August 8, 2010: Boston Herald
Food addiction support groups growing in popularity
We admit we are powerless over sweets
By Jessica Fargen. Originally published in the Boston Herald, Sunday, August 8, 2010.
Obese people in Massachusetts and nationwide are turning increasingly to groups that see food as an addiction, treat sugar as akin to booze or drugs, and use an Alcoholics Anonymous approach to help control cravings.
“I was using food as a drug,” said Dana, 46, whose weight dropped from 210 to 160 after joining the expanding Massachusetts support group Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA). “I ate all throughout the day. I ate to the point where I was sick to my stomach. No matter how much I wanted to stop, I couldn’t stop.”
Recovering food addicts told the Herald how their lives were gripped by an uncontrollable need to eat until they sought help through 12-step programs. Dana, like all members of FA, abstains from sugar and flour, two of the foods seen as most “addictive.”
Diane, 63, of Everett, a recovering food addict, credits Food Addicts Anonymous (FAA) with saving her life. Food addicts interviewed for this article asked that their last names not be used, in keeping with a policy used by AA members.
“It’s a miracle,” said Diane, whose weight dropped from 385 pounds to 170 pounds once she sought help in 2005. “It’s really worked. When I came to FA, it confirmed what I suspected - that I had a different reaction to food.”
FA and FAA follow AA precepts: first names only, 12 steps, group meetings, sponsors and total abstinence from substances (sugar and flour).
There are no hard statistics on the number of food addicts, but the roster of Americans who say they can’t control how much they eat is growing, experts say.
About one in 35 American adults has a binge eating disorder, a clinical diagnosis, according to the Binge Eating Disorder Association. Some food addicts are also binge eaters, doctors say.
FAA weekly meetings in the U.S. and worldwide have risen from 78 in January to 86.
FA has 4,044 members, up from about 1,000 members in 2005. Each week, FA holds more than 30 meetings across Massachusetts. In June, 400 of its members gathered in Danvers for an annual business meeting to discuss the group’s future.
Nationally, there are millions of food addicts, many of whom don’t know they have an addiction, said Phil Werdell, chairman of the Food Addiction Institute, a nonprofit research center in Florida.
Food addicts are slowly emerging from the shadows as the debate over the hard science of food addiction increases. Some clinicians strongly dispute the notion of addiction.
“It’s an area that is still very much in development, in evolution,” said Philip Levendusky, director of the psychology department at McLean Hospital in Belmont.
Binge eating has gained more acceptance as a clinical condition in recent years. In 2013, binge eating disorder will be included for the first time in the revised American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The increase in awareness of food addiction has been fueled by growing evidence that draws parallels between chemical reactions in the brains of drug and alcohol addicts and obese people who can’t control food intake.
“There is a gene marker for alcoholism and drug addiction, and people who are obese and binging on dense carbohydrates have the same marker,” said Werdell, who is also training director with ACORN Food Dependency Recovery Services in Sarasota, Fla.
This “goes to show that some food addiction has the same origin as alcohol and drug addiction, and it has the same effects on the brain,” he said.
Patricia Herlehy of the Florida-based FAA, said acceptance of food addiction as a disease is growing.
“More medical professionals are looking at it and looking at that as being a cause of somebody’s decline in health,” Herlehy said.
Still, food addicts say misconceptions plague what they define as a disease, and what others call a personal problem or weakness.
“It is fully accepted in our society that alcohol affects some people differently than others,” said Michael Prager, 52, a recovering food addict from Arlington who wrote the memoir, “Fat Boy, Thin Man” due out next month.
“A lot of people say, ‘Food addiction? What’s next, air addiction? Everybody eats.’ ”
Caroline Apovian, director of the nutrition and weight management department at Boston Medical Center, which treats people with food disorders, is skeptical of research likening food as addictive as booze or hard drugs.
“You have to be careful when you try to define food addiction,” she said.
But she does believe food can control a person’s behavior.
“People are more aware and physicians and health-care providers are more aware that this is not a matter of willpower. Neither is obesity,” she said. “Obesity is a disease.”
