What nobody's ever told you about Addiction, until now!
Many people deal with difficult feelings by resorting to long relied upon self-soothing methods. These typically started helping us cope with our pain, when we were very young.
One of the ways we learned to COPE when we felt anxious or bad, was relying on food to soothe us. Other coping mechanisms have involved masturbation, addiction to sex, porn, over-work, rigorous gym workouts, drugs, alcohol, staying too busy to FEEL our difficult emotions, etc.
All these behaviors are dissociation-related. When we choose not to feel an emotion because we judge it as bad, dangerous, "weak" or just generally undesirable, we must find something/anything to supplant it with. I always turned to food.
I was always thinner when I was in a relationship, because I was getting my primal needs for touch, positive mirroring and emotional nourishment met by someone. When sex and touch weren't available to me in-between romances, I turned to food to ease my discomfort, loneliness, emptiness, etc.
When I began feeling my emptiness or boredom or dissatisfaction in my late 40's, major changes occurred. My relationship to food and eating went thru a radical transformation for one, and how I assessed and entered relationships with men, shifted dramatically.
Food and sex had long been synonymous for me. If I couldn't get one (in-between my involvements with men), I always had the other as a backup. You might say, my bases were covered~ yet I was always hyper-focused on and concerned with my body weight, when I wasn't sleeping with someone. Essentially, food was my interim lover.
By the grace of God, I dismantled this eating disorder in myself many years ago, and with the help of proper food combining, vanquished it completely. I now eat to live~ not the other way around.
ALL addiction is fairly easy to dissemble, if you know what the root cause of it is, what drives and keeps it in place, and what's needed to heal our dissociation from feelings that began around the time we first learned to walk and talk.
Physical ailments in the body are catalyzed by dissociation from emotions, so curing the addictive reflex in us usually means curing any bodily dysfunctions or ailments that exist as well. In short, when we heal the emotional body, the physical body follows suit.
I always felt imprisoned by my eating disorder. Nobody knew about it but me~ but it kept me captive, and halted further growth and healing. Ya might wanna take a look at my addiction article, and see if any of that material speaks to you about You, and your compulsive behavior patterns. https://sharischreiber.com/outgrowing-your-addiction/