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The Blood Flow Problem Nobody Explained to You
Colleen Clifford has a nursing degree. She's 62. And she told me that it wasn't until her mid-to-late 50s that she'd even heard the term "food addiction", let alone understood the actual mechanics of what happens in the brain during a craving. If a nurse can go decades without this information, I promise you it's not just you who never learned it either.
Colleen's path here wasn't a straight line. She's a former commercial fisherwoman who spent decades in a hyper-demanding, all-male, high-intensity environment where you learned to suppress what you felt because there wasn't room to fall apart. She was bulimic in her twenties, got it under control, and then, this is the part I want you to sit with, it simply migrated. The eating disorder became a drinking disorder. Same root, different exit.
After she lost her husband to alcohol-related suicide, she finally got help, became a coach herself, and wrote a book called Life Beyond the Binge. What she shared with me about the biology of a craving is something I now explain to almost everyone I work with, because once you understand it, the shame starts to loosen its grip.
Here's the mechanism: your brain has a frontal lobe, where your rational, long-term-thinking self lives, and a center brain, where your addiction pathways live. When you're calm, blood flow stays up in that frontal lobe, and you have access to consequences, impulse control, and reason. But stress and cravings share a pathway in the brain, they sit right next to each other. So when your stress pathway gets activated, it vibrates the craving pathway too, and blood flow starts draining away from your rational brain toward the center, where the only message your body can generate is: this is an emergency, get the donut out of the trash right now or you will die.
You are not weak at that moment. You are, quite literally, not getting enough blood flow to the part of your brain that makes good decisions. That's not a metaphor, it's physiology.
Colleen calls the antidote to this "becoming your own detective." When a craving hits, instead of white-knuckling it or giving in on autopilot, you get curious: what triggered this? Was I stressed? Was I somewhere I used to drink? Am I hungry, actually hungry, and just misreading it? She told a story about coming home from two months at sea, opening the fridge, and finding a tiny bottle of Fireball that wasn't even hers. The thought crossed her mind, I could drink this, nobody would know, and instead of fighting that thought, she interrogated it. Why do I want it? What happens after? And then she threw it away and ate real food instead, because she was probably just hungry.
A few other things from our conversation worth holding onto:
Toxic shame says "I am a failure." Healthy shame says "I did something I'm not proud of, and I can course-correct." Only one of those leads anywhere useful.
Isolation is where most binges happen. Community isn't a nice-to-have in recovery, it's often the actual mechanism of change. Colleen credits the group she joined for teaching her to look at "the other twenty days" instead of fixating on the one hiccup.
Recovery is a series of edits, not one dramatic overhaul. What works for you now may need a tweak in six months. That's not failure. That's just how this works.
The food industry designed the bliss point on purpose. Colleen brought this up unprompted, scientists in the 1970s engineered the exact combination of salt, sugar, and fat that keeps you reaching for more. Knowing that doesn't excuse the behavior, but it does take some of the self-blame out of the equation.
If you take one thing from this: the next time a craving hits like an emergency, try asking what's actually happening in your body before you respond to what your brain is telling you. The blood flow will come back. It always does. You just have to give it a minute.
You are not alone. Healing is possible. Your story matters.
You’re not broken, and you’re never alone. If you want ongoing encouragement, practical resources, or a supportive community of women walking this path, join my email list or grab our book, Real Food Recovery: If Food Isn’t the Answer, What’s the Question? And catch our weekly podcast here!
You are strong. You can do this. And we’ll walk it together.
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