The Zoom Call

A year ago, I was on a Zoom call with a couple, Kaitlyn and Peter.

Kaitlyn had booked it. Not for herself. She had spent hours online that night looking for help for her daughter, Elena — a year into a binge pattern that was reaching its tipping point.

But before bringing Elena into the conversation, Kaitlyn and Peter had made a decision. They would solve it in themselves first.

Because they had it too. Both of them. For decades.

Kaitlyn’s version was restriction. Calories, macros, the next meal, the last meal — running in her head all day, every day. Her body was thin — only about 120 pounds — and yet it felt like it was always working against her. She never felt safe in it. Every once in a while, the control cracked and she binged on chocolate. Then came the days of ‘correcting’: severe fasting until the numbers felt safe again. Every pound, every gram, every day. For years.

Peter’s version looked like the opposite. A leg injury eight years earlier had ended his daily runs, and thirty pounds had arrived since. He was an executive who traveled constantly, and at every conference break there was cake. There were cookies. He ate every slice, simply because it was there — and felt out of control every time.

Neither of them knew what real hunger or real fullness felt like. She relied on rules and numbers to force a stop. He overate at every meal without realizing it. When your body can’t tell you when to stop, you have to do the stopping yourself — manage, control, overcompensate, all day long.

Both lived with cravings too loud to ignore. She spent her life resisting them. He had stopped being able to.

Neither had the natural self-regulation that lets a person eat the right amount of the right thing at the right time, without thinking about it.

And both had grown up believing the same thing: that their bodies couldn’t be trusted, and that weight had to be held in place by force — mental and physical, every single day.

They learned it at home. Kaitlyn’s mom put her on a strict diet when she was eleven. Peter watched his mom and dad diet his entire life and he himself started Atkins early.

By the time we met, each of them had spent more than forty years in a toxic relationship with food. And now they were watching their 20-year-old daughter start the same fight, and recognizing every step of it.

This family is not unusual. It is one of millions of American families. In the same cohort, I had Matt and Cecelia, and Josh and Leah. One couple had a seven-year-old daughter. The other, a fourteen-year-old son. Both came with the same fear: that what had shaped their whole lives was already reaching their children.

They were right to be afraid. The data show two things.

First, addiction-like eating is common in this country. About 15% of American adults meet criteria for food addiction on the Yale Food Addiction Scale.¹ Up to 43% describe themselves as addicted to food. Many of them fall below the formal threshold but still report more problematic eating and less control around food.^2,3 And 44% of Americans aged 50–80 report at least one symptom, according to a University of Michigan poll on healthy aging.⁴

Food addiction is not in the DSM-5. Whether it should be is still an active scientific debate.⁵ But look at how it is measured. The Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0 takes the DSM-5 criteria for substance use disorders — loss of control, craving, failed attempts to cut down, continued use despite harm — and applies them to eating.⁶ And it overlaps heavily with binge eating disorder without being identical to it: in one study, 92% of people with binge eating disorder met at least mild food addiction criteria.⁷ It behaves like an eating disorder. It is measured like an addiction. It is both at once.

Second, the patterns are handed down. The evidence shows up across several major peer-reviewed studies.

In America, between 42% and 53% of parents of children aged nine to seventeen have had weight-focused conversations with them.⁸ Girls encouraged to diet by both parents were eight times more likely to be dieting by the age of eleven.⁹ Eleven. The same age Kaitlyn was.

And a 15-year longitudinal study found that adolescents whose parents encouraged them to diet were more likely, as parents themselves, to do the same to their own children.¹⁰

When I asked the couples in my cohort whether they had had those same conversations with their children, every one of them said yes.

Not out of neglect. Out of love. They were trying to protect their children from the struggle they had lived — with the only tools anyone had ever given them.

I’ve been putting off writing this for a long time, even though “Why is America addicted to food?” is a question people ask me often. The complexity of the contributing factors is only part of the reason. The bigger part is that every one of those factors is deeply triggering. This was an emotional experience to write, and it may be an emotional experience to read.

The answer holds several revelations: how far the industry lags behind the science, how the system is built to sustain the problem and make it worse, and how deeply people have been misled. Add time to that — most people have struggled with this pattern for half their lives, some for all of it — and the weight is real.

I didn’t want to write a long essay that only criticizes and exposes. I wanted to write one that delivers hope. But when hard truths come from every direction, that is not easy to do.

Then in May, Jonathan Cronstedt, the co-CEO of Kajabi, asked the very same question over a Zoom call. His platform serves what is probably the largest audience of people investing seriously in bettering their lives. When he put the question to me, I took it as a sign that it was time to write this.

They aren’t. Exposure supplies the lessons. What turns it into an addiction is what the brain learns from them.

And the problem doesn’t end here.

On one side of the equation, overindulgence is the mainstream food culture across the country.

On the other side of the equation is another kind of exposure: dieting.

Nearly half of Americans try to lose weight in a given year.²⁷ And they are not choosing from one coherent set of instructions. By 2014, a clinical review counted more than 1,000 published weight-loss diets. ^† Low-fat. Low-carb. Atkins. Zone. South Beach. Paleo. Keto. Juice cleanses. Detoxes. Intermittent fasting. Carnivore. The names change; the cultural instruction is remarkably persistent: your natural appetite cannot be trusted, so something outside of you needs to control it.

For generations, Americans have watched those instructions cycle through their homes, magazines, television screens and, now, social feeds.

Nearly half of the country diets every year. And almost 50 years of scientific literature tell us that restrictive diets lead to disordered eating.

So when I say America’s food addiction epidemic is due to an exposure problem, I don’t only mean exposure to addictive food. I also mean exposure to fad diets.

Then he said: I think people are just lazy.

I need to place that conversation properly. It was 2023. By then I’d done the neuroscience, and I knew the answer. So what I was doing in that garden was standing next to a physician while he explained that a documented condition is a character flaw.

Two things made me angry, and I’ll say them plainly.

The first is the word. Lazy. I was one of these people, and I have never had a discipline problem in my life. Neither did the clients who came to me later — the founders, the physicians, the surgeons, the athletes ranked at the top of the world in their sport. You do not build any of that without discipline. They had this anyway.

The second is worse. The Yale Food Addiction Scale was published in 2009, and the neuroscience of food addiction had been in the literature for years before that. We have had more than enough, for a long time, to rule out a moral failing. And here was a weight-loss physician still framing it as one.

I’m not condemning every doctor in this country. But he wasn’t unusual. He was representative. In a national survey of more than 600 primary care physicians, about one in three described patients with obesity as “weak-willed,” “sloppy,” or “lazy.”⁴³ The science had moved. The system hadn’t.

So what is fueling the psychology behind diet culture — and, in turn, behind food addiction?

Beliefs.

There are two main ones driving it.

The first is exactly “it’s a discipline problem.” That belief projects “I’m weak” and “I’m not good enough,” and it turns something the body is meant to handle naturally, every day, into a luxury — a surreal experience that has to be earned.

The second belief is the more collectively damaging one. It’s that “being at a healthy weight while having food freedom — not counting, not tracking, not trying hard to manage — is beyond realistic.”

In America, people grow up watching everyone in their families diet. Grow up in a town of 30,000 people, and you will see most of them on some kind of diet, every day. The numbers back this up: in the most recent national survey, 47.4% of Americans aged 16 and older had tried to lose weight in the past year.⁴⁴ This is not new. Between 1985 and 1992, 41–48% of American women reported they were currently trying to lose weight.⁴⁵ Three generations of kitchens.

And we know how it tends to go. Restriction, especially the extreme kind, feeds the very loss of control it is meant to prevent. In the Nurses’ Health Study II, women who repeatedly lost and regained weight were 1.8 to 2.5 times more likely to binge eat than women who didn’t, and they went on to gain more weight.⁴⁶ Diet, binge, regain, diet again. For millions of people, that loop is not a phase. It is a life.

The difference between you and me is this:

You grew up in a world where reality told you every day that you have to work really hard to earn something I consider natural — and still fail. I lived in a world where reality, in my hometown of 10 million people, effortlessly showed me that food was never a thing, and that natural weight management was the everyday norm.

Most people don’t realize that America is a fish tank. They don’t see that billions of people outside it have never even heard of what they call truth. When I first moved to the US from China and everyone told me “rice is evil,” I had no idea what world I had landed in.

This is what I have been telling my clients for all these years:

By the time they find me, my biggest advantage over them is this: my belief about food, built on twenty years of accumulated data, keeps me from adopting the thoughts and behaviors that led to the outcomes they have lived with for so long.

From the perspective of neuroscience, our brains are prediction machines. They don’t take in reality neutrally; they project forward, then work to make what happens match what they predicted.^39,40 Our lived data forms the prediction, the prediction shapes our beliefs and self-concepts, and those beliefs project our future experiences.

That is how a country’s story becomes a person’s story. After enough years, it isn’t something you do anymore. It’s who you think you are. “I’m the one who can’t keep chocolate in the house.” “I’m the one with no willpower.” And once your brain holds that model of you, it doesn’t just describe you. It enforces you — in what you notice, how you read your body, which move it primes next.

This is where the deepest belief of all comes from: “I have no power in front of food.”

In case you’ve never heard it, this is what I learned from the textbook: