Glutton - Part 4

My birthday is this week...which makes me think about cake.  Not presents.  Not the passage of time.  Not the precious life that God has bestowed on me.  Cake.  White birthday cake with buttercream icing.  That's what birthdays mean to me.

If you read that paragraph and still don't believe in food addiction, I kinda don't know what to tell ya.

So for the sake of this whole deal, let's just assume you can be addicted to food.  Ok, great.  Addiction is treatable.  Not curable...treatable.  And how do you treat addiction?  Total abstinence, right?  Ask any addict in a twelve step program and that will be their answer.  And here's where the food addict runs into big trouble.  You don't have to drink alcohol or take drugs to survive.  You probably know loads of people who never drink or use drugs.  Do you know any one who doesn't eat?

And hear me on this.  I am not suggesting for one second that recovering from alcohol or drug addiction is easy.  I am just saying that food addiction is different.  For one thing, very few people doubt that alcohol and drug addiction are real.  But a large majority of the population really believes that food addicts are just fat and lazy and could slim down in no time if they would just eat everything in moderation.  If I hear the phrase 'eat everything in moderation' one more time, I'm gonna take a hostage. 

So take a walk in my sugar addicted shoes for a typical year.   So January is ok.  (Let's face it, I ate so much at Christmas, I could probably fast the entire month and be fine.)  February is my brother's birthday.  March is Ava and my dad's birthday. April is Savannah, Kaylee and Anna's birthday. May is nobody, yay!!!  June is Dylan's birthday.  July is Katie and Emily and my mom's birthday.  August is my wedding anniversary (Melting Pot! Tradition!) September is my birthday (cake plus sad 9/11 type eating).  October is Kevin's birthday plus Halloween.  (You know I have never once made it through Halloween without a candy binge...NEVER.  I once made it until after 10PM, which was disheartening at best.  This year I might take an Ambien and just go to bed after lunch.  It could work.)  Then November has the Glutton fest known as Thanksgiving which snowballs straight into the lost month of December wherein I barely have time to sleep lest I miss some holiday goodie that must be consumed in order to celebrate the birth of my king. 

Here's my point (and I do actually have one!)  I don't have to eat sugar at any of those celebrations.  No one forces me to consume anything.  I always have the option of eating something that I am not addicted to.  But can you understand why it's hard?  If you were addicted to cocaine, can you imagine how difficult it would be if one day a year, the whole nation celebrated crack?  Stores put it on sale.  Your coworkers put bowls of it on their desks for anyone to enjoy.   You were forced to buy mass quantities of it to hand out to little costumed kids as they rang your doorbell.  What if you were an alcoholic and the people you loved most in the world brought you a gallon of vodka on your birthday?  Or served the most delicious wine on Thanksgiving and urged you to drink it so you wouldn't hurt Aunt So and So's feelings? 

Maybe you think these scenarios are ridiculous.  But this is how life feels for me.  Every family stop for ice cream is a punishment and a test.  Even if I pass, it hurts.  And while no one would take their alcoholic friend to a cocktail party, no one thinks twice about taking a glutton to Dairy Queen.

You see addiction is not an excuse for the sin of gluttony but for a lot of us, it is the reason.