up process.