How to know if you are a glutton or an addict?

Are you a glutton or a food addict?

How do you know?

Have you sold your birthright for a meal lately, as Esau of the Bible did?

Most of us were born with glorious potential, but also with that particular something that blocks us from reaching that potential. Ask yourself what is it that reveals the weaker, short-sighted aspect of your personality. Food is mine. Is it yours?

Does the idea of eating only one-half cup of ice cream make you mad? You might need to consider your piggish ways.

If the ADA’s notions about portions leave you starved and frustrated, your colleagues and siblings may soon be calling you garbage gut.

If the idea of eating just one is truly incomprehensible, you may be sealing your fate with your fork.

Are you often voracious? Insatiable? Ravenous?

But here’s the important question: Does it matter? Is your weight or BMI or how you look in your clothes interfering with your living up to that glorious potential you were born for? Do you care?

Desperately?

Well, here’s a well-kept secret. If you care now, you will still care in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. Caring about the consequences of gluttony and/or food addiction rarely goes away. Putting food first in our lives may not cost us the right to lead a country, but it certainly can cost us many happy times.

What are the consequences?

Fat. Sadness because you feel shame about not being able to control your eating.

Fat. Depression because over-eating has robbed you of having fun. Again.

Fat. Self-condemnation because something compels you to behave in self-destructive ways and it spills over into every area of your life. People assume you’re weak. Undisciplined. The emotional consequences of gluttony present themselves long before health concerns do.

If your hips are heavy, your heart probably is too. When the sin of gluttony or the disease of addiction lies at your door, it blocks the opening of many other doors. If belly bulge is stealing your joy now, you won’t feel any better about it next year or the year after that. It will go on stealing from you until pretty soon, it has stolen your whole life. How many parties does a girl have to miss before she gets it? How many fashion trends and fads does she have to pass up because her portly profile resembles a boiled egg?

But what can you do about it? It isn’t as though you haven’t tried already. You’ve been on all the diets. One or more worked but you didn’t stay on it. All that advice about determination and perseverance hasn’t done a bit of good. Why not? Because the gluttonous alter ego in us doesn’t care about fashion trends. She likes to eat. What she wants. When she wants. And as much as she wants. And God help the one who comes between her and her Cherry Cordial ice cream. Addiction is sneaky.

There is always a moment when we choose to care about the food more than anything else. Like Esau when he sold his birthright for a bowl of stew. He was hungry and he didn’t care that he was supposed to inherit a fortune.

Getting to the truth about gluttony and addiction
Why do we fail in attempt after attempt to permanently change our eating behavior, and likewise our appearance? We tell ourselves we failed yet again because of some logical sounding excuse, but the real reason we don’t stay on diets is gluttony. Period. End of sentence. Or is it? Is it gluttony or addiction?

Think about the last time you pigged out on something that made you feel crummy about doing it. Gluttony masquerades as fatigue, stress, even illness. So does addiction. Someone who is not a glutton or an addict will not use those excuses to stuff herself. Normal people might occasionally eat too much because their plate is too large, or the ambience too inviting, but never because of some inner compulsion. But I am not normal. Even though there is always a moment when I could choose differently, I occasionally don’t. I fall off the chow wagon yet again. And I do it often enough to keep my two body hovering two good sizes larger than I’d like. No amount of distorted logic can account for the regularity with which I sabotage my best intentions. Plainly, self-will runs riot. We are defined by our actions, not our thoughts or feelings.

What’s the difference between a glutton and a food addict?
A food addict might love the taste of food but hates the results of overeating. When a food addict overeats her whole life begins to spin out of control and the addiction takes over. She begins to act out in other ways. Control issues show up. A glutton loves food despite what it does. A glutton just accepts the results of overeating as part of life and does not care about getting it under control until health problems threaten. And she doesn't care enough about other people to try to control them.

Hi, my name is Lin and I'm an addict.