Why can we sabotage ourselves?
Are addictions disease or coping?

By David McElroy · November 10, 2017

It happened again this week. Like a never-ending nightmare, I made the same horrible choice I’ve made before — with the same results.

For most people, the idea that eating could be an addiction sounds silly. For those who have experienced the patterns I have, though, it’s something that can feel both inexplicable and inevitable.

It wasn’t until I had a political friend who was a recovering alcoholic that I realized the patterns I go through with food are very similar to what any addict experiences. That shocked me at the time and it’s led me to think and read quite a bit about it over the years. The knowledge and insight haven’t stopped me from doing things, though — more often than I’d like to admit — that I know are unhealthy for me.

It’s never about the food. It’s always about the feelings that the food can mask.

That’s what happened Thursday night. This was a busy week and I tried to keep my mind focused on the things I needed to get done. I had successfully concluded a month-long project on Wednesday and I was happy about that narrow subject. But in the midst of being happy about something I’d done, that old gnawing emptiness got louder and louder. Again.

When I start feeling that kind of craving — for love, for connection, for something I need to fill the void — it’s as though there is an intense pressure that builds inside. It’s hard to put it into words, but it’s like a silent scream that feels emotionally painful.

It took me many years to even be able to describe it this well — and I know this description is still not quite accurate. I don’t know how to put it into words. I just know it’s intense and it’s inescapable when it starts.

When I eat at such times, I’m driven to eat a lot of sugar. (A half gallon of ice cream is my favorite way to get a “hit.”) Something about the experience dulls the pain in my heart. I have no idea why I taught myself this pattern. I just know it soothes or dulls the emotional pain — even as it creates physical problems that are just as real. It’s led to weight gain for years and high blood pressure recently. I even fear it could lead to diabetes. It’s a form of slow suicide.

So what is this? Is it a disease?

I don’t want to argue with people who like to label addictions as diseases, but I think it’s inaccurate to call them diseases. A disease is something that simply happens to you physically — something you can’t control. It’s caused by a germ or a bug or a mutant cell.

An addiction is a coping mechanism of some sort. It’s not a disease. It’s a pattern your mind has evolved to protect you from a feeling that you don’t know how to deal with otherwise. It’s something like a safety valve for the emotional mind — something that takes some pressure off in a crisis — but that safety valve might end up causing even more problems as you turn to it over and over again.

I recognize the feeling which I’m trying to avoid. It’s something I feel most days. I’ve talked quite a bit about this need for missing love, understanding and acceptance. And it can even be demonstrated with clock-like precision, depending on the state of my relationships. When I feel loved and understood by someone, I suddenly lose the need to eat the wrong things. Food is just something to fuel my body at those times. I naturally start dropping weight and feeling healthier.

But when love disappears, the emptiness returns — and the addiction returns.

I’ve come a long way in understanding this over the years, but it’s become far more intense in the last few years. It’s like a cage for me. It’s a cage that my mind builds in an effort to keep me safe from something I can’t control. It protects me from the immediate pain, but at a huge price.

My friends don’t really like hearing about this anymore — because there’s nothing new to say — but if you see me heading toward the ice cream aisle once again, you know what’s going on. And you know that I have no idea how I’m going to stop this pattern that’s slowly killing me.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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