You Don’t Look Like an Addict. That’s Part of the Problem.

The most socially acceptable addiction in the world — and what it’s costing the people inside it

My grandmother was my first drug pusher.

I don’t say that to be cruel. I say it because it’s accurate. She loved me with her whole heart. She also handed me the substances that would run my nervous system for the next fifty years. Both of those things were happening at the same time — which is exactly why this is so hard to see, and why naming it matters.

The day I realized I was an addict, the picture in my head looked nothing like her, and it looked nothing like me.

The addict in my head had sallow skin and rotting teeth. The addict was twitching on a sidewalk. The addict was the embarrassment at the office Christmas party who couldn’t stop, the car crash, the family destroyer, the cautionary tale.

I was a functioning, contributing, presentable woman with a relationship with food that had quietly run my life for decades. The grandmother who loved me had given me my first taste. And I didn’t fit the picture.

So either the picture was wrong, or I was lying to myself about what I was.

Both, as it turned out. But the picture being wrong is what this post is about.

• • •

The hierarchy nobody admits exists

There is a hierarchy in our culture about which addictions count as real. Heroin, meth, cocaine — legible. Real. Serious. Alcohol gets celebrated in moderation and condemned in excess, with the line drawn somewhere that conveniently keeps most of the wine industry’s customers safely on this side of it. Cigarettes used to be celebrated. Now they’re stigmatized but at least acknowledged.

And then there’s food.

Food doesn’t appear on most people’s lists at all.

You can have an addiction that drives more medical disability and chronic disease than alcohol and cigarettes combined, and the culture won’t just refuse to call it an addiction — it will actively pressure you to keep engaging with the substances. Bring the casserole. Bake the cookies. Make the birthday cake. You deserve this. Treat yourself. Life is too short.

The same neurological hijacking that gets the heroin user pity and the alcoholic concern gets the food addict applause.

That’s not an accident. The substances were engineered to be culturally invisible. The marketing was paid for. The "treat yourself" language was focus-grouped. The whole apparatus was built to make sure you never asked the question I asked that day in my kitchen: what is this actually doing to me?

• • •

The cruelty of the setup

You already know this part. You’ve lived it. But it deserves to be named out loud, because too many of you have been carrying it alone.

You were conditioned from childhood to associate these substances with love. Birthday cake means you matter. The casserole means someone took care of you. Holiday tables groan with proof that you belong. Your nervous system learned — accurately, brilliantly — that these substances and these feelings travel together.

And then.

After decades of that conditioning, the body eventually sends the bill. The metabolic syndrome. The Type 2 diabetes. The joint failure. The heart disease. The fatty liver. The cancers now linked to chronic metabolic dysfunction.

And here’s the cruelest part. The alcoholic can hide it for a long time. The pill addict can hide it for a long time. The smoker can hide it for years. The food addict’s struggle is visible from across the room.

The body becomes the archive of every NF product the culture pressured into it. And then the same culture turns and shames the archive.

You get pressured into the food. Then shamed for the body that resulted.

The food was love until your body became evidence of failure.

That’s the whiplash. That’s what your community has been carrying. That’s the thing nobody says out loud.

I’m saying it now.

• • •

Why the shame loop makes everything harder

Shame isn’t just emotionally painful. It’s biologically active.

It activates the same nervous system states that drive food-seeking in the first place. Threat. Aloneness. Activation without resource. The exact internal state your brain has spent decades learning to solve with NF.

So the cultural shame loop creates a closed circuit: I feel ashamed of my body. My nervous system activates. My brain reaches for the substance that has reliably solved this state for fifty years. I consume the substance. My body changes. The culture shames the change. The activation gets louder. The loop repeats.

And because your addiction isn’t culturally legible, you can’t access the language, the community, or the framework that exists for people whose addictions the culture has decided to take seriously. You’re alone with it. You think it’s a personal moral failure rather than what it actually is — a sophisticated, decades-long exploitation of a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do.

This is what Sarah Peyton calls alarmed aloneness — being activated and alone with that activation. It is one of the most painful states a human can be in. And the cultural hierarchy of addiction creates this state on purpose, by refusing to recognize what is happening to millions of people in food bodies.

You weren’t lonely because you were broken. You were lonely because the culture had decided your suffering didn’t count.

• • •

Reclaiming the word

The word addict doesn’t have to be the hurricane.

It can be a description. Accurate. Neutral. Biological. A clinical statement about what your nervous system has become through repeated exposure to substances designed to exploit its reward system.

You’re not an addict because you’re weak.

You’re not an addict because you’re broken.

You’re not an addict because there’s something morally wrong with you.

You’re an addict because the substances worked the way they were engineered to work, on a nervous system that responded the way it was designed to respond, for long enough that the response became wired in. Same biology as any other addiction. The only difference is what the culture decided to call it.

That isn’t a character verdict. That’s a clinical description.

And once the word stops being an accusation, it becomes useful. It points you toward the right tools, the right community, the right framework. It separates you from the cultural lie that your suffering is your fault, and connects you to the truth that your suffering is the predictable result of a system that was built to produce it.

I want to land something carefully here. There are recovery communities that have been doing this work for decades — abstinence-based, often meeting in church basements, often unrecognized by the mainstream medical establishment, often gaslit by a culture that refused to acknowledge what they were addressing. Whatever language they use, whatever framework they hold, those communities saw what the culture refused to see. They named what the culture refused to name. They built support for people the culture had abandoned.

I honor that lineage. My work approaches the same territory through a nervous-system lens — biology, not disease; adaptation, not powerlessness. But the work is the same work. The people are the same people. The cultural problem we are all addressing is the same problem.

We are stronger when we recognize each other.

• • •

What I want you to walk away with

The fire in this post is real. The indignation is earned. The hierarchy is real and the cruelty is real and the complicity is real.

And — both/and, always — your nervous system is still the intelligent biological system it always was. The shame was never yours. The verdict was never accurate. The hierarchy was never about you.

You don’t look like the cultural picture of an addict because the cultural picture is a lie. The real picture includes you. Includes the woman in the next aisle at the grocery store. Includes the colleague at the office holiday party. Includes the grandmother who has been carrying this since before there was language for it.

You are not alone in this. You were never alone in this. The culture just decided your loneliness wasn’t worth naming.

It is worth naming.

You are worth naming.

And the brain that has been listening for decades is finally allowed to be heard.

You were never broken. You were carrying a lot.

• • •

With love and light,

Sonja

If this resonates and you’re ready to put your nervous system in conversation with people who get it, the Advanced Recovery Project is a community walking through this work together. Or take the quiz to find out which patterns are running underneath your relationship with food. You don’t have to keep doing this alone.