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The term "addiction"  is just a description of compulsive eating behaviors that lead sooner or later to harm. Human behavior is determined to an alarming degree by strong drives to obtain specific foods and chemicals.   Elaborate habit-structures are built around the goal of delivering a regular supply of addictive molecules. Successful programs for reducing addictive behavior work on external behavioral structures, first to withdraw from the addictive substances and then to maintain successful abstinence. The control of addiction is strategic rather than moral.

The Recursive Loop

The basic pattern of using and abusing addictive substances is a recursive loop. Normal eating is controlled by  recursive loops with cycles of hunger and satiety. Normal hunger builds slowly and rhythmically, but can be over-ridden by normal activities. If food is not eaten, normal hunger builds in pulses of increasing intensity, but a normal person can carry on with work or play and does not develop distressing symptoms if food is not available.

An abnormal, addictive loop is more intense, exclusive and leads to the wrong results. Cravings are intense feelings of hunger, associated with strong and distracting drives to ingest food or drink. A craving can be distinguished from meaningful hunger if you have already eaten and really do not require more food to satisfy nutritional needs. Cravings may be interpreted as urges to find missing nutrients, but the foods found in compulsive searches are not biologically correct. Instead, food cravings are a symptom of an abnormal recursive loop.  

Cravings build quickly, interrupting other activities. In the abnormal state, missing the next "fix" leads to withdrawal symptoms which can be distressing even within a 2 to 3 hour period. Often the addictive food and drink is not satisfying, and the most dysfunctional people keep eating and drinking with only the briefest interruptions.

Cravings lead to ingestion (or injection)  and may be followed by a brief period of stimulation with increased energy, activity and satisfaction. The gratification is short-lived and is followed by decreasing energy, irritability and renewed cravings. The loop recurs with specific timing; presumably timed by the effective duration of the rain activity of specific substances derived from the food or drug. The nicotine loop in smokers may be in the range of 20 minutes. The timing of food loops is variable and ranges from minutes to hours. Closed-looping locks in recursive and repeating behaviors, cravings, and compulsions, usually with negative consequences, brain dysfunction and ill-health.

Addictive substances are good at inducing recursive loops. Further input of the loop-inducer is achieved through the appetitive system, which drives your behavior toward the goal of getting some more (cravings and compulsions). Once an addictive substance is added to the list of chemicals in your environment you need to get every day, you are at risk plunging into a withdrawal state if the supply is cut off. Food addiction is easier and cheaper than heroin addiction, but it may be more difficult to resolve since the supply may never be cut off except by heroic abstention. 

With continued abstinence from the addictive drugs or food, withdrawal over-reactions settle down to a more stable level of function. With complete abstinence, about 10 days are required for the brain-emitted disturbance to settle. Slow withdrawal of offending drugs and foods reduces the severity of withdrawal. 

However, slow withdrawal is more difficult because the remaining addictive foods or drugs maintain your cravings and compulsions which preclude control over the amount you eat. All addictive cycles face you with the same conundrum: suffer "cold-turkey" withdrawal and get out of the recursive loop quickly or suffer less acute withdrawal and tempt yourself with the difficult, and sometimes impossible, task of controlling compulsive behaviors. Continuing stability of the addict requires complete abstinence from the trigger foods.

Compulsive Eating

Food addiction programs, well-learned on the molecular level after a few repetitions, are linked by classical and operant conditioning to sights, smells, sounds, faces, and places. This conditioned linking mechanism allows circumstances and events to take over as triggers for compulsive eating behaviors. Often the smell or first taste of foods containing addictive substances trigger an eating binge that exceeds voluntary control. This context-dependent addictive behavior must be recognized before behavioral modification succeeds in correcting compulsive eating disorders. 

Recovering addicts may do well in neutral or new environments which are free of the old signals and contexts. However they can be triggered by returning to the cafe, pub, family home or friend's place where they practiced their additive behavior. Even look-alikes or smell-alikes will challenge recovery years after abstinence has been established.

Excessive eating is the most prevalent eating disorder in our society. Overeating is the cause of many adverse health consequences. Food choices play an important role in disorderly eating patterns. Often, people with delayed pattern food allergy or other food-related illness are abnormal eaters. Most people report sugar cravings and/or bingeing. "Sugar" means a wide range of candies, cookies, desserts, baked goods, pop, ice cream, and junk food. Sugar is only one component among many that may cause trouble, but these foods definitely trigger strong cravings and compulsive or binge eating. Cravings for milk, bread, cheese, peanuts, fruit, or potato chips are as common as cravings for sweets. Even people with obvious milk allergy, who have a protective aversion to drinking milk, will compulsively eat cheese or ice cream, thereby maintaining their milk-allergic illness.

http://www.nutramed.com/eatingdisorders/addictionintro.htm

So the other day, folks in the comments were talking about leggings. I'm pretty agnostic about leggings, but the whole discussion (which centered on the fact that it can be *really* hard to look good in leggings) got me thinking about the pervasive idea that women owe it to onlookers to maintain a certain standard of decorativeness.

Now, this may seem strange from someone who writes about pretty dresses (mostly) every day, but: You Don't Have to Be Pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked "female".

I'm not saying that you SHOULDN'T be pretty if you want to. (You don't owe UN-prettiness to feminism, in other words.) Pretty is pleasant, and fun, and satisfying, and makes people smile, often even at you. But in the hierarchy of importance, pretty stands several rungs down from happy, is way below healthy, and if done as a penance, or an obligation, can be so far away from independent that you may have to squint really hard to see it in the haze.

But what does you-don't-have-to-be-pretty mean in practical, everyday terms? It means that you don't have to apologize for wearing things that are held to be "unflattering" or "unfashionable" -- especially if, in fact, they make you happy on some level deeper than just being pretty does. So what if your favorite color isn't a "good" color on you? So what if you are "too fat" (by some arbitrary measure) for a sleeveless top? If you are clean, are covered enough to avoid a citation for public indecency, and have bandaged any open wounds, you can wear any color or style you please, if it makes you happy.

I was going to make a handy prettiness decision tree, but pretty much the end of every branch was a bubble that said "tell complainers to go to hell" so it wasn't much of a tool.

Pretty, it's sad to say, can have a shelf life. It's so tied up with youth that, at some point (if you're lucky), you're going to have to graduate from pretty. Sometimes (as in the case with Diana Vreeland, above, you can go so far past pretty that you end up in stylish, or even striking (or the fashion-y term jolie laide) before you know it. But you won't get there if you think you have to follow all the signs that say "this way to Pretty." You get there by traveling the route you find most interesting. (And to hell with the naysayers who say "But that's not PRETTY"!)

http://www.dressaday.com/2006/10/you-dont-have-to-be-pretty.html

Ladies,

I know will power is not enough for the recovery of those of us suffering from BED, but this is nevertheless an interesting article.  Strengthening a mental muscle can't hurt !

From The New York Times: 

Every day, we are tested. Whether it’s a cookie tempting us from our diets or a warm bed coaxing us to sleep late, we are forced to decide between what we want to do and what we ought to do.

The ability to resist our impulses is commonly described as self-control or willpower. The elusive forces behind a person’s willpower have been the subject of increasing scrutiny by the scientific community trying to understand why some people overeat or abuse drugs and alcohol. What researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.

Studies now show that self-control is a limited resource that may be strengthened by the foods we eat. Laughter and conjuring up powerful memories may also help boost a person’s self-control. And, some research suggests, we can improve self-control through practice, testing ourselves on small tasks in order to strengthen our willpower for bigger challenges.

“Learning self-control produces a wide range of positive outcomes,’’ said Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State University who wrote about the issue in this month’s Current Directions in Psychological Science. “Kids do better in school, people do better at work. Look at just about any major category of problem that people are suffering from and odds are pretty good that self-control is implicated in some way.’’

Last month, Dr. Baumeister reported on laboratory studies that showed a relationship between self-control and blood glucose levels. In one study, participants watched a video, but some were asked to suppress smiles and other facial reactions. After the film, blood glucose levels had dropped among those who had exerted self-control to stifle their reactions, but stayed the same among the film watchers who were free to react, according to the report in Personality and Social Psychology Review.

The video watchers were later given a concentration test in which they were asked to identify the color in which words were displayed. The word “red,” for instance, might appear in blue ink. The video watchers who had stifled their responses did the worst on the test, suggesting that their self-control had already been depleted by the film challenge.

But the researchers also found that restoring glucose levels appears to replenish self-control. Study subjects who drank sugar-sweetened lemonade, which raises glucose levels quickly, performed better on self-control tests than those who drank artificially-sweetened beverages, which have no effect on glucose.

The findings make sense because it’s long been known that glucose fuels many brain functions. Having a bite to eat appears to help boost a person’s willpower, and may explain why smokers trying to quit or students trying to focus on studying often turn to food to sustain themselves.

Consuming sugary drinks or snacks isn’t practical advice for a dieter struggling with willpower. However, the research does help explain why dieters who eat several small meals a day appear to do better at sticking to a diet than dieters who skip meals. “You need the energy from food to have the willpower to exert self-control in order to succeed on your diet,'’ said Dr. Baumeister.

Kathleen Vohs, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, says that in lab studies, self-control is boosted when people conjure up powerful memories of the things they value in life. Laughter and positive thoughts also help people perform better on self-control tasks. Dr. Vohs notes that self-control problems occur because people are caught up “in the moment’’ and are distracted from their long-term goals.

“You want to look good in a bikini next summer but you’re looking at a piece of chocolate cake now,’’ said Dr. Vohs. “When we get people to think about values we move them to the long-term state, and that cools off the tempting stimuli.’’

Finally, some research suggests that people struggling with self-control should start small. A few studies show that people who were instructed for two weeks to make small changes like improving their posture or brushing their teeth with their opposite hand improved their scores on laboratory tests of self-control. The data aren’t conclusive, but they do suggest that the quest for self-improvement should start small. A vow to stop swearing, to make the bed every day or to give up just one food may be a way to strengthen your self-control, giving you more willpower reserves for bigger challenges later.

“Learning to bring your behavior under control even with arbitrary rules does build character in that it makes you better able to achieve the things you want to achieve later on,'’ said Dr. Baumeister. “Self-control is a limited resource. People make all these different New Year’s resolutions, but they are all pulling off from the same pool of your willpower. It’s better to make one resolution and stick to it than make five.'’

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/how-to-boost-your-willpower/