I was listening to a podcast this morning and it hit me like a truck that I needed to record this episode today. I had a completely different topic planned. Didn’t matter.

The episode was about alcohol addiction. And as I was listening, I kept hearing the exact same words my clients use to describe their relationship with food. One drink led to another led to another. The whole night revolved around it. I told myself tonight would be different. I was a shell of myself but I still couldn’t stop.

Sound familiar?

This is the conversation I want to have. Because a lot of people have come to the conclusion that they must be addicted to food. And if that’s true, then the answer must be the same as it is for alcohol: cut it out. Avoid the trigger foods. Abstinence.

I want to offer you something a lot more nuanced than that. And a lot more hopeful.

The Similarities Are Real. I’m Not Going to Pretend They’re Not.

The parallels between a tumultuous relationship with alcohol and a tumultuous relationship with food are genuinely striking. And I think it’s important to sit with them, because dismissing them doesn’t help anyone.

Can’t have just one. She described how she could never just have one drink. She’d convince herself: moderation, just one. And then one became the whole night. If you’ve struggled with binge eating, you heard that and thought: that’s me. I cannot just have one cookie. Once I start, I cannot stop.

The whole night revolves around it. She described the anticipation before the first drink. The hypervigilance, the waiting, the feeling that everything else was secondary. I used to do this with food at social events. If there was a bag of chips sitting there unopened, I’d be watching it. Why is no one opening this? My whole attention was on the food, not the people. Not the conversation. The food.

Good intentions, same outcome. Every time she went out with the promise: not tonight. And every time, she’d negotiate, just one, and then break the promise. How many times have you started a day with: today is going to be different. I’m not going to binge. I’m going to stick to the plan. And by the end of the day, everything fell apart. Same pattern, different substance.

Functional, so it doesn’t feel like a real problem. This one hit me. She described herself as high-achieving, very successful, very social. And because her life wasn’t falling apart in dramatic ways, she kept telling herself it wasn’t that big of a deal. Sound like anyone you know? Smart, successful, managing everything, except this one thing. The dirty little secret. The thing you keep thinking you should be able to figure out on your own.

Using it as a social buffer. Even though she was outgoing and confident, the moment she felt any social discomfort, she’d grab a drink without even thinking about it. Subconscious. Automatic. I noticed the same thing when I stopped drinking. I hadn’t realized how much I was using it as a social lubricant until it wasn’t there anymore. And with food? Your hand in the chip bowl at a family gathering you didn’t want to be at. Eating something you don’t even want, not even noticing you’re doing it, because the discomfort needed somewhere to go.

Knowing the consequences and still not being able to stop. The bloating. The regret. The next morning. The way it was affecting relationships, and presence, and the ability to just live a flexible, spontaneous life. I was a shell of myself for years. And still couldn’t stop. That’s the part that makes someone think: I must be addicted.

But Here’s Where the Comparison Breaks Down

After describing her experience with alcohol, she started talking about what happened when she stopped drinking. And this is where everything changes.

She realized the alcohol wasn’t the problem. It was the exit ramp. The moment uncomfortable feelings started surfacing, she had this reliable, fast, effective way to not have to look at them. When she quit, she described feeling emotionally stunted. Like a newborn having to relate to emotions for the first time. There’s a theory she mentioned: you get frozen emotionally at the age you started using something to escape your feelings. Start drinking at 15, drink compulsively for 20 years, and at 35 your emotional processing is still partly 15. She said she’d never learned how to be alone with her thoughts.

Quitting alcohol didn’t heal her. It exposed the real work.

And THAT is the most important sentence in this whole episode. Because the same is completely true for food. If you take the food away without building other ways to meet the needs it was meeting, one of two things happens: you find another exit ramp (scrolling, overworking, shopping, a different food), or your emotional needs win and you break the rule and the shame goes through the roof and the urge to eat goes up with it.

Here’s the crucial difference though: you cannot abstain from food. With alcohol, the line is clear. You drink or you don’t. With food, you have to eat several times a day, every day, forever. You’re surrounded by the foods you’ve labeled off limits. So abstinence from food doesn’t look like sobriety. It looks like a list of forbidden foods that requires constant vigilance, constant anxiety, constant monitoring.

That’s just restriction. With a recovery label slapped on top of it.

And restriction, as you probablyyyy know by now, creates the very out-of-control feeling you’re trying to fix.

What’s Actually Driving the “Addicted” Feeling

There are specific mechanisms at play here that have nothing to do with you being broken or wired differently. Let me name them.

Deprivation neuroscience.

When you restrict a food, your brain starts thinking about it constantly. Your reward system gets louder. You become hypervigilant to it in your environment. And when you finally eat it, the response is way bigger than it would be if you’d just been eating it all along. What feels like addiction is often just your brain responding to chronic deprivation. “I can’t stop once I start” is describing what restriction naturally does to the human brain. Not what’s wrong with you.

Food habituation.

This is the one that changes everything. When food is available all the time, without guilt, your brain’s response to it actually settles down. Think of when Luke said I love you for the first time. December 24, 2022. I remember every second of it. My whole body was warm. Complete out-of-body experience. Now we say it seven times a day and it’s just… lovely. Habituated. The same happens with food. The foods that feel urgent, magnetic, out-of-control? They get that way from being forbidden. Give yourself consistent, unconditional access AND neutralize the guilt around them, and over time they just become… less special. We had a client last week who was baking cookies with her daughter, had one cookie, and walked away. She said: I’ve never done that before in my entire life. I didn’t even think about it. That’s habituation. That’s what’s on the other side.

Abstinence keeps food in charge.

When something is off limits, it gets more power, not less. Every party, every holiday, every dinner out becomes a test you could fail. Your identity becomes “I’m someone who can’t be trusted around chocolate.” Every moment near the forbidden food is a perceived threat. That is not freedom. That is managing a threat for the rest of your life.

Real healing is when the food just becomes food. Some days you want it. Some days you don’t. And neither of those says anything about your worth or your safety.

Ultra-processed food is designed to be enjoyable. Not to break you.

Yes, some foods are engineered to taste really good and keep you coming back. That’s real. But it doesn’t mean you need to avoid them forever. It means your brain enjoys pleasure, the same way it enjoys music, and dancing, and hugging someone you love. The heightened response to ultra-processed foods is often a sign of deprivation, not damage. When you stop restricting and start building other sources of joy and regulation in your life, food loses the grip that deprivation gave it.

If You Think You’re Addicted, Here’s What I Know After Working With Thousands of Women

Every single time I have spoken to someone who believes they’re addicted to food, I have found at least five root causes underneath it that have nothing to do with the food itself.

Physical restriction or mental restriction creating deprivation. Emotional regulation: food being used to manage feelings that haven’t had anywhere else to go. Psychological patterns: beliefs about the food, about the body, about what eating a certain thing makes you. Body disconnection: being so far from your own hunger and fullness cues that eating feels chaotic. Dopamine depletion: food becoming the primary or only reliable source of pleasure and comfort.

Those are all workable. Every single one.

And my pantry right now has sweets, chips, crackers, things that I would never have trusted myself around. Some of them have been in there for months. Luke has a LOT to say about the fact that I forget food is there. There is zero urgency. Zero uncontrollable craving. Not because I have extraordinary willpower. Because I did the work underneath it.

In This Episode

→ The 6 parallels between a tumultuous relationship with alcohol and a tumultuous relationship with food — and why they’re worth sitting with

→ The functional high-achiever trap: why being able to manage everything else makes the food thing feel like it shouldn’t be this hard

→ What happened when Emily stopped drinking — and the most important sentence about food and healing

→ Why abstinence from food is not the same as sobriety from alcohol, and why it makes things worse

→ Deprivation neuroscience: why “I can’t stop once I start” is often describing what restriction does to the brain

→ Food habituation: why consistent, guilt-free access to trigger foods makes them less magnetic over time

→ Why keeping a food off limits keeps it in charge — forever

→ What I actually find underneath every “food addiction” story I’ve encountered

→ My pantry, and what’s in it, and what that means

Resources Mentioned

→ Girls Gotta Eat podcast, episode: Deciding to Get Sober (with Emily Fenner) 

→ Live Unrestricted episode: Why I Stopped Drinking Alcohol and How It Changed My Life (April 2, 2025)

→ Food Freedom Academy: sabrinamagnan.com/ffa

→ Decode Your Food Noise (free mini course): sabrinamagnan.com/decode-podcast

→ Instagram: @sabrina.magnan.health (DMs open for this conversation)