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The Three Camps (And why Willpower Only Works for One of Them)
Amanda Leith runs SHIFT Recovery, built on the legacy of Acorn Food Dependency Recovery Services, and she's been in stable recovery from food addiction herself for eleven and a half years, no sidesteps, by her own account, since the day she walked into treatment. Before that, she told me, her life was a familiar-sounding spiral: weight loss surgery, a lap band, an early GLP-1 medication almost twenty years ago before they were common, fat camps, every diet, and she just kept getting fatter and sadder in tandem, eventually landing over 300 pounds, diabetic, and, in her words, wanting to die.
What changed everything for her wasn't another diet. It was finally getting matched with treatment that was actually built for what she had.
This is the piece of our conversation I think is most underused in the recovery world, so I want to lay it out carefully. Amanda breaks struggling with food into three distinct camps, and each one needs a genuinely different kind of help.
Camp one: weight is the actual problem, full stop. Someone in this camp might be carrying twenty or twenty-five extra pounds, gets a nudge from their doctor about rising blood pressure, adopts a new food and exercise plan, and it works. Calories in, calories out, some willpower and education, and they're on their way. This camp is real, and for this camp, the standard advice genuinely holds.
Camp two: emotional eating. This is where a lot of eating disorder and emotional eating treatment lives. People in this camp are eating over something, trauma, big or small, because none of us get through life without some, and their system learned early that food was the way to cope. What they need is skills: therapy, whether CBT, DBT, or internal family systems work, to learn to sit with feelings instead of eating them. For this camp, the goal is usually full moderation and intuitive eating, and it's achievable.
Camp three: addiction. This is the camp Amanda specializes in, and it's fundamentally different from the other two, because it has a physical component layered on top of the emotional one. Your brain has actually changed. And here's the critical point she made that I think gets missed constantly: if addiction is present, you cannot treat only the physical side (just put down the substance) or only the emotional side (just build coping skills), you have to treat both, simultaneously. Do only the food work, and your untreated emotional barometer eventually fills back up until you hit what she calls the mental obsession, and you're back in the food before you've even registered a decision was made. Do only the emotional work while still consuming the addictive substances, and you never fully learn to be with yourself without food, and you stay trapped in physical cravings that never fully quiet down.
Volume addiction is real, and it's separate from sugar or ultra-processed food addiction. Amanda told me that even with her sugar and processed food fully addressed, she still has to watch for eating enormous quantities of things like carrots or broccoli, food most people assume is safe in any amount. There are stretch receptors in your stomach that trigger a dopamine release when activated, meaning volume itself, independent of what you're eating, can become its own addictive pattern. If someone has fully quit sugar and processed food but is still struggling, this might be the missing piece, and the treatment for it is typically a weighed and measured food plan.
How do you know which camp you're in? Amanda's honest answer: it's not always clean-cut, but one telling sign is whether food feels like an occasional struggle you can course-correct, or whether it's simply constant, not tied to a specific trigger at all, just running in the background all day, every day. A new member in our own community recently told me exactly that: she didn't have a trigger, she just had one continuous binge, rolling into the next and the next. That's a strong signal toward camp three, and toward needing real addiction-level treatment, not another diet plan.
"You need so much support in the first six months to two years — that's not weakness, that's the actual treatment." Amanda pushed back hard on the idea that knowing the tools should be enough. If you know exactly what you're supposed to do and still can't do it, that doesn't mean the tools are wrong. It usually means you don't have enough support to actually use them yet. Her advice in that case isn't to try harder alone, it's to add more support: a peer group, more frequent meetings, professional help, or a more intensive program if what you have isn't holding.
"Live a small life for now, and you'll get a great big one later." This was the line that stuck with me most. Amanda tells early clients, plainly, that in the beginning of real recovery you may need to simplify your life dramatically, fewer commitments, tighter structure, because your emotional barometer hasn't learned to stay low yet, and that takes time to build. People resist this because it feels like giving up freedom. Her response: you weren't actually free before. Food, or your weight, was the boss of your life. The freedom she's watched people find on the other side of a genuinely small, structured beginning has, in her twelve years doing this work, never once disappointed anyone who tried it.
One non-negotiable, above everything else: honesty with yourself, held up by support. When I asked Amanda what protects her own recovery more than anything, she didn't say a food rule or a meal plan. She said honesty, and immediately admitted she needs a lot of support to stay honest, because addiction runs on denial. Being around people who share the same disease and the same solution is what keeps her accountable to herself.
If you take one thing from this: if you've been told your relationship with food is "just" emotional eating, and the tools for that haven't worked no matter how hard you try, it might not be the wrong tools. It might be the wrong category. That's not a failure, that's just information pointing you toward the treatment that was actually built for what you're carrying.
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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