Food as a childhood addiction

I was just listening to a webinar with Janina Fisher about addiction and trauma, and one of the most profound statements she made was “food is the first drug a child has access to”.

It seems intuitively obvious, and I’m sure most of us know that use of food as a coping mechanism often starts in childhood, but the way she worded it just made it really hit home as a method of survival, especially for young children who have little access to anything else.

Edit: I want to add this because I think that people will get caught up in the description of eating as an addiction and that it somehow automatically means that I am saying eating is bad. There are a lot of problems here.

One is that addiction isn’t bad. Addiction almost always has served the purpose of helping someone survive. Let’s stop equating it with “bad”, because that just promotes the shame and stigma around addiction.

Two is that it is less about the behavior of eating on its own, and more about the purpose it serves. No one is saying that eating is a problem. Food (especially sugar) acts on our nervous system, and for many people they need more and more of it to release the chemicals that allow them to feel safe. This works much the same way in other types of addiction. Can we not deny that this is a real problem that people experience? It feels so invalidating. People who eat in excess to soothe themselves don’t want to be told that this isn’t an issue. They know it is. What we can do is provide a path toward self-compassion and help bring awareness to the feelings around lack of safety that make them feel like they need to eat to survive.