It's a question any addict might ponder: If they told me that, beyond a medical certainty, I had just a few weeks or months to live, would I continue to abstain from the foods I've chosen to eschew?

I grant that it's mostly just navel-gazing, but there are meaty questions in there, too: By not eating refined sugar, refined grain, dried fruit, peanuts, popcorn, and a few other things, am I merely trying to maintain my physical health, and once I know the end is near, will that matter no more? Or are the mental and spiritual benefits equal to, or even greater, and would I be ruining what little time I have left by clouding my thinking and fouling my spirit?

I know that the "right" answer is that the greater benefits are those less readily seen, and if I returned to the perpetually angry, mercurial, churlish, arrogant bastard I often was before I found recovery from my food addiction, I would sully my family's last memories as well as be a bitter pill to be around.

And yet, I'm just not sure I'd be willing to hold out from having pizza, ice cream, cinnamon-raisin toast, and all the other stuff I've given up in favor of my health and sanity, if I knew there was no future to preserve. I like those flavors, even if I don't like what that stuff does to my head, even before it arrives on my hips.

I tend to think that if my drug of no choice was alcohol, I wouldn't start drinking again. But that may help define why I am not an alcoholic and why I am a food addict: Alcohol is more of a neutral for me, and I don't foresee any value from going there. (Yes: That, or anything else, might change if I were to find myself actually in the circumstance. I'm trying to get at principles here.)

But substitute proscribed foods for alcohol, and suddenly I'm thinking about the tastes and textures, even though I've had them all before, and gave them up by seeing that, especially the quantities and ways I was eating them, they were doing me harm.

What about you? If you're an addict, do you think you'd go back to your substance? And if you're not, would you keep on running, or studying Spanish, or whatever self-improvement project you're on, just for their own selves, rather than as paths to a richer future? Those aren't the same as addictive substances or behaviors, but they can get you closer to the question.