Up to now, it would be wrong to describe this as sparring, because you have to have a partner for that. In the recent past, I’ve been opining, and someone whom I’ll keep nameless has been vehemently dismissing my perspective. Not just disagreeing, but dissing, and responding to claims I don't make and beliefs I don't hold.

OK, sure, it’s just another moment in social media.

But his last couple of comments have been worming into my serenity, until I decided today to address them. But I’m not just talking to him.

[This is a repost of an article that was lost, due to the failure of my now-fired web host, A Small Orange.]

Kristina LaRue, RD, CSSD, LDN is a sports dietitian in Orlando, and thanks to her, we have another opportunity to discuss food addiction. Despite all those letters after her name, food addiction has been been misunderstood, again.

We can start here..

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concepts of “restriction” vs. “freedom.” For me, of course, the context is often around how to eat.

I recently interviewed Dr. Christopher Ochner, an accomplished researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital, and have found I have a couple of leftovers to discuss. In this post — I don’t know if I’ll write the other — I respond to this answer he gave in the interview:

Let’s talk about deprivation. As in “deprivation diets don’t work,” which is a mantra of most of the registered dietitians I’ve encountered. Everything in moderation, because people won’t stick to a food plan on which they feel deprived.

I don’t disagree with that last part, “feeling” deprived, and I understand the necessity of meeting one’s patient where they are.

As I've described before, registered dietitians scoff at the idea of food addiction almost monolithically, a circumstance I got to observe again last weekend at the Binge Eating Disorder Association national conference in Bethesda, Md.

In a recent post, I dropped in on the latest flaring of comment over the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ insistence on accepting financial support — about 10 percent of its budget — from Big Food.

Friend and reader Casey Hinds pointed me towards Casey Seidenberg's post for the Washington Post lifestyles blog "On Parenting" and asked my take on its "all food should be enjoyed" message, vis a vis children and addiction potential.

One of the blogs I'm following in my RSS reader is by the Fat Nutritionist. Her most recent post describes several quotidian food strategies that I agree with, but it also has this:

Plus if I don’t buy a frozen pizza, I will just order one at some point anyway. There’s no point in fighting it.

I just don't get this fatalism around food choices. There are people who go without pizza their whole lives. What's to say that this writer, or anyone else, can't go without it too?

An irking aspect of conventional wisdom around weight loss, peddled foremostly by many dietitians, is that deprivation doesn’t work, so moderation is the only path that can succeed.

I have some sympathy with the notion, I suppose — I don’t like to be deprived if what’s dear to me, either. But I reject the premise.