Thursday 10 December 2009

Food addiction, rules OK

Oh shizz, it's our old friend food addiction. Now I know better than to expect (un)common sense to prevail on this one so I'll confine my comments to my own playpen. And though people see things in different ways. The way our mind works is the way it works, not the way we want it to.

If anything's a true sign of decadence, it's any society that simply will not grasp what is necessary to human existence and place in proper perspective. How hard has it become to remember that eating is necessary to life? How can innate necessary form the basis of addiction?

Addiction is an acquired necessity, it can be no more than that. So it cannot reference inborn necessity as if it supersedes it as defining biological function.

When we take a substance say, heroin which causes the body to respond by sending the supply of its own version of happy chemicals into decline. When that decline is not wholly reversed, this creates the symptoms of physical lows felt after the drugs have worn off and eventually symptoms of withdrawal.

Food is not about addiction. The only exception (there always is at least one) is ALCOHOL and that's only because it's capable of becoming a toxin, or can poison at certain levels, well as being a food, in that it contains a lot of energy.

There is something facile about the mere presence of an overwhelming urge being taken for addiction, in women. Yet for men it requires heavenly and transcendent highs, a multiple orgasmic level pleasure.

Please show me the footage of "food addicts" off their faces, intoxicated, laughing themselves silly, crashing their cars whilst under the influence of peanuts before you start talking about addiction.
Do you think you wouldn't have noticed loads of people staggering about under the influence of cake, hanging round any place you can find food, with dilated pupils and such?

Speaking of peanuts, you know those averse to nuts get alarming symptoms? Well the equivalent reaction from booze, is what makes people feel drunk. Seeking to get drunk is seeking to poison yourself to some degree with alcohol, at a certain concentration in your blood, it can kill you.

This is why you haven't seen this addiction, you had to be told about it because, it isn't there. It's true that the body can produce it's own alcohol, at minimal levels. It produces it's own opiods/opiates too as a natural part of your body's cycle of existence.

It can even suffer from non alcohol related cirrhosis of the liver. Even so, problems with food best fit under the banner of obsessive compulsive.  Because it is the imbalance of natural cycles that are necessary to life, therefore cannot be avoided. Or are benign in aspect, such as dealing with probability or taking chances, which can be be diverted to become the basis of a gambling compulsion.

And a lot of the things that provoke that disruption are either barely perceptible, complexly multi factorial, or the result of what we think of as good behaviour. It can be very indirect. It can start with the desire to distract oneself, noticing that strong feelings do that. Repetition then creates a strong link between relief or diversion of emotions /stress. Then this develops a compulsion. For others, it just becomes a bad habit that they overcome at some point.

That doesn't need to be dressed up as addiction which obscures potentially effective approaches for treatment and solutions. What we call things can be the start of recovery if they're accurate, they can illuminate.

One day we will have to learn to remember that we are animals who like others have our limitations. This is not depressing, far from it, that's how we learn what we can do.

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