Food Addiction

Calendar icon Last Updated: 07/22/2025

Reading Time: 7 minutes

For most people, having a healthy relationship with food is nothing but a forethought. Eating helps us build strong bones and muscles, replenish vitamins and minerals, and is a cornerstone of a healthy life.

Unfortunately, food can cause some people to have uncontrollable cravings that manifest as an addiction and lead to the excessive consumption of sugars and other foods. Eventually, this can lead to physical, emotional, and social consequences. The probability of such addiction is highly likely with foods that are rich in sugar, fat, or salt, but other foods can also play into an addiction. One study shows that up to 20% of Americans struggle with food addiction.

What Is Food Addiction?

Food addiction is a disease similar to drug or alcohol addiction in which a chemical reaction in the brain is triggered by a certain behavior. With food addiction, the behavior that triggers the reaction is eating a particular food or a particular amount of food.

This addiction manifests itself in uncontrollable cravings for excessive eating and typically involves eating salty, sugary, or carbohydrate-rich foods for satisfaction.

The cravings that someone with this addiction will have are so strong that they cannot control them. In many cases, food addiction will lead to a deteriorated quality of life. The individual’s physical, emotional, social, and spiritual happiness are all affected..

Once an individual who is addicted to food eats and experiences the “high” or pleasurable state that they feel when they are done eating, they will quickly feel the need to eat more or to eat again to feel that feeling.

Tolerance can build as an individual eats more. This can lead to a desire to eat even when they are already full. Because of the tolerance that builds, scientists believe that food addiction plays an important role in obesity and the struggle to lose weight.

Food Addiction Symptoms

The symptoms of food addiction are wide-reaching. Someone with this disorder may gain pleasure from the anticipation of eating, thinking about the availability of food, or physically eating. This pleasure leads to excessive eating that can lead to increased weight gain, poor self-image, and a range of other medical conditions.

Someone with a food addiction may not even realize that they are addicted to food because their improper eating habits have simply become a way of life.

Early detection of a food addiction is vital to the individual’s successful recovery. Further, the sooner that one realizes the need for help, the less chance there is for negative consequences to set in, such as extreme weight gain, physical illness or other problems.

Not all food addictions result in weight gain, though. In some cases, an individual’s decision to consume large amounts of food is followed by excessive exercising, vomiting, or the use of laxatives to eliminate or reduce the number of calories eaten. This is known as bulimia, and it affects around 0.3% of the U.S. population.

In other cases, excessive eating is followed by instances of limiting food for days or even weeks at a time, which is a form of anorexia. Both of these eating disorders are characterized by an addiction in some manner to food and can lead to extreme weight loss.

Physical Food Addiction Symptoms

These are the physical symptoms to look for if you’re concerned that someone may have a food addiction:

  • Inability to control cravings for food
  • Inability to control the amount of food that is eaten
  • Trying many different weight loss or diet programs, but still excessively consuming food
  • Vomiting, using laxatives or exercising in excess to avoid weight gain as a result of overconsumption

Each of these physical symptoms of food addiction can lead to long term consequences. Those who vomit regularly to overcome the fact that they ate a large amount of food are likely to suffer from tooth decay, esophageal problems, malnutrition and a range of other issues as a result of their addiction.

In time, an obsession with food, whether it’s an obsession with not eating, overeating and dieting to cover it up or using diuretics or other methods to reduce weight from overeating, a food obsession can lead to rash physical problems and could even result in death if left untreated.

Social Symptoms of Food Addiction

Food addiction can also affect one’s social life. Here are some of the signs you might notice:

  • Eating behind closed doors to prevent others from seeing what you are eating or how much
  • Avoiding social interactions because you feel like you cannot be around others due to a lack of ability to control your eating
  • Avoiding social interactions because you don’t feel like you look good enough or have clothes that fit correctly due to your eating habits
  • Stealing food from others
  • Obsessing over food and paying more attention to the food that is being served than to friends or family members

Socially, food addiction leads to an intense obsession with food that can distract us from the things that really matter such as spending time with friends or family members. In time, the food addict will find more time to spend with food and may spend less and less time socially interacting in a healthy way with others. Many food addicts will hide food or steal food from others so that they can secretly indulge in the foods behind closed doors.

Emotional Symptoms of Food Addiction

Emotional signs that someone may have an unhealthy relationship or addiction with food include:

  • Feeling ashamed of your weight
  • Feeling depressed or sad about your weight or self-image
  • Feeling hopeless when it comes to losing weight
  • Eating when upset or depressed
  • Eating as a reward for a job well done
  • Eating when you are not hungry
  • Becoming anxious or irritable when eating certain foods

Food addiction can adversely affect our emotions, leading to mood swings and other mental health problems. Some people with this disorder will suffer from depression or anxiety as a result of their inability to control their eating habits despite a desire to eat less and improve their self-image. Others are emotional eaters who eat because they are happy or sad. When these emotions take over, their eating slips out of control.

Types of Food Addiction

Various types of food addiction exist. Some food addictions are marked by an individual’s desire to consume large amounts of food at one time (binge eating) while others are characterized by the obsession that an individual has with food (bulimia).

Here are the most common types of food addiction:

Binge Eating

Binge eaters will gorge themselves on large amounts of food such as sweets, salty foods or carbohydrates. They typically eat behind closed doors so that others do not know that they eat so much.

Binge eating is usually an occasional practice. In many cases, this type of food addiction will go unnoticed for many years because the individual will exercise or perform other actions to prevent gaining excessive amounts of weight. Binge eating is recognized as the most common eating disorder in the U.S. and affects around 2.8 million people.

Anorexia

Anorexic individuals will typically limit their food intake to stay thin, no matter what the cost. Many anorexic eaters will only eat once per day or may not even eat every day. When they do eat, they only eat small portions of certain foods.

Many will count how many bites they take or strictly measure the food that they place on their plates to reduce intake and monitor the amount of food that they consume. This condition affects around 0.6% of the U.S. population.

Bulimia

Bulimic individuals will eat as much as they want when they want to eat, but later take extreme measures to prevent gaining weight as a result of their uncontrolled eating. They may exercise excessively to burn calories, or they will take laxatives or diuretics to prevent weight gain. Excessive eating followed by vomiting is another common symptom of Bulimia.

General Food Addiction

Some people are just generally addicted to food and do not take extreme measures to cover up their addiction or to hide the symptoms. These people will excessively consume salty foods, sugary foods or other types of foods. This can lead to weight gain, health problems, and other consequences for the individual, but the individual continues to feel a burning desire to continue eating despite the consequences.

Treatment for Food Addiction

Scientists are still working to figure out and fully understand every facet of food addiction, but some treatments have proven to be effective.

Food addiction treatment typically consists of behavioral therapy, nutrition counseling, education and social support. If a food addiction is primarily the result of an emotional disorder such as anxiety or depression, psychological counseling and medication to treat the mental illness can often reduce the adverse addiction to food.

Nutritional counseling is often effective at helping those who are addicted to food learn about the health benefits of nutritious food. Nutritionists can help those with a food addiction learn to cook healthier meals, discover foods that they can indulge on safely and cook meals that keep them fuller for a longer period of time.

Support groups such as Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous are another option of treatment for food addiction. Individuals can get social support in a recovery group like this or Food Addicts Anonymous. Both of these groups utilize the principles of the 12-step program to help food addicts learn how to adopt healthy habits, reduce their food intake, seek spiritual happiness and socially support one another.