Original image courtesy of r3v || cls

I started smoking when I was sixteen years old.  At the time I was convinced that I was young and invincible, despite the fact that I had proof of the dangers of cigarette smoking living with me in the form of my lung cancer ridden Grandmother.  Truth be told the reason I started smoking is even stupider than the act of smoking itself. I liked a girl. She didn’t like me back. She hated smokers and I was convinced that I would “show her” by picking up the habit. Apparently being stinky, having yellow teeth, spending money I didn’t have, and significantly increasing my chances of dying due to any number of horrible diseases was the perfect way to get revenge. I’m surprised I didn’t follow up by huffing spray paint.  That would have really showed her.

I have, in the course of the last twenty years, stopped smoking several times.  The last time I did so was in February of this year, and while I have slipped up and had a few cigarettes in the months that have passed on the whole I have remained smoke free.  Regardless of the fact that I’ve gone through it several times, though, quitting has never been easy. There are many situations in which I simply want to smoke, and there are physical symptoms of withdrawal that I go through as well. Those symptoms have included the inability to concentrate, shakes, extreme headaches, and intense irritability (the latter being so extreme that in several cases my significant other and I got into fights that almost led to the end of our relationship during periods in which we were both suffering from nicotine withdrawal).

The Random House dictionary defines addiction as “the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.” These days it seems as though many people tend to use the addiction label a little loosely. I am sure that a healthy percentage of the visitors to this site can relate to being called a video game addict, but the number of us that actually suffer from severe trauma when cut off from our consoles is likely to be minimal. Having an obsessive focus on an activity or substance is not necessarily the same thing has having an addiction, and I personally feel that the liberal use of the term cheapens it for those individuals that really are attempting to overcome an unhealthy habit.

For some of us that habit is food.

Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida recently released a study showing that junk food could elicit the same addictive behavior in rats as heroin. The subjects of the study were split into two groups. The first received a healthy diet of nutritional chow while the second was fed with a host of grocery store junk food that included Ho Hos, sausage, pound cake, bacon and cheesecake. The rats in the junk food group quickly developed poor eating habits and began to rapidly gain weight. As they became accustomed to their unhealthy diet the amount of pleasure they were able to attain from eating junk food diminished so they had to eat more in order to receive the same level of stimulation. As the study progressed scientists set up a system that required the rats to step on a plate that delivered a mild electrical shock in order to get to the junk food and they continued to eat poorly even though they knew that doing so was going to put them in pain, and when the rats were deprived of junk food altogether they actually refused to eat the healthy chow and started starving themselves!

The upshot of the research the scientists conducted in the study above is that there is very real evidence supporting the claim that some of us are addicted to junk food to the point where giving it up is going to cause us severe physical and psychological trauma. To that end, if you suspect that you’re addicted to junk food you’re going to have a significantly harder time improving your eating habits. It’s not impossible, and perhaps the knowledge that you’re dealing with a very real addiction may actually help you be successful where you have failed in the past.