One of the most common but overlooked addictions is the addiction to food.
From a young age many people form an addiction to sugar and sweets. Other food-related addictions can be to coffee or soda.
It’s important to recognize that food addictions are unhealthy and can have serious repercussions, making it important to eat healthy. But just because that’s important to do doesn’t make it easy.
Psychologist, author, and speaker Dr. Rhona Epstein says that maintaining a healthy diet and overcoming bad eating habits and addictions is a struggle that needs to be worked at every day.
Fighting a food addiction isn’t a simple one-and-done step; it requires forming a plan and sticking with it throughout recovery. George Fraser, notes that this struggle of putting in hard work while fighting an addiction can be found in any recovery process.
“We need to work our recovery as hard as we worked our using, and we don’t get to a point where…we’re okay to say that we have permanent sobriety or recovery because we’ve done the work. We have to do this every day.”
It’s not just putting work into staying sober, either. Part of real recovery is working at your spiritual health and maintaining that, as well.
Rhona explains that it’s through the unity of both sobriety and a healthy spiritual relationship that recovery becomes freeing. Without understanding the spiritual experience of surrender, she says, working at recovery can seem more like bondage. But when you don’t have that enslavement to food and that food obsession, then that is freedom.
“I think the daily work is much more spiritual than anything, because it’s dependent on my connection with the Lord and a factor of if that goes off then that’s the beginning of going in the wrong direction.”
We need to we keep our hearts and minds in the right place with the Lord, even when it’s difficult to do.
“…that’s harder than putting a food plan together because, you know, it’s easy to get busy… that quiet time is so important, and that recognition of who’s the reason I’m free. It’s because of Him, not because of me.”
George recommends that we look at recovery as being an act of worship. Step three of the program involves acknowledging that we are powerless and need to turn our lives over to God, and in turning over our bodies to God, our responsibility then becomes to maintain these bodies that belong to Him. This includes working the steps, getting enough sleep, being in the Word, praying, and eating the right foods. Romans 12:1
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”
We give our bodies as a holy, living sacrifice acceptable to God, and that’s an act of worship- not enslavement.
