A(nother) Short Take on Addiction

Some other post has made me think of another way of describing (opiate) drug addiction. Imagine a self-charging phone. This phone helps power itself with what I call pleasure chemicals, basically a group term for chemicals that we perceive as giving us feelings of pleasure and enhanced well being, they include chemicals labelled "reward", reinforcers, motivators and natural painkillers amongst others. They enable us to function properly.

Imagine charging the phone with one of these chemicals, in order to "touch the sky" get some kind of extra performance from the phone. The phone responds to this outer charging by reducing the level of its own charging, in order to stop it from exploding.

When the extra charge wears off, the phone's inner charging is restored to normal. 

If you repeat the extra charging hard enough and often enough, the ability of the phone to restore its charge to normal becomes compromised, a part or two gets damaged from having to take this emergency measure to often. It wasn't designed to be a regular function.

At some point full restoration is not happening, the phone is permanently undercharged, making you reliant on charging it up. At this point, drug users say; "I don't take drugs to get high, just to get by." To function. 

That's basically drug dependence-on an outer supply.

There cannot be any such thing as "food addiction". Food is a necessity and outer supplied. We are all "addicts", you cannot not be addicted to or physiologically dependent on food, full stop. People need to use such terms properly, or they quickly cease to define anything specific, this opens them up to be applied to anything the powerful and cynical feel like and used to label us sick when we aren't. For the purposes of removing our freedoms and civil rights as is increasingly happening to people on the grounds of weight.

It's about time people who like to abuse terms because, "I feel like this is what I'm suffering" are told to knock it off as they don't bother to consider the consequences of their solipsism. There has already been way too much suffering brought about by quackery and false use of defined medical terms should come under that title.

If you wish to reduce weight through reducing intake and wish to try to make that happen by cutting out certain foods, i.e. sugary and/or fatty [depending on which cycle of the macro nutrient whirl is currently fashionable]. Your continued hunger function is not "addiction" or "craving" its still just hunger.

Re-framing is not magic.

If you choose to starve weight off, you will continue to experience that. Whatever food you cut out, as long as it provides you with sufficient energy. Often repeated dieting increases hunger for these foods precisely because they are targeted for exclusion and even because they are more efficient means of taking in energy.

Repeated denial of energy and/or the repeated threat of denial of energy, makes your energy supply insecure. This can make your body favour the most efficient and effective means of taking in energy, sugar and fat for example.

What you are supposed to do instead is to reduce your hunger function, which will make you eat less. Awful abomination though it is, the experiment of weight diet gastrectomy demonstrates this. Not only does it show that, it shows that appetite, which is really what this is about, is also part of hunger function. Reduce it and you're likely to reduce your hunger for all foods including sweet/fatty ones. 

It often leads to astonishing changes in the way things taste, making cravings for a rich slice of chocolate cake or a bag of White Castle hamburgers simply vanish...they were not particularly hungry afterward...their taste for food often changed.... “Are you sure they didn’t operate on my brain? Food does not call out to me anymore.”Another, who used to seek fatty and sugary foods, said, “I crave salads now.”

That person who was asking if something had been done to their brain was so used to being told-as we all are- that eating is just a decision rooted in the mind. He couldn't relate the assault on his body with a change in what was supposed to be all in his head.

In reality hunger is an all body process that is collated in the brain and then responded to. Removing a major digestive organ curtails the body's ability to produce hunger at an efficient and normal level.

Hunger (and appetite) function can be adjusted without tearing people up. But for some reason, healthcare professionals, researchers and scientists prefer to cut-em-up-rough. Or to seek drugs. Well, as long as people allow them to get away with this, they'll continue.