They say addiction starts with a broken promise. You promise not to have a third drink and then you wake up the next morning with no memory of falling asleep in your own barf. You promise not to have a cigarette and then you’re bumming just one more from a friend. You promise not to overeat on Thanksgiving and then you go back for four pieces of cake and a piece of pie.

The fact that you have to make the promise shows that you have a problem. I’ve never had to promise not to take another drink because I don’t care much for alcohol. It makes my headache worse and I’ve never thought the buzz was worth all the calories. There’s a bottle of vodka that has been in my freezer since July and it will probably still be there next year. That’s how I know I’m not an alcoholic. However, I have often promised myself that I will only eat half the meal at a restaurant and then eaten the whole plate. I’ve promised [...]

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It’s Girl Scout cookie time and I have yet to eat a Thin Mint or a Samoa or a Tagalong. (Mmmm, Tagalongs.) I wish I could only buy a couple cookies at a time because I don’t trust myself with an entire box. I’m trying to visualize a world in which I only eat 2 or 3 crunchy cookies of mint chocolate goodness a day even though there’s a whole box sitting in my cupboard. Honestly, it’s easier to imagine a world where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama bake Girl Scout cookies together while singing Eminem songs. As unlikely as the second scenario is, I can actually imagine it in my head. The first situation, not so much.

Which brings me back to the idea of food addiction, something I’ve been pondering on and off the past couple months ever since I read that book, Hungry by Allen Zadoff. I’m still not sure what to make of the concept of food addiction, though Zadoff is a firm believer in it. However, reading that book did [...]

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Sometimes healthy living is so easy for me. I eat my snacks at the scheduled hours. I have a salad for dinner and genuinely enjoy it. I walk past boxes of Girl Scout cookies in the office kitchen without reaching my hand out to grab a bite and it’s not hard at all. Then there are nights when I’m sitting in the Marsh parking lot at 8:00 at night thinking, “There is something seriously wrong with me.” Because it is not normal to eat a box of ice cream sandwiches, two donuts, God-only-knows-how-many bowls of oatmeal, and a lot of other stuff I can’t remember two weeks later, and still want to drive to the grocery store to buy a stuffed-crust pizza.

Thankfully, it’s been so long since I bought a Tombstone stuffed-crust pizza that they seem to have stopped making them, or my Marsh just doesn’t stock them, so that was one small chip of the iceberg my personal Titanic avoided. I did wander around the freezer section for literally 15 minutes trying to decide [...]

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