Now, 20 years later, I’m the leading expert in the food addiction recovery space, with a neuroscience background and a clear understanding of the key brain mechanisms that make this happen.

I’ve spent years reading, analyzing, and writing papers on it.

I’ve drawn diagrams mapping the major neural systems underlying constant, impulsive, addictive eating. Before this, there wasn’t a comprehensive, integrated image that put everything together and depicted the full brain mechanism at work that hosts this problem — even in the neuroscience world, despite hundreds of published studies addressing different angles and neurobiological elements of the problem.

And in the past 10 years, I’ve helped hundreds of people cleanly solve this problem. My clients range from the general population to general managers, leading scientists, physicians, unicorn entrepreneurs, therapists, and world-ranking athletes who are living textbooks of discipline but still couldn’t hold independence and sovereignty in front of food.

What compels me to write this article is this: the world has food addiction completely wrong. Wrong definition. Wrong treatment. For decades. And people are paying for that ignorance with their entire lives.

My oldest client right now is in her 70s — more than half a century of struggle.

Unfortunately, for most people, the struggle doesn’t go away. It only gets reinforced. Ignorance on this subject matter costs a lifetime of peace.

Food addiction has a clear scientific framework. It has for over fifteen years. The Yale Food Addiction Scale — introduced in 2009 and updated in 2016 — measures it using criteria directly adapted from substance use disorder in the DSM-5: loss of control, continued use despite harm, failed attempts to cut back, tolerance, withdrawal. It is not yet a formal DSM-5 clinical diagnosis. That gap is not a sign the science is weak. It is a sign the institution hasn’t caught up.

Here is the definition the industry keeps getting wrong:

It carries the behavioral patterns of an eating disorder and the neurological patterns of a substance addiction disorder.

That combination puts it in its own category entirely. And that category has been almost completely ignored by the solution landscape.

This is not a technicality. It is the entire reason why most people who struggle with food addiction never get better — not because they haven’t tried hard enough, but because they have solved the wrong problem the entire time.

By strict YFAS criteria, food addiction affects 16–20% of the US population (Penzenstadler et al., 2019). When you include people who self-report addiction-like patterns without meeting the full diagnostic threshold, that number rises to 43% (Leary et al., 2021).

That is not a niche problem. That is almost half the country.

And yet the dominant conversation around food addiction calls it a discipline problem. A mindset problem. A food choice problem. Occasionally — in the more sophisticated corners of the wellness space — a “reward loop” problem, though rarely with enough depth to mean anything actionable.

Here is what it actually is.

Let me say the most uncomfortable thing first: for a very long time, there was almost no solution on the market that was actually built for food addiction. That gap is what drove me to build Lean Instinct Formula™ in the first place.

Even today, dedicated, viable solutions to food addiction are still very rare — not because the problem is new. Because the industry, without fully understanding the problem, never properly named it.

Remember — food addiction is both an eating disorder and a substance addiction disorder, at the same time. So when you go looking for help, here’s what you actually find: solutions built for one half of the problem, or the other, or neither. Almost nothing built for the thing itself.

Look at how few solutions even exist. Leary et al. (2021) did a systematic review of food addiction interventions, a search that surfaced 16,649 peer-reviewed studies from 2008 to 2020 using keywords including food addiction, eating behaviors, interventions, measuring food addiction, etc. After combing the entire field, they could only find nine studies that even measured food addiction as an outcome — and in every single one of the nine, food addiction wasn’t even the point. It was a secondary measurement, tacked onto studies designed for something else: weight loss, bariatric surgery, smoking cessation. Not one single solution across the nine studies was actually built to treat food addiction.

16,649 peer-reviewed studies. Nine relevant interventions. Zero dedicated solutions.

16,649 → 9 → 0.

Zero. For decades, not one single solution was developed to solve food addiction.

(By 2020, the Lean Instinct Formula™ hadn’t yet been established long enough to be studied.)

And the handful of things people do get handed? Every one of them was designed for a different problem.

Now, back to the solution umbrella as a whole, the pattern is the same across all of them: wrong category, wrong mechanism, symptoms managed on the surface while the engine keeps running.

Most people with food addiction and food noises are simply told to try harder. But without touching what’s actually driving the whole web — the neural patterns, the emotional wiring, the interoception, the identity predictions — trying harder feels exactly like pushing a car with the engine off. You can throw your whole body into it. The car isn’t going to move on its own.