Healing Food Addiction: Why Discipline Doesn’t Work

"In your view, what is causing your overeating?"

This is a question I often ask clients at the beginning of coaching, as I'm curious the way they personally view their compulsive behavior with food.

Often, they reply things like,

"I just need better focus and discipline."

"I don't have good willpower and that’s the reason I overeat."

We believe that the issue is a lack of willpower or discipline, and we then try to force ourselves to just behave differently.

We force ourselves into diets and eating restrictions, we berate ourselves when we aren't perfect, and we minimize our food and drink addictions to simply being, well, an evidence of our failure and how pathetic we are.

I understand because this is exactly how I used to treat myself and talk with myself.

But the thing is, you can’t just force yourself to be different with food. Willpower doesn’t actually work long-term. You might be able to discipline yourself to better eating for a short while, but it will never be permanent and it will always take a ton of energy to do.

This is why most people who diet can't sustain their diets for long, and most people who lose weight gain it back: because you can't willpower your way to acting differently with food.

Instead, we must recognize that compulsive eating is the tip of an iceberg, or the end domino in a domino chain. In my 15 years of studying food addiction and coaching people in it for many years, in every single case, there are deeper reasons emotionally as to why a person develops this compulsion.

Forcing different behavior will not heal food addiction.

True healing involves finding and feeling through the root cause of why we have food addiction in the first place.

Before you beat yourself up for feeling like your willpower or discipline is poor, consider that there’s another direction you can focus on, which would benefit you far more. Be gentle with yourself and understand that something must have happened in your life, and particularly in your childhood, to create this.

Force and willpower will not give us the healing we seek, but compassion, curiosity, emotional openness, and emotional experimentation can!

Photo by Kevin Wenning