My relationship with food was always a weird one. As a child, it was "you must clear your plate, think of all the starving children in *insert impoverished country in the media at the time* who would be grateful for that food!" Part of me would have been happy to parcel it up and send it to them and part of me secretly felt that they would be just as disgusted by butter beans out of a tin as I was. When my mother was going through a tough time emotionally (which was most days, as a general rule) she would come home from work with a carrier bag loaded with bars of chocolate and proceed to demolish them. Her weight fluctuated wildly, she would get bigger and bigger, and then go on some ridiculous diet or other that would shrink her to virtually invisible, and then revert to type and pile it back on again. She's now got type 2 diabetes and still has massive issues with food. At the same time as all this was going on, I was copping for the occasional comment about my "puppy fat" and later after I lost my grandfather "he would have wanted you to lose weight". The teenage rebel in me decided that actually he would have wanted me to be happy, created the chemical formula that "junk food = happiness" and promptly piled on significant amounts of weight.
It has taken me a long time to readjust that way of thinking, and even now, it isnt totally gone - but it is far more controlled. When I am due on, I could eat my way through a supermarket chocolate aisle, but I have come too far to allow that to happen, so I only allow myself small "fixes". The problem with food addiction, is that you can never go cold turkey on it permanently. You could do it short term, with a VCLD, in order to lose some weight, but you still have to face it at some point. In order to exist, we need to eat. You can give up cigarettes, you can give up alcohol, or addictive drugs, and still live without them, but you cannot give up food forever, and to change from a binge eater into a person who eats healthily, takes some serious emotional adjustment and a recognition that perfection is an unattainable state, but that there is a happy medium that can be found and worked with successfully.
