A study came out this year in the Milbank Quarterly that confirmed what we have been saying. Ultra-processed foods and cigarettes use the identical industry playbook. Same sensory additives. Same reward acceleration strategy. Same lobbying playbook. Same health washing claims. The researchers did not use soft language. They called them highly-engineered delivery systems designed specifically to maximize biological and psychological reinforcement.
Delivery systems. Designed to maximize reinforcement. Read that again. That is not food. That is a product engineered to create dependency. And it works.
The bliss point. That is what they call it. The exact combination of sugar, salt, and fat that spikes your dopamine, crashes it, and makes you reach for more. They change the shape of fat globules to improve how food feels in your mouth. They grind salt finer so the flavor hits your taste buds faster. They literally call that an improved flavor burst. This is not cooking. This is chemistry. And the lab is pointed directly at your brain.
The dopamine spike from ultra-processed food activates the same neural pathways as cocaine, nicotine, and gambling. Your brain does not distinguish between the substances. It only knows the spike. The crash. The craving. The reach. The shame. The cycle.
Follow the money and it gets uglier. Why will health insurance not cover food addiction treatment? Because the money flows the other direction. The food industry creates the addicts. The pharmaceutical industry sells them the pills. The insurance industry charges them higher premiums. And the diet industry sells them the same failed solution every January for $49.99 a month.
Everybody is getting paid except you. You are the product. You are the recurring revenue. They do not want you healthy. A healthy person is a lost customer.
317 pounds. That is where I stood. Hiding a bag of fast food under my front seat so nobody would see me. Nobody in that supply chain wanted me to stop eating. Every single one of them wanted me to feel bad enough to buy their solution and desperate enough to fail so I would buy it again. And then it is my fault. That is not healthcare. That is a subscription trap wearing a lab coat.
Here is what they never taught us. When you stop eating, your body flips a switch. It is called autophagy. Your cells literally start eating their own damaged parts. Recycling broken proteins. Cleaning house. An enzyme called mTOR shuts down. Growth mode stops. Repair mode starts.
A study on intermittent fasting showed autophagy gene expression jumped 4.2 times in just four weeks. Four weeks. Your body already knows how to fix itself. It has been trying to help you for years.
We have been told our whole lives to eat six small meals a day. Snack between meals. Never skip breakfast. Every single one of those instructions keeps your body in growth mode and prevents the repair cycle from even starting. Who benefits from you eating more often? Follow the money. It is not your cells.
Somebody will comment that fasting is dangerous and I should see a doctor. Yes. See a doctor. But you know what else is dangerous? 370 pounds. 365 pounds at my heaviest. Insulin resistance at 56. Dying slowly in a body that is breaking down while everybody around you pretends it is fine because they do not want to be rude.
I did not get to 317 because I missed a doctor's appointment. I got there because every system around me was designed to keep me exactly where I was. Comfortable. Profitable. For everyone but me.
I am done being profitable for people who do not care if I live or die. I am not a guru. Not a coach. I am an addict sitting here with other addicts telling you what I am doing and what the science says. If you are carrying extra fat, if you have tried everything, if you have failed a hundred times, you are not broken. The system is broken. And stumbling is part of the recovery. We get back up. That is what we do.
