The term “addiction” can be applied
into so many things, such as when a person can’t stop doing something or do
something semi-unconscious, like their body is trained to do it. Food addiction
is something that people don’t really consider as addiction. However, food
addiction is something that is consistently happening and being advertised all
over the place. One example of food addiction being promoted is through the use
of stress, depression, and so forth. People nowadays use food as an excuse to
destress, especially when it comes to sweets. Ice cream, chocolate, any kind of
sweet is brought up when someone is stressed or depressed. Based on my personal
experience, whenever I talk to my friends about being to stress they always
bring up something that involves eating something sweet like going to Dairy Queen
to grab some blizzard in order to de stress. Another thing that I noticed being
advertised so much is eating ice cream after a break-up to help you calm down.
People are basically creating a placebo in order to help them, but that could
lead to addiction because once a similar experience or feeling sparks, that
feeling of wanting to eat something to relieve you comes back. The placebo that
people are creating for themselves is a form of pleasure that they get “addicted”
to.
Society does not acknowledge food
addiction as something legitimate because they are comparing it to other
general addiction that has a large side effect to people’s lives. But food
addiction can also harm people’s health and can lead to even greater harm or
even death the person. So, when can we start acknowledging this addiction?
I'm not ashamed to say that I was one of those girls who used food as a coping mechanism after a break up. I never saw it as a problem because tv shows and movies usually followed a break up with girls hanging out, eating ice cream and other various desserts, and talking about how crappy the other person was in the relationship. For me, it started with just one small tub of ice cream, then it lead to me eating sweets every day for a couple months, to me eating salty snacks, to consistently eating larger and larger portions. I didn't consider my eating habits to be an issue until I started to see my weight gain. It was then that I acknowledged I had a problem. I agree with the statement you made about food addiction being harmful to a person because they're risking obesity, high blood pressure, heart attacks, and so on.
ReplyDelete