Emma Wright used to have bulimia. Now she is helping others as a feminist health and body-image coach. She has strong opinions on ‘food addiction’, and women’s internalised shame around food and body image. And who knew that going on a diet will likely lead to weight gain in the long run?
Ever heard of the term ‘food addiction’? Ever wondered if you’re addicted to certain foods – maybe sugar, maybe processed foods? Is ‘food addiction’ really a thing, or is it something else?
“The diet and ‘wellness’ industry has spent decades convincing us that certain foods are dangerous, toxic, and addictive,” says Emma Wright, a health and body-image coach with a Master’s degree and training in trauma-informed cognitive behavioural coaching and intuitive eating. “So if you’ve ever felt out of control with food, it might seem like proof that you must be ‘addicted’ to food.”
Some people believe they’re addicted to sugar, right? “I think people mean they feel out of control with sugar. I don’t think it’s helpful to self-diagnose as a ‘sugar addict’. Food doesn’t act on the brain the way addictive substances do. What people are feeling is the biological backlash of restriction and shame, not an addiction.”
So, what about processed food? “Firstly, no one actually agrees on what ultra-processed foods are. It’s not like alcohol where you know what the addictive substance is.”
Emma says the science on ‘food addiction’ isn’t there and what’s there isn’t clear.
“What worries me is talking about food addiction in the media, or even in a clinical setting, as though it’s a phenomenon in itself rather than a feeling someone has. We see headlines about food addiction, and it’s a great hook. That’s because so many of us want an answer to how to find the control, discipline or willpower we’ve been told is the key to getting food and ultimately weight under control.”
But the “food as addiction” model is scientifically contested, she says.
“There’s disagreement on whether it is a substance addiction or a process addiction. For instance, alcohol is an addictive substance. There’s no evidence of an addictive molecule in food, though I’m not an addiction expert. The other really challenging thing is, if we’re talking about food addiction from a health perspective, what do we mean by health?”
She mentions the Yale Food Addiction Scale. It’s described on its website as “the first measure designed specifically to assess signs of ‘addictive-like’ eating behavior. The YFAS allows for a more systematic examination of the hypothesis that highly processed foods (e.g., French fries, milkshakes) might trigger an addictive process for certain people. The YFAS includes 25 items and translates the diagnostic criteria for substance dependence as stated in the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) to relate to the consumption of calorie-dense foods (e.g., high in refined carbohydrates and fat).”
Emma thinks this ignores the huge and important impact of social conditioning. “Also, the food addiction scores overlap massively with eating disorders. It’s a flashing warning sign.” Up to 97% of people with diagnosed eating disorders score positive for food addiction under the YFAS. “That’s not addressed in the research currently.”
So we should be wary of using the term ‘food addiction’? “I understand that it’s a person’s description of feeling out of control around food. But if someone still says they’re addicted to food, I get curious as to what they mean. Do you have a substance problem? Do you have a process problem? Or are we back to feeling out of control with food?”
“Another thing missing in the research is addressing how weight stigma affects your thoughts about food or your feelings of shame. When women feel ‘addicted’ to food, they’re feeling a collision of biological restriction and cultural shame that they’ve internalised through their lives.”
“Women have had years of messaging telling them that how they look is directly related to their value. There’s the belief that our bodies have to be a certain way in order for us to belong, be valued, get the job. If you don’t match that expectation, you often experience shame.”
The shaming, she says, is both implicit and explicit. “We’re given [positive] attention when we lose weight, so that’s an explicit example. And we’ve heard people talk about people who put on weight, like ‘they should get themselves sorted’.”
“We say to ourselves ‘we should be able to get this sorted’, right’? But you start to realise that discipline, control and willpower are only ever short-term. Then you run out of it. So there are cycles. Our bodies are naturally wired against restriction and starvation.”
“For humans, restriction has a massive impact on food noise. As soon as you tell someone they can’t have something, they want it. So as soon as you create restriction in your mind, your biology doesn’t know the difference between ‘I want to be a dress size smaller to go to my friend’s wedding’ and ‘there is a threat to my life because food is not as available as it was’.” She says we need to be more certain that we’re not confusing the effect of food restriction with ‘proof’ of ‘food addiction’.
“In our society we believe that if we can’t control what we eat and can’t control our size, there’s something fundamentally wrong with us. So if we gain weight we may not want to spend time with family, go out with friends or go to that wedding because it’s ‘God, I’m overweight’.” This is what the diet industry is responsible for.”
“Some women who come to me have been dieting for 50 years. They started new diets because someone said, ‘this is the way to do it. You had got the wrong mix of protein, fat, carbohydrate’ or the wrong time of day.”
‘But eventually all diets fail. We don’t have a way of making human beings thinner in the long run. The research shows that only about 5% of people who go on a diet and lose weight actually keep it off. Those 5% tend to be people who were slim, but had something happen where, for instance, they were very sedentary. The other 95% of people are either bigger than they’d like to be because of genetics, stress, or they’ve dieted themselves into a bigger and bigger body.”
“We know, with great predictability, that the best way to make yourself bigger in the long run is to diet in the short term. So if I wanted to be 10 kilos bigger by 2030, I would start dieting now.” Emma will never go back to restricting what she eats.
“I have gone from having an eating disorder – bulimia – to being a person who doesn’t think much about food at all. No one would have known I had an eating disorder at the time. I had people and doctors saying I could lose a few kilos, without ever asking me about or screening me for a [potential] eating disorder. The first thing I thought about in the morning was food and weight. I found getting dressed challenging because I felt everything looked terrible, so it was a constant battle of clothes having to be flattering. I’d feel shame, and tell myself that if I could just be thinner, I could stop thinking about it.”
Bulimia led to shame. “Deep shame, and deep secrecy, which leads to more shame. I was 39 before I could form a proper romantic relationship, because I was so deeply ashamed of myself.”
How did she start to recover? “Learning that what I was feeling about food and my body wasn’t a personal flaw. It was actually a normal response to living in a culture that disrespects bigness and a life of severely restricting food. That gave me huge relief. First I found intuitive eating, then I found weight-neutral healthcare and both those things made a bit of a difference. Then I found body-image coaching from a trauma perspective, and cognitive behavioural coaching. These days I can eat freely, see photos of myself and go to social functions without food and body thoughts haranguing me. I’d love to see every woman have that freedom.”
To rewind briefly, what is weight-neutral healthcare? “It’s healthcare delivered outside of a weight perspective. The focus is on health behaviours rather than measuring weight, which is largely out of our control. It’s very hard to find weight-neutral health providers in New Zealand. But they’re becoming more prevalent, particularly in the States and the U.K.”
It’s rare to find coaches like her: coaches using trauma-informed CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), challenging internalised anti-fat bias, intuitive eating, and thinking – from a feminist perspective. “I believe the way we’re socialised as women has such a big impact on what we’re indoctrinated to believe, and once we really get insight into that, we get so much empowerment, and improvements in our health.”
