ABSTRACT

Assessing for unintended use will give the practitioner important information about the pattern and severity of loss of control over use of processed foods. This chapter reviews the evidence for a syndrome of unintended use in Processed Food Addiction (PFA). Practitioners can gain the ability to incorporate information about unintended use into phases of recovery, including the definition of the problem, the process of motivating the client to undertake recovery, the list of options for starting, baseline pathology, and tracking of progress. The internal confusion and sense of continuous failure associated with unintended use is a serious consequence of PFA. The ingestion of excessive harmful calorie-dense foods makes cessation of unintended use an important goal of recovery. There are three general categories of behaviors in unintended use: loss of control over eating itself, coping with loss of control, and hiding the loss of control over eating.