A Food Freedom Quiz

Are you a healthy person except for your addiction to food?

Many people just can't stop eating, but not because they suffer bulimia. People who have bulimia tend also to have problems with insight, error detection, and deferred gratification. Bulimia tends to be associated with changes in the brain that affect a set of intellectual abilities called metacognition. People who have bulimia can't "look at themselves" and change their course of action.

People who are food-addicted aren't lacking intellectual capacity. They fully understand the consequences of eating too much. They just have a strong drive to eat to much regardless of weight gain and all the problems that go along with it. It's not that they don't want to exert control. The problem is that they can't without appropriate help.

Are you addicted to food? Here are five simple questions that can give you a good idea of whether addiction is driving your weight issues.

1. Think back to the six-month period in which you put on the most weight (except during pregnancy).

• Give yourself one point if you remember being able to eat what you wanted and quit even if you still had food on your plate.
• Give yourself two points if you remember eating everything on your plate, but not needing to order seconds or fill up your plate again.
• Give yourself three points if you remember eating every morsel off your plate, and filling it up again.,
• Give yourself four points if you remember eating plate after plate of food until there wasn't anything left to eat in your kitchen or you ran out of money to order more food in a restaurant.

2.  Still thinking about the same six-month period in which you put on the most weight (again, except during pregnancy):

• Give yourself one point if you remember not thinking a lot about food.
• Give yourself two points if you remember watching lots of cooking shows on TV and reading cooking magazines, and trying out recipes as your kitchen skills, time, equipment, and money permitted.
• Give yourself three points if you remember being obsessed with food, reading about it, watching programs on television about it, compelled to try out everything you saw on a cooking show in your kitchen.
• Give yourself four points if you joined a fine dining club or paid for fine dining meals with credit cards, spending more money than you could afford.

3. Now think about your cravings for specific foods during that six-month period of your life in which you put on the most weight.

• Give yourself one point if you remember being able to eat whatever you had around the house without needing to go out and buy special ingredients for every meal.
• Give yourself two points if you remember going to the grocery shop or supermarket more often than three times a week to pick out especially tasty ingredients.
• Give yourself three points if you remember going to buy groceries every day so you could make constantly changing meals.
• Give yourself four points if you remember needing to eat at different restaurants (even fast food restaurants) more than once a day just to get something different.

The quiz continues on the next page.

What Is a Food Addiction? This Weight Gain Quiz Tells You

Continuing with the food addiction quiz:

4. Consider the amount of time you spent thinking about food, diets, or weight loss every day during the six-month period in which you gained the most weight.

• Give yourself one point if you had other things in your life that kept your mind off food.
• Give yourself two points if planning, cooking, and eating meals took more than two hours a day, or if a large part of your day was consumed by cooking for others.
• Give yourself three points if food became your primary hobby, and you cooked for yourself. 
• Give yourself four points if you took time off work for food, preparing it, eating it, or dieting to lose the weight you gained from it.

5. Finally, looking back on the six-month period of your life you gained the most weight, think about food binges.

• Give yourself one point if you never ate until you absolutely could not eat any more during those six months. (With an exception for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Eating too much on these holidays is never a good thing, but it is not clearly motivated by food addiction.)
• Give yourself two points if you binged on food once a month or less.
• Give yourself three points if you binged on food once a week or less.
• Give yourself four points if you binged on food more often that once a week, eating until you simply could not eat any more.

Low scores on this quiz indicate food freedom and weight gain caused by health issues other than food addiction. However, if your points total just eight or more, you probably have an issue with food addiction. What can you do about this problem?

Just as no one is addicted to every illicit drug, for instance, no one is addicted to Valium and oxycodone and heroin and caffeine and nicotine and methamphetamine, almost no one is addicted to all four of the major addictive food groups:

• Foods that are high in both fat and refined carbohydrates/sugar, such as chocolate cake and French fries.
• Foods that are high in fat but low in refined carbohydrates/sugar, such as bacon and thin-crust pizza.
• Foods that are high refined carbohydrates/sugar but low in fat, such as sugar-sweetened soft drinks and bread or pasta without sauce.
• Foods that are low in fat and low in carbohydrates but that can contribute to weight gain when eaten in excess (as on a sumo wrestler's diet), such as chicken and Brussels sprouts.

Nearly every food addict has one special problem group. The answer isn't to cut back on foods in that group. The answer is to eliminate foods in that group. It's not unusual to need professional help to overcome a food addiction similar to that needed to overcome a drug addiction, only without the legal overtones.

What else can you do to manage a food addiction? Brain stimulation usually helps. Any other sensual activity steers your thoughts away from eating. And for those with $500 to $1000 to spare, transcranial pulsating magnetic stimulation devices, essentially pulsating magnets that are worn on the scalp, actually help in most cases. Just be sure that your buy any pulsating magnetic device with a satisfaction-guaranteed, no questions asked refund policy.