To use your alcoholic analogy. Imagine you were a terrible alcoholic and you decide to get better. Great! But you can’t STOP drinking. Not completely. You have to stop drinking too much while also NEEDING to have 2-3 single drinks a day to survive. So every day. Every. Single. Day. Multiple times a day you have to face that temptation. Your brain and body are craving you down a fifth of vodka when you wake up, but you’re only supposed to drink a watered down Bloody Mary instead. You have to taste that vodka and get a tiny bit of that dopamine hit from it, but you just have to stop. Your kitchen is full of liquor bottles, but you have to just wait until lunch to have your next drink with that craving eating away at you.
And then you hit the breakroom at lunch to sip on your small shot of whiskey you brought from home, but the breakroom is a cocktail bar and everyone around you is downing a couple pints of lager or a Long Island Ice Tea. There’s an open bar right there! Plenty of drinks easily available and your mind is begging you to just go get some. But you’re not abstaining completely. You just have to sit there and sip on your tiny bit of alcohol and that’ll just be enough.
For your nightly drink, you always take it at home. You can’t go to a restaurant with anyone, or even by yourself. You can’t order in. The smallest drinks they serve is a full pint. And still, while you down that Manhattan as quickly as you can every night so as not to think about it too much, you have to go to your kitchen to prepare it with the shelves full of liquor. And just have that one drink. Everyone else gets to have a few drinks a day and move on with their life, but for you every meal is a fight to not go off the deep end while dipping your toes just a little into the pool.
And then tomorrow you have to wake up and do it again.
And every day for the rest of your life.
And that’s just me trying to appeal to your empathy, assuming you have any. There’s science that shows that the dopamine (or maybe serotonin, I always get them confused) that food addicts get is just as addictive as a hard drug habit. It’s literally the same thing. That’s why drugs feel good. It’s not just the altered state that’s addictive. The chemicals your brain release when it gets these things make you crave more. Some people’s brains light up from eating some foods. It’s the same thing as a drug habit, but you can’t quit. Ever. There’s science to back up how wrong you are. You just don’t have to deal with it and you can’t imagine how anyone could have different experiences than you.