Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. I want to talk today about a topic that I've known about for a long time. You may have heard about it too, and it's this notion that addiction is progressive. I've heard of addiction characterized as a progressive, incurable fatal disease, and food addiction is no different. It is absolutely progressive. In fact, 63% of deaths right now worldwide are attributed to diet-related diseases, things that are absolutely linked to the way we're bending our elbow and putting that fork in our mouth. And it's fatal. It is absolutely a fatal disease, and most people these days are dying too young and in pain by the fork, and the costs are huge, enormous, and most people will not reach end stage food addiction, but there's a progression to get there. Some of us like I got there, and it is bleak at the end. It's absolutely bleak, but there's this progression to get there.
The brain slowly wires up, remembering the cues that predict certain food rewards and leading us down those paths again, and we do it again and again, and the brain slowly changes. What happens is this slow death march of a creep toward later and later stage addiction. At the beginning, it's relatively mild. What starts to show up is an inability to control how much you eat sometimes. This overeating pattern happens and this feeling of maybe loss of control, but not always. Not always, and you're still living a functional life, and it's hard to maybe notice the costs. It's just that maybe some weight is creeping on, maybe not yet, but there's this awareness of a relationship with food that is, or maybe it's a relationship with weight first that you notice. You don't even think it is related to food. It's interesting how a lot of people are like that. They think they have a weight problem and they don't think that has anything to do with having a food problem. But it's mild at first.
Then you move into the middle stages of the disease where it creeps into more areas of life now, whereas before, you probably enjoyed social things fully. Maybe it starts to impact social engagements. Maybe you start to think of events as mainly places to eat instead of places to socialize with people, or maybe your food and your weight's gotten to the point where you're starting to avoid some events and social gatherings because it's uncomfortable to eat in front of people, or you don't like the way your body looks, or you'd rather be home eating alone. I mean, that's really characteristic of late stage food addiction, but maybe that's starting. Maybe it's impacting your performance at work. Maybe it's hindering you from showing up fully at work. Maybe it's starting to impact some personal relationships.
What's interesting is along this path, I was never aware really of the avenues that were cut off. You never know what, you don't get to experience things that might've happened. If I hadn't been in my food addiction, I'll never know. Those roads not taken those opportunities missed. But absolutely, my life was getting narrower. As my disease progressed, the costs were really starting to mount at the end of the road with food. Addiction is absolute mental madness. It's just nonstop obsession about what I can get and when, and wanting to be alone to hide and procrastinate and eat massive binges that are completely out of control that take days to recover from lying, to go hide and eat. I remember I used to pack up all my binge foods. I would resolve that I was quitting, and I would pack up all my binge foods in a trash bag, and I was living in an apartment at the time, and I would bring my foods out to the dumpster and put them in there. And then I remember going to get my food out of the dumpster and break open that garbage bag and eat my binge food out of the dumpster. And so, the next time I resolved to quit and gathered up all my foods before I put them in the trash bag, I dumped vinegar on everything. I literally opened containers and things and doused them with vinegar to ruin them so that I wouldn't go get the food later to eat it. That's late stage food addiction. Eating out of garbage cans. I know people who've had their mouths, their jaws, wired shut, bariatric surgery, these are the things that we subject ourselves to in late-stage food addiction. It gets extreme and the areas of life that it impacts mount up where it's really impacting relationships and we're lonely and we're isolated, and it's definitely impacting work, not advancing, maybe not being able to work. I mean, I remember in my 20s already, early 20s, I had to take a whole chunk of time off from my PhD program because of my food addiction. I was binging so badly that I had to just take a semester off. It was egregious. It was really intense. And the opportunities just of life just get blocked out. Just we're not able to show up for the magic of life. It's a progressive disease. It's a progressive disease, and everybody experiences it differently.
I think a lot of people come to Bright Line Eating in early-stage food addiction, or maybe even not full-blown food addicts, maybe just with an addictive relationship with food. The difference would be if you don't feel like you're experiencing clinically significant impairment or distress as a result of your eating, you're not experiencing clinically significant impairment or distress, then it's not food addiction. It's an addictive relationship with food. If you're experiencing things like, I've tried to quit before and it never lasts, or I lose control over how much I eat sometimes, or I'm experiencing some tolerance where I need to eat more and more of certain foods to get the effect. Those are all addictive symptoms. But you have to also have a clinically significant degree of impairment or distress in order to actually have addiction. But even without that, if you've got some of the symptoms of addiction, you still have an addictive relationship with food. So, it progresses.
In my experience, addiction always gets worse because the brain keeps wiring up in relationship to these experiences that it has where there's some need, there's some want, there's a craving. You go satisfy it. And now that memory gets logged into, and we wire up with the cues that predicted that reward, and it just keeps going. It just keeps going. One of the hallmarks of this progression is the prefrontal cortex that would rein in these impulses. It just gets weaker and weaker and weaker, less and less functional, less and less able to show up for us and to counteract these cravings and these urges that are arising.
I've known about the progression of addiction for a long time. I know in the recovery rooms, people talk about it all the time that this is a progressive disease. They would talk about while I'm in here getting some recovery, my addiction is out in the parking lot doing pushups, getting stronger. They would talk about how when you pick up after a long period of abstinence, you're right back where you started very, very quickly, often worse as if the disease was progressing on you all along, even during your period of abstinence. I don't know about that, maybe. I think that effect often is the rebound effect of the rubber band of abstinence kind of stretches thin, and then when you pick up, suddenly it ricochets and suddenly you're binging worse than you ever did before. That's happened to me for sure.
It was well into my recovery journey before I heard someone say addiction is progressive, but recovery is progressive too. Recovery is progressive, and that has been my experience at first. The benefits of recovery start small. And they're coupled with a lot of challenges, right? Because in the initial stages of recovery, there's a lot of heightened cue reactivity. All of the logos and the sights and the sounds and the smells, they just pull harder. The brain really, really wants what it wants, and it does not like this dopamine downregulation. It does not like the depletion, the wanting, itching, needing thing.
At first, it's very hard, and then the social engagements feel hard, and everybody's eating and everybody's drinking, and woe is me. The world feels like it gets narrower and narrower and narrower, and the benefits are nice. You lose a little bit of weight and that feels good, and it does feel good to write down your three meals and then watch yourself eat only in exactly that. It's a huge feeling of victory. Some moments of peace start creeping in here and there. The benefits of recovery start to accumulate slowly, but then it's a snowball rolling downhill, and it starts to gain momentum. Little by slow, you might not notice this, but what used to be really intense, even overpowering cravings, they start to transition and become just food thoughts. If you're not attuned to that difference, you may not notice, but there's a world of difference between an intense, even overpowering craving and a food thought, a part of you suggesting, oh, are you sure you're not interested in a little of that? Or doesn't that look good? Kind of a vague thought, right? Not a craving, not a craving, a thought, a suggestion, a hypothesis, a proposal, that if blocked out immediately doesn't have to go anywhere. So, that's nice, that's a benefit. Then the habit stacks start to form, and suddenly there's traction with other things. Like, oh, now I'm writing a gratitude list. My mood is getting better. My outlook is getting more positive. Oh, look, now I'm picking up a meditation practice. Wow, I'm way more productive. Look at this linen closet that I just tidied up and purged and decluttered. Amazing.
Now my food is weighed and measured, and my life starts to get weighed and measured. I know that I've got breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I've got to have time to eat them. I start to understand my time a lot better and what time I have and what time I don't have. Because I have boundaries around my food now, I have boundaries around my life and I start to learn to say, no thank you, or no, I'm not free then because I'll be eating dinner. So, I know I'm not free. Then I start to respect my time and my needs a lot more than I ever used to. I get clearer about my yes and my no. Deep down inside I can feel myself really being a hell yes to some things and being a no, that doesn't feel right or sound good, or I don't like the looks of that idea or whatever. I can feel that more.
In other words, the vagus nerve starts to develop its connection. The vagus nerve connect. It's one of the cranial nerves that goes from your organs up to your brain and vice versa. It's the way the brain communicates down with the heart, the gut, the lungs, the organs. But interestingly, 90%, almost all 90% of the connections, the nerves in the vagus nerve are actually afferent, not efferent, meaning they arrive at the brain, they go from the organs up to the brain informing the brain of what the organs really think and feel, as opposed to the brain telling the organs what to do. Like, "Hey heart, you better keep beating." I mean, that's minimal. That's 10% of those nerves. "Heart, do your job, keep beating lungs, do your job, keep breathing great. We're making urine awesome. We're filtering toxins. Awesome." That's the brain's job. These organs though, like the gut that has its own nervous system, the heart that has its own intelligence, they're bringing all this information up to the brain, and these connections now start to strengthen, and we start to become more attuned to the gut feeling, the heart opening, the softness.
Oh, wow! These benefits start to accumulate, and then I'm more present, I'm aware, alert, and these new horizons start to open these new frontiers of experience. Suddenly, we're taking a painting class, we're picking up our old cello. We're available to meet a friend for a walk. We're showing up for ourselves and our family members and our friends in ways we never used to. Now suddenly, there's a promotion at work because we've become so reliable and steady, and these horizons start to open. Now we feel the calling of a book inside of us to write, or a move we need to make, or a relationship we need to end and transition out of. So many things start to become possible, and the recovery starts to spread into so many new areas of life. We learn to take care of our bodies in ways we never used to perhaps, and maybe get fit, maybe start to move more. Maybe start to go to appointments like acupuncture, chiropractor, body work, Reiki. Suddenly ,we're taking care of ourselves in a way we never used to, investing in ourselves in ways we never used to.
Recovery is progressive and the resources that we build, when we lose weight, we earn more money. Research shows shouldn't be that way, but it is. We become more ambitious potentially, and more able to charge what we're worth. If we're a solopreneur or we're a coach, or we're a doctor or whatever, we're able to charge what we're worth and our income starts to increase. These types of benefits, they start to compound and accrue and build. Suddenly the friendships we've built and the time we're saving by being clearheaded and doing the next right thing and having our time weighed and measured, these benefits start to build on each other and create new structures of capacity and broadening and opening in our lives.
With the food addiction slipping away, we address other addictions, the smartphone addiction, the shopping addiction, the underearning, the shame, addiction, all of these things we start to address. Our self-confidence builds our self-esteem, builds our self-concept becomes healthier and healthier and healthier, and we find ourselves reborn and it keeps going. It's progressive, and we find new modalities of healing. We find new ways to do our inner work, and it keeps going. Recovery is progressive ongoingly.
I'm 30 years into the journey, and it is nowhere near, slowed down or stopped yet. It is progressive as far as I can tell, as far as the, I can see forever and ever and ever. So, addiction is progressive, but recovery is progressive. And to my knowledge, addiction is the only disease you can catch or develop the treatment for that leaves the patient better off than they ever even were before they caught the disease. That's the thing about the treatment for this addiction. It leaves you better off even than you were before you ever became an addict in the first place, which is why I still 30 years in so proudly claim the identity of an addict in recovery, because my recovery means the world to me. It's who I am. It's what I love most in life, is this recovery path. The ticket of admission is being an addict. And I am that through and through in the way I've always thought the way I've always reacted to life. The me, me, me. Yes, please, more of everything more now, bigger, better, stronger, faster. Now. That's who I am at my core, and I'm in recovery now, and I love this path that I'm on. It just keeps getting better, and I'm better off than I even was before I ever picked up in the first place. I hope that you will be too if you're not already right now. Double check. Maybe you are. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
