Welcome back to the Diet Doctor Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Brett Sher. Today I'm joined by Dr. Vera

Tarman. Now, Vera is a physician and an addiction specialist, and she treats all kinds of

addictions. In fact, she's the medical director of one of Canada's largest addiction treatment

centers. But her passion and her focus is on food addiction.

And that's really interesting because when it comes to the world of psychiatry, the world of

addiction medicine, food addiction actually isn't recognized as a true diagnosis. So for someone

to be an addiction specialist physician and to work in an addiction center and focus on food addiction,

it presents a little bit of an issue, I think, because of the lack of a diagnosis.

And we talk a lot about that and what it means to the field of addiction medicine and what

it means to individuals who may be addicted to food. She also has authored a book, Food Junkies, Recovery from Food Addiction. She's got a

podcast food junk, food junkies. She's got a free Facebook group. She tries to put as much

information out there as she can to help connect with people and help them through this problem.

Because like with a lot of addictions, there's a lot of doubt, there's a lot of

guilt, there's a lot of uncertainty, and it can be really hard to sort of break through it.

And the first part is recognizing it, understanding it, and knowing where to get help and how

to get started with help.

So we talk a lot about sort of the definition and why it may or

may not be food addiction and whether that even really matters, how to differentiate it from

other just food cravings or emotional eating and things like that, what types of foods are most

addictive, how to recognize it in yourself and where to start to get help or treatment.

So if you think you might be battling this or someone you know is struggling with this,

this could be a really important episode to listen to because it's not something that's

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