Joan Ifland, PhD, MBA, FACN

Issue No. 31 | Brought to you by the Addiction Reset Community – ARC

Unlocking the secrets of processed food addiction and guiding you to find freedom from food and weight obsession.

Many people who struggle with overeating or fail to cut back on processed foods despite their best efforts, still believe that this is due to their lack of willpower. They live with shame and self-judgement, believing that they are simply “not trying hard enough”. 

Big Food and dieting industries have thrived on the vicious weight-gain-weight-loss-cycle that many find themselves caught in. 

Awareness, diagnosis and management of processed food addiction is still relatively low, with medical professionals, health coaches and society at large, still not acknowledging processed food addiction as a “real addiction”. 

In the years spent by Dr Joan Ifland (PhD) while researching as the lead author and editor of the textbook Processed...

Issue No. 30 | Brought to you by the Addiction Reset Community – ARC

Unlocking the secrets of processed food addiction and guiding you to find freedom from food and weight obsession.

Following on from the last issue of this newsletter,  we will continue to answer the 6 most commonly asked questions in relation to ‘emotional eating’. 

1. What is emotional eating?
2. Is emotional eating an issue in the absence of processed food?
3. Why is it specifically food that I have chosen to deal with my emotions?
4. How can I stop feeling like a failure?
5. How do you resolve emotional eating?
6. How can I stop emotional eating permanently?

In the last issue, we provided insights on the subject of ‘emotional eating’ based on the research of Dr Joan Ifland, the lead author and editor of the textbook Processed Food Addiction: Foundations, Assessment and Management. Here are new answers to the last three questions.

Question 4: How can I stop...

Issue No. 29 | Brought to you by the Addiction Reset Community – ARC

Unlocking the secrets of processed food addiction and guiding you to find freedom from food and weight obsession.

Over the last seven years of engaging with recovering food addicts around the world on our Food Addiction Education Facebook group, 6 important questions have emerged regarding ‘emotional eating’. 

The 6 most commonly asked questions in relation to ‘emotional eating’ are:

1. Is emotional eating an issue in the absence of processed food?
2. Why is it specifically food that I have chosen to deal with my emotions?
3. How can I stop feeling like a failure?
4. How do you resolve emotional eating?
5. How can I stop emotional eating permanently?

The old ideas about emotional eating have been disproven by research. In researching and writing the textbook Processed Food Addiction: Foundations, Assessment and Management, Dr Joan Ifland looked at almost 8000...

Issue No. 28 | Brought to you by the Addiction Reset Community – ARC

Unlocking the secrets of processed food addiction and guiding you to find freedom from food and weight obsession.

Have you ever experienced a total loss of control that leads to overeating despite your intention to cut back? 

Have you witnessed yourself behaving like a programmed robot, responding to the urge to eat processed foods despite your best efforts to abstain from them?  

Or have you found yourself overeating just to cope with stress and manage your emotions, despite not being hungry?

Observing yourself switching to this almost ‘auto-pilot’ mode, where you are seemingly unable to stop yourself from eating the foods you intend to avoid, can be very frightening. It can also lead to self-blame and feelings of frustration or shame. Let’s take a closer look at what’s really going on in your brain.

In previous issues of this...

Issue No. 27 | Brought to you by the Addiction Reset Community – ARC

Unlocking the secrets of processed food addiction and guiding you to find freedom from food and weight obsession.

Recovery from processed food addiction requires vigilance and management of triggers and cues that lead to eating processed foods. Repeated relapse and loss of control can be frustrating and is often the result of being unaware of how to identify and manage triggers and cues.

Cues are stimuli in the environment that lead to developing a routine that is the basis for a habit. On the other side of the routine is a reward. Cues, routines, and rewards go hand in hand with creating a habit. Triggers are stimuli that prompt people to think about related things. They are, quite simply, reminders to engage in a specific behavior.

The research shows that relapse is not simply due to a lack of willpower or commitment. Loss of control despite the desire to achieve abstinence from...

Issue No. 26 | Brought to you by the Addiction Reset Community – ARC

Unlocking the secrets of processed food addiction and guiding you to find freedom from food and weight obsession.

Having an accurate perspective of the severity of processed food addiction removes the cloak of self-blame and shame and helps you to consider the right level of recovery messaging and support that may be needed for recovery. 

For far too long, the focus has been on weight loss dieting with little attention being given to the underlying causes of uncontrolled eating. Understanding that you are dealing with a severe addiction is a major step in your quest to take back control of your food and save yourself from diet-related diseases.

Here are 10 reasons why processed food addiction is most commonly, a severe addiction:

1. Addiction in childhood 

Important factors include:

• sugar
• fat and salt combinations in children’s foods
• children experiencing more...

Issue No. 25 | Brought to you by the Addiction Reset Community – ARC

Unlocking the secrets of processed food addiction and guiding you to find freedom from food and weight obsession.

For many people, processed food addiction is severe and much harder to put into remission than alcohol and other drugs.  

Several factors may contribute to why food addiction is difficult for you to overcome:

1. You have lost and regained weight.
2. You can remember craving or longing for processed food as a child.
3. You overeat sugar, artificial sweeteners, flour, gluten, excessive salt, dairy, processed fat or caffeine and tend to eat these in combinations.
4. You overeat in reaction to a variety of stimuli such as temptation, advertising, relationships, fatigue or stress.
5. You often eat at restaurants, fast food outlets, and convenience stores.
6. Your household members eat processed food in front of you or leave them out where you can see them.
7. Most of your friends and family eat...

Issue No. 24 | Brought to you by the Addiction Reset Community – ARC

Unlocking the secrets of processed food addiction and guiding you to find freedom from food and weight obsession.

The severity of processed food addiction is often underplayed with the use of phrases like “over-eating”, “emotional eating”, “sweet tooth” or “stress eating”. Framing the problem properly can be the first step to finding solutions.

Research shows that the same signs are present in processed food addiction, that are present in alcohol and drug addiction. 

Modelled on the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for substance addiction, here are 11 signs that you can use to self-assess for processed food addiction:

1. You’ve eaten despite not intending to
2. You’ve tried to cut back and have failed
3. You spend a lot of time thinking about, planning, getting, eating and recovering from processed foods
4. You crave...

Issue No. 23 | Brought to you by the Addiction Reset Community – ARC

Unlocking the secrets of processed food addiction and guiding you to find freedom from food and weight obsession.

In this issue, we take a closer look at why we lose control over our food... against our will and much to our dismay.  

Science is increasingly focused on the role of mirror neurons in our decisions about what to eat. It seems that these powerful neurons in the brain can direct us to do what the people around us are doing... no matter what. 

Have you ever had the experience of watching someone eat something and then getting an intense craving for that food? Maybe you haven't thought about that food for a long time, but suddenly you can't get it off your mind. Those thoughts could be coming from your mirror neurons. Those mirror neurons might think that eating the same thing as the other person could save your life, even if the opposite is true. So...

Issue No. 22 | Brought to you by the Addiction Reset Community – ARC

Unlocking the secrets of processed food addiction and guiding you to find freedom from food and weight obsession.

So many people around the world suffer in the painful despair of facing mental health challenges. While some conditions may require a clinical diagnosis and treatment, it may surprise you to know that research reveals that processed food alters brain function.  

Scientific studies reveal that processed foods are associated with the following direct and indirect aspects of mental health:

• Anxiety: Processed foods activate brain cells which release a signal that tells the adrenal glands to release adrenalin. With extra adrenalin floating around the body, we become anxious and angry. 
• Depression: Processed foods cause reward brain cells to release extra dopamine. So much extra dopamine causes the dopamine pathway to 'wear out.' The technical term is down-regulate....