An interesting virtual get-together and meeting of minds will take place in August, and Dr. Pretlow will be a participant (more on that later). This is not surprising, because the basic ideas are derived from the document “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” authored by Robert Pretlow & Suzette Glasner.
There is a great deal of interest in developing ways to diminish the cues that lead to overeating: the pervasive intrusion of advertising; the ubiquitous presence of fast-food outlets; the holidays on which people feel compelled to eat for social approval; and other insidious factors.
But getting rid of cues, triggers and temptations can only go so far. There is a number of reasons, some of them having to do with American freedoms. After a certain point, people begin to push back, muttering such phrases as “nanny state” and “government overreach.” But the aversion is not only to political involvement.
Basic human nature prompts children to start saying “No!” at an astonishingly early age. As kids grow, they can develop unrelenting stubbornness when being told what is good for them by parents, teachers, partners, or even healthcare professionals. The resistance trait often carries into adulthood. It tags along, as part of the familiar and unexamined luggage we drag through the years and sometimes need to be reminded about, so we can take it to the landfill and dump it in a hole.
The interesting part
There are people on whom cues and triggers do not work. They can look a bag of chips or a chicken wing straight in the eye and be unmoved. What is it about such people? What is their secret? Where does this superhuman ability come from?
If we consider the proposition that the true culprit is stress, the outlook becomes more hopeful, because that can be handled to some extent. If a person isn’t stressed out, cues and triggers have less opportunity to sink their teeth in. Apparently, some folks are simply not constitutionally predisposed to crumbling under stress. As with so many other human problems, there could be a genetic element.
It is also possible that these fortunate individuals have successfully and non-violently removed one or more sources of stress from their lives — and if so, this is also worth looking into. Maybe some folks have learned to cope with stress by cultivating proactive, creative and effective ways to burn off nervous energy. They don’t get overwhelmed and eat themselves into oblivion, because they have developed toolkits. A person can learn a skillset, which is what BrainWeighve is all about.
What to look forward to
The August event, “Consensus Building Workshops on addiction-like symptoms related to consumption of certain foods,” is the creation of four colleagues whose ambitious goal is to persuade the World Health Organization “to include symptoms of addiction related to food, as a disease, in the International Classification of Disease, ICD-11.”
It will consist of a number of online workshops on the subject of food addiction as a disease.
(To be continued…)
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” Springer.com, 06/22/22
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