The Search for Reliability
A 28-Year Quest for Reliable Remission of Addiction to Processed Foods
Dr. Ifland has been looking for a reliable way to help people stop compulsively eating addictive, harmful foods since 1996. Here is the story of how a 6-year quest finally yielded online programs that reliably give compulsive overeaters control over food for the long-term.
1996 Joan creates a handout of healthy foods for friends but no one can follow it. This shows that a information alone is not effective in helping people change eating routines. Information is not enough, nonetheless, health professionals are still relying on handouts today.
2000 Joan publishes her popular book Sugars and Flours: How they Make us Crazy, Sick and Fat. The book stays in the top 3% of Amazon books for over 10 years but does not spark a revolution in eating styles. A book was not enough. Nonetheless, hundreds of diet/health books continue to be published.
2001+ Joan teams up with PBS producer Patricia Gras to teach Americans about the harm of processed foods. This does not help but such programs are still being produced.
2007 Joan earns her PhD in the hope of reaching academics. To her astonishment, she discovers a vast body of obesity literature describing the symptoms of food addiction. Her dissertation validates alcoholism diagnostic criteria for overeating. Although the scientific basis for food addiction exists, it is hidden.
2009 Dr. Ifland publishes the first description of food addiction in the academic press. The article has been cited 302 times as of this writing. The scientific field of food addiction has swiftly grown but does not reach practitioners nor the public. It did not create the reliable help that Joan was searching for.
2010 Joan founds Victory Meals, a prepared meal company with the goal of showing people easily how much better they feel without processed foods. One finding was that prepared meals are too expensive to sustain health. To her surprise, Dr. Ifland found that even highly successful people were released from cravings, brain fog, and fatigue when eating non-addictive food. Processed food impairment reaches the highest levels of society. Prepared meals are not the answer just as giving an alcoholic water does not stop the alcoholism.
2014 Joan is approached by CRC Press to write the textbook for the food addiction field. Processed Food Addiction: Foundations, Assessment, and Recovery is published in 2018. It is 204,000 words supported by 2,000 studies. It establishes the scientific basis for food addiction and shows it to be a widespread, severe addiction. This is the foundational work that shows why all weight-loss programs are inadequate to put reverse overeating and diet-related disease for the long term.
2016 Dr. Ifland begins offering online support to overeaters. The rationale for focusing on online programs is that overeaters are severely addicted which justifies a level of support equal to Intensive Outpatient Treatment. However, such treatment is not available. The initial offering of one phone call per day is not enough. The program builds to 4 hours per day of live programming.
2019 The Daily Addiction Reset Community (ARC) with the one-week intensive Reset Week, finally brings control over food to a beta test group of 30 individuals who had been bingeing uncontrollably. Access to four hours of live programming per day on the Zoom platform, plus a periodic all-day, multi-day live program proves to be enough to keep addictive overeating and diet-related diseases in remission. (www.foodaddictionreset.com) (www.resetweek.com)
2019 The American College of Nutrition promotes Dr. Ifland to Fellow in recognition of her work in processed food addiction.
2020 Dr. Ifland releases the Food Addiction Core Training (www.foodaddictionprofessionals) for health professionals. She also releases the Food Addiction Recovery Advocate (FARA) for lay people, leading to the role of managing an Addiction Reset Community.
2023 Dr. Ifland created and oversaw the Remission Optimist Community (ROC) launch. A caring community with lots of experience in recovery from ‘incurable’ diseases using alternative modalities.
2023 Dr. Ifland created the Holistic Recovery Academy (https://www.foodaddictionreset.com/holistic-recovery-academy) to offer her latest breakthrough approaches to health restoration through its life-changing short courses.
Future. Dr. Ifland continues to train both professionals and lay people to lead others out of the misery of processed foods. She works to improve retention, shorten the time to control over food, and attract compulsive overeaters to her programs.
