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Not to be redundant, but to catch all my new readers up to speed, my issue is food addiction, both personally and professionally. I am a food addict, and I believe that well more than 10 million Americans are as well.

In one slight sense, it doesn't matter. My extensive experience is that when I accepted standard addiction treatments that go back decades, I started losing weight and now I've kept about 160 pounds off for almost two decades.

With results like that, who cares what they call "it," right?

But here's why it matters intensely: "Because diagnosis determines treatment." I say as much — which is to say not nearly as succinctly — in "Fat Boy Thin Man," but my layman's status always has to be conceded.

Recently, though, I became acquainted with Dr. Vera Tarman, a doctor at Renascent Center in Toronto, upon recommendation of my friends Mary Foushi and Phil Werdell of Acorn Food Dependency Recovery Services. They showed me a video of a presentation she makes, and I'll tell you, that's when she got me: "Because recovery determines treatment."

Returning to where I'm most qualified, my experience: For well more than a decade, I kept trying lesser measures to get my food under control: not only the diets that people regard as "solutions," even though they hardly ever solve anything, but various types of exercise plans and pledges to just cut down. Of course they "failed," because temporary measures hardly ever solve long-term problems.

But would I brook talk like that? NFW! I knew what I needed, I insisted, even though the evidence showed that I didn't. 

But when I'd finally been beaten down enough to concede that I might need a sturdier solution, that I might need to take on even sturdier measures still, until the kit of actions I was taking was enough to bring results, I did start getting better. Not only slimmer, but healthier in mind and spirit as well.

So long as the medical mainstream — with the notable, laudable exception of a few doctors like Vera Tarman — and popular culture cling to the idea that nothing significant underlies the dramatic burgeoning of obesity in America, then the "treatments" will continue to fail, and we'll keep getting unhealthier, in mind and spirit, as well as in body.

PS: I don't think that everyone who is overweight has an addiction. Not by a long shot. Nor do I say that an addict, once declared, is freed from personal responsibility. In my case, I put every single Cheeto, every single fry, every single spoonful into my mouth, and my solution could not begin until I took responsibility for that. 

This concerns understanding that I have a disease — I call it an addiction, but you can call it whatever you want — and then getting the right treatment. Not until people understand that they're sick — or even begin to consider that they might possibly be sick — will they begin to investigate the appropriate treatments.

Go ahead, argue with that.


Author and wellness innovator Michael Prager helps smart companies
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