Jeanine, and I'm a food addict. Whether you care to believe those words or not is up to you. For me, they are a reality. For me food is more than fuel. Certain types of food can send me on a crave-binge-loathe roller coaster for days. One bite is all it takes. Sometimes just the SMELL of certain foods can do it.
Chocolate
Fast Food (especially Wendy's spicy chicken sandwiches with a bowl of chili on the side)
Chinese potstickers
Lasagna (all that cheese... ohmygoodness)
There are others, but those are my Big Four. The ones that I could inhale heapfuls of every day without blinking. And eating just one bite - just one - can lead to craving them again and again for days. Just writing about them makes me want to send my husband on a Wendy's run right now.
The food addiction goes beyond craving certain foods, however. It comes with a desperate desire to hide how much I'm eating. I'll sit with my family at dinner and eat a modest amount. Then later, when everyone is asleep, or occupied doing something else, I'll head back into the kitchen under the guise of say... doing the dishes... and clean off whatever my kids left on their plates. I manifests in the form of sneaking pieces of Halloween candy into the bathroom with me and devouring them, then burying the wrappers in the trash can, or flushing them down the toilet so no one will know. It rears its ugly head in the way that I'm thinking about what I'm going to make for breakfast as I lay down to go to sleep at night, and that I'm thinking about dinner before I've sat down to eat lunch. The next meal or snack is never far from my thoughts.
If that doesn't sound like an addict to you, then I don't know what will.
