#moderationfalsehood

When I was in college, my friends and I had a long-standing joke about going to the bathroom at parties. The lines were often so long to use a bathroom that we would wait until the last possible moment to have to use the rest room because once you “broke the seal,” you’d have to pee much more often.

I find that food addiction can be a lot like that. I can stick to my food plan for a long time, but if I “break the seal,” then all bets are off. It’s like I cannot stop eating.

Once the abstinence seal is broken, the food comes fast and furious. It’s as though nothing can stop the mental obsession with the food. Worse than that, it feels as though I have no control over NOT eating. I just forage until I find something (anything!) to eat.

Then it can take hours if not days to find tape strong enough to reset the seal.

That’s why “moderation” doesn’t work for food addicts (or any kind of addict for that matter). The idea of an alcoholic or drug addict using alcohol or cocaine “in moderation” is ludicrous, yet we still seem to think that this is a good plan for food addicts.

It is not.

Because once you break the seal, it’s a long, difficult road to reestablish food sobriety. Why tempt fate and repeat pattern after pattern when the end result is always the same?