I wanted to call your attention to the book of this post's title, which I read a couple of weeks ago. Burt Nordstrand, a successful Upper Midwestern businessman, wrote it with Carol Pine; its subhead is "An Exploration of Addiction and Recovery."

Some of you may recall that I engaged fellow blogger "VB" in a conversation about the existence of food addiction last week, and she has responded. In part, here's what she said: 

I happened across a well-written blog by "VB" this morning that had a couple of points of interest to me. The url is healthygumsandme.blogspot,com, which she explains in one of her first posts: The dental hygienist told her, at the end of a visit, that she'd reset the cleanliness in her mouth, and it was up to her to keep it up there. And unlike other times, she did, for more than a month, and then realized she could apply that same discipline to other habits, including her eating.

Hoping to meet up with my brothers and sister in belief of food addiction, I have a Google alert trolling for the term. Most of what I get is crap — spammers who put out popularly searched words so Googlers will arrive at pages they wouldn't otherwise visit.

One of the ways I express why I wrote "Fat Boy Thin Man" is to say that if you and I canvassed any random group about "solutions" to obesity, they wouldn't respond with anything like my experience. Since my experience works (for me), and the best-known "solutions" don't seem to be solving much, I figure I have valuable information to share.

Thanks to my colleague Pat Hartman over at Dr. Robert Pretlow's blog Childhood Obesity News, here's a decent companion to my post yesterday about the science behind food addiction: The early adopters of food-addiction thinking.

I commend to you this article on The Delano Report (drzarkov.com) about how food addiction, "considered fringe just five years ago, is fast becoming a mainstream view among researchers as new studies in humans confirm initial animal findings, and the biological mechanisms that lead to 'junk-food addiction' are being revealed."

Part of what drives my "food addiction is real" mission is the need/want to be smarter than everyone else. (No, I'm not proud of it, but it is true.) So why, then, do I get so much pleasure when I hear or see other voices saying essentially the same things that I am? It should ruin it, but doesn't.

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?

The Boston Herald has a story on food addiction today, and mine is the photo they used to illustrate it.

Apparently they had someone else lined up to shoot, but she backed out. I gather that it was because she's in a Twelve Step fellowship and they have an anonymity clause, which hadn't come up earlier in the paper's process.