Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Here in North America, we are right in the midst of the peak of summer, and we just had the 4th of July in the United States and Labor Day coming up not too long from now. There's picnics and there's summer parties, and there's food all around us. I've been thinking about the different ways that people orient toward that food, whether they're still eating addictively, or they might relapse. I wanted to bring up the topic of whether you need to binge to be a real food addict. The answer is no. I'm just going to come out with that right out front because there's different flavors of addiction and they're equally legitimate, right? If you think about cigarette smoking as an addiction, now we're all really clear, right? That nicotine is addictive. Cigarette smokers are addicts, and what they're engaging in is an addiction, but it's not typically a binge addiction. As a matter of fact, it's almost never a binge addiction. It's a steady, slow drip grazing style addiction where they're just having a cigarette, just one, and then a little while later, they're having another one, and then another one, even if it's one after the, they're after other, it's still a steady stream, not a binge. Right? Now, I may be one of the rare people that has actually binged on cigarettes, and I've just smoked a pack of cigarettes and vomited all in one fell swoop. I don't recommend it. Ew. It was awful. But I have done that. So, it's possible to binge on cigarettes. I'm living proof, not advisable, nor pleasant, nor typical, right? Your smoking cigarette addict is almost always a purely slow drip grazing addict, right? Alcoholics on the other hand, come in either variety. You've got your binge drinkers and you've got your maintenance drinkers, your alcoholics who just drink their drinks, excuse me, drink their drinks steadily through the night, never getting blackout drunk necessarily, but just the six martinis evening every night, and that's how they drink. Caffeine, I would say is an interesting one. Probably more often the grazing slow drip variety. But then again, I guess there's people who drink four cups of strong coffee first thing in the morning, and then none for the rest of the day. I don't know, would that be a binge? Not? I mean, it probably takes them an hour to drink those four cups of coffee. I don't know. Is that a binge? I don't know. I don't know. It's hard to even imagine really binging on coffee. I don’t know, maybe someone binges on coffee with food. It's really clear that we've got both varieties, and they're both addiction. They're both addiction.
People whose food addiction looks like just grazing all day long and kind of the steady drip of food that's just a little more, a little more, a little more all day long, never eating necessarily to the point of getting overly stuffed, never eating overly fast, never shoveling it in, but just a little here and then a little there all the time. That is one form of food addiction and binging is another form of food addiction. I mean, think about it this way. If you had to be a wicked intense binge to have food addiction, why would we even need the diagnosis of food addiction? We already have the diagnosis of binge eating disorder, which brings me actually, now that I mention it to the topic of eating disorders. Most people, while they're active in binge eating disorder, also have food addiction, but not all. It's important to keep in mind too, that for a pure diagnosis of binge eating disorder, you have to be binging with a certain frequency and ferocity, like voracious. It has to be intense enough. I'm getting tangled in my words here. It has to be intense enough to qualify for binge eating disorder. But there are food addicts who binge periodically or who have the subjective experience of a binge that would not qualify in clinical terms as a binge, meaning they have the experience of losing control over how much they eat.
I have a family member who does this. Sometimes she'll lose control over eating rotisserie. She's like de-boning a rotisserie chicken. So, she's taking the skin and the meat off of the bones of a chicken that she's bought at the store, and she won't intend to eat any. She's just trying to prepare it into a container for later consumption. But she'll eat a little of the skin and then she'll lose control and she'll feel like she binges. But really upon analysis, she ate maybe four ounces of chicken, but it feels like a binge to her. She feels like she loses control. She eats very quickly. It wouldn't qualify for a binge in DSM-V terms because it's not eating in inordinate large amount of food, like more food than a normal person would eat in a single sitting. But it does have the features of being furtive intense, quick, and with a subjective experience of having a loss of control during the experience. Those types of experiences are like subclinical binge eating disorder. It wouldn't hit the threshold, but it is a feature of food addiction. These moments of losing control over your eating and then gobbling some stuff up, that's addiction as well. In terms of the eating disorder, you've got the strict eating disorder, you've got these other sorts of binge features, and you've got people who have food addiction with no binging behavior at all.
I really think it's important at this juncture that we keep in mind what addiction is all about. Addiction is about having difficulty stopping when you honestly want to stop. That could be binging, or it could be you're grazing, just you're eating all the time. It could be that when you stop, you successfully get on a diet or you successfully do Bright Line Eating®, you have a difficulty staying stopped, right? And again, that could be your binging, or it could be just going back to foods or eating behaviors that are causing you difficulty, that grazing that eating bites, licks, and tastes, that overeating. It's about the mental chatter, the obsession in the mind of will I, won't I? Should I? Shouldn't I? What I've eaten or not eaten, whether I'm on my plan or off my plan? All that insanity is part of the addiction. It's about continuing to eat excessively, whether you're grazing or binging, continuing to do it despite consequences that are piling up, physical consequences, psychological consequences, impact on your life, on your work, on your knees, on your joints, on the medications, all of it, right? That's addiction. It does not require that you binge or that you graze.
As we think about this time of year and what it might look like as someone relapses, it could be that they relapse at the cookout and then they go binge their brains out. It could be that they just eat an extra ear of corn that they didn't intend to, and then they feel demoralized. They feel desperate. They know it was off their plan. They're plummeted into a sick in the gut feeling about it, and they're not binging, but it makes it hard to Rezoom™. The addiction is terrible even without the binge. Those types of feelings over eating an ear of corn are not typical. That is a disordered relationship with food. That is food addiction. I think it's really important because a lot of people have the misperception that binging is required to have food addiction.
Now, one of the questions on the Food Addiction Susceptibility Scale™ does ask about binging, but you can be a 10 without giving a high number to that particular question at all. At all, right? Now, a lot of the people who consider themselves to be 10 plus plus plus pluses are bingers, right? That's part of what they mean. Binging does add another layer of experience on the food addiction, right? It's another way that food behavior can go awry, and that addiction can be intense. Is it necessary for a food addiction? Absolutely not. Again, just look at the smokers, right? They're not binging. Whew. But they're addicted. They are addicted. So, just wanted to clear that up for anyone who was wondering if they could possibly be a food addict, because they never, ever binge. Sorry to drop the news on you. Yes, you can. And that's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
