If you’ve ever tried to quit smoking or witnessed someone close to you going through it, you know the signs of withdrawal – shaking, crankiness, ups and downs of mania and fatigue. When someone is in the early stages of getting clean of nicotine, the sight or smell of other people smoking can trigger a visceral reaction. Years after I quit smoking, I still vacillate between being offended by the smoke and wanting to grab their cigarette for myself. Old habits die hard (and roll around in their coffin every once in a while just to keep you on your toes).

I know firsthand that quitting is tough dusty work, but I’m here to tell you this: no one has EVER died from resisting a craving! For people stuck in their own personal food fight, the feeling is the same. You see your trigger food and feel your response to it. See or smell, consider or crave – and you’ll have a physical and emotional response. What’s confusing around changing what we eat is that we’ve all got to eat; there’s no going entirely cold turkey on the food front.

Each of us has an animal intelligence that compels us to survive, makes us drink more water when we’re dehydrated, or eat more protein because we’re iron deficient. It’s difficult to figure out when you should pay attention to these signals once you’ve started to binge on food and are overeating for emotional – not physical – reasons.

If this is hitting home for you, I want to ask you right now to not get sad, but to get a little bit mad. Take a moment to design a pair of imaginary boxing gloves. Maybe yours are pink and shiny, or covered with tiger-print fake fur. Leather with spikes? Camouflage print with a button you press to shoot out flames? All good. The point is: get mad enough about the way you’ve been treating yourself with food that you’re ready to fight! Put your boxing gloves on because I am giving you permission to start a FOOD FIGHT!

As I’ve said: “Addiction is a disease of cravings, obsession and lies.”

First Opponent: Cravings

Your first battle is going to be the toughest: figuring out the difference between hunger – the actual need to eat and nourish your body – and cravings, that addiction response you have, that feeling that you “need to feed.” A major clue is that foods with high levels of sugar, such as chocolate, are more frequently craved than foods with lower sugar glucose, such as broccoli because – FYI – sugar is addictive.  Eating sugary foods or nutritionally vacant foods made of refined flour (white bread, crackers, donuts, the majority of non-home baked goods) actually floods you with an initial speedy rush that quickly nosedives, leaving you depleted and craving another fix.

Think back to 150 years ago; most people consumed small amounts of sugar found naturally in fruit. Today it can be challenging to avoid processed foods. They dominate supermarket shelves and advertising, so you want them and buy them. They’re engineered to hook you and deliver a sugar overload that literally crashes your system.

Kicking sugar and other addictive foods to the curb has a physiological and a psychological component. This is going to sound a little odd,  perhaps, but many of us rely on food for emotional intimacy.  Think about it, don’t you sometimes eat over feelings? We turn to food for comfort when words and people fail us, or we feel like we fail ourselves. Think through what you are doing to your body by rewarding yourself with food that is bad for you. Is this relationship with food sabotaging your life and your future? Are you a mom? A sister? A daughter? Ask yourself how your relationship with food has influenced your relationship with others, and their own relationships to food and love-affirming foods.

Imagine a giant 50-pound bag of white sugar (or if you’re more of a carb addict, make that a bag of white flour). You’ve got the gloves on, so put your fists up and give me 10 punches right out in front of you as hard as you can. You’ve got to ID your opponent to knock him out.

Cravings: Pow-pow-pow x 10!

Second Opponent:  Obsession

Here’s a cold, hard fact: Most attempts to change the way you eat fail because we can’t get past that crucial moment when we take the first bite of the food we are literally emotionally glued to. We all have our excuses as to why we should let ourselves have “just a little.”

I call them “justification levers” we pull when we want to give in and give up. It’s a birthday party or a holiday, the bad food was a gift or something someone made special for you (it will take time to get the word out, but loved ones will get you other presents!). Maybe it’s something other people bring into your home or workplace, and you feel like you don’t have time to grab anything else.

All are lame excuses when you think about it in a detached unemotional way. Take a deep breath and ask yourself this: Will you take action to live lighter and better – or not?

Here’s some practical advice because I know it can be tough. When you find yourself obsessing about food that is not self-loving, begin a task that will take at least 15 minutes to complete. Call your best friend. Take a bath. Do a load of laundry, or my favorite – take a stroll.  Distract yourself for even a little bit and wait it out. It’s just a feeling you are having and you can walk through it.

As much as possible, don’t have any of your trigger food around you. Put out the word to friends and family that you’ve taken the Just 10 challenge to change what you weigh. Don’t bring any of these trigger foods to your home or to your job. Out of sight, out of mind. Extinction. Let the chocolates go the way of the dodo bird!

In a moment of weakness, you’ve always got your boxing gloves handy. Obessions: Pow-pow-pow x 10! Line up those trigger foods in your mind like opponents.  Fists up! Now pop those unhealthy sugary sweets and empty carbs as hard as you can with your custom boxing gloves – right off the edge, into the abyss.

POW-POW-POW-POW x 10!

Let me start by saying this is friendly fire. I support your courage in battling for health care reform. But I must offer my perspective as a professional interventionist, former smoker and recovering drug addict and alcoholic as to how much damage you are doing – not  just to your own life and health, but to the strength of your moral authority by continuing to smoke. In demanding healthcare for all Americans, I implore you to kick the addiction that is the leading cause of preventable death in our nation.

I smoked for 20 years, and only 5 years ago snubbed out the last cigarette of my life. I’m a recovered addict, and more than 7 years ago quit alcohol, 8 years ago quit cocaine, prescription drugs and crystal meth, so I know the realities of “quitting.”

Tobacco was harder than all those combined.

With tobacco, I was triggered every 15 minutes or so. The urge to pick up, light, inhale and get high arrived without fail. My friend and constant companion? An addiction: My smokes.

If we were in an intervention in the White House, with your family and friends around you, (and Secret Service of course), this is the advice I would offer and it what the experts told me before I quit.

Mr. President, you are loved, and deserve this change:

1. Set a date, and commit to quitting.
2. See a doctor to find out the status of your inside; consider a stop- smoking prescription as advised like a patch, a lozenge, nicotine gum or a pill.
3. Get support – family, friends, co-workers, Nicotine Anonymous (NA) or the seek out free online meetings
4. Act “AS IF” you are a non-smoker. Claim your seat in the row of the recovered. Clean out the motorcade, Air Force One and the White House of all the cigarettes, lighters, and ashtrays. Get rid of it all!
5. Get a haircut, take a shower, clean your clothes and smell like the non-smoker you now are.

My own quitting was tough, slow going. I quit in a moment, but the urges lingered. My brain had become hard-wired for the drug delivery system that cigarettes provided. Rain or shine, I’d get my fix.

I understand where you are at – and it’s safe to concede you are under much more pressure than I expect I will ever be in my lifetime. But I made the plan, got the support and quit I did, and so can you. Slowly but surely my body started to heal, to rebound and mend.

Even today, years into my recovery from tobacco addiction an urge will strike: Pick up, light, inhale and get high. But just as the urges arrive, they depart.

Without fail the urges came to pass. They never came to stay.

Even as you ignite a national debate on the costs of healthcare, I pray that you will do your own personal math on this front. What is smoking costing you? Your health, skin, hair, sex life, and future? Quitting smoking is time in a bottle.

Smoking robs life, and time from us. In the US alone more than 47 million men and women smoke. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable and premature death right here in the greatest land on Earth, bar none. Yet it’s legal and we tell ourselves we “aren’t ready to stop” and that “we like the flavor” and really it’s just: Pick up, light, inhale and get high. It’s an addiction.

Smoking is a drug that delivers a powerful jolt to your brain and central nervous system. Pick up, light, inhale and get high. The fix.

But it’s not. You can do better, Mr. President. You must. This is a watershed moment for the way we see health care and disease. You are laying out a moral imperative and spotlighting our solemn obligation to provide health insurance for all Americans. But no plan coming out of Washington will really make any difference if we don’t take care of ourselves – in the same way no car insurance will save your life if you choose to drive recklessly. Its starts with you and you are leading by example.

Alas, we are not in the White House, and I may never be invited to the Oval Office to conduct this Intervention or Family Meeting in person, so the best I can do is write this open letter and ask the rest of America to join in asking you to change. I pledge my support

You are living with a disease of addiction – so am I. We are fighting on the same side. The example you set is too important. But most of all, your very life is at stake. Please quit.