Does it make sense to fight addiction first, and then (after the addiction is cured or alleviated) to fight gluttony?
In trying to separate the two, I prefer to say that gluttony is a sinful behavior, and addiction is a disease that, if present, mitigates the guilt. An addict can eat gluttonously or temperately; a non-addict can eat gluttonously or temperately; the addict incurs less guilt than the non-addict, because the disease lessens his knowledge and his consent.
To eat and drink non-gluttonously involves both knowledge and will. First you must use biochemical signals, social signals, and learning to know correctly what you should eat — what love of God, self, and others requires. Then you must exercise your will to eat and drink in accord with that knowledge.
An addict has a screwed-up set of biochemical signals, so his knowledge of what's necessary for love of self is impaired. And the same signals punish him harshly for disobeying them, so his will is impaired too.
The first task of the gluttonous addict is to correct his knowledge: in determining his necessities from day to day and from moment to moment, to give a greater weight to the more-reliable intellect and a lesser weight to his unreliable-because-diseased biochemical signals. As far as I can tell, this requires the exercise and development of the virtue of prudence:
…an intellectual habit enabling us to see… what is virtuous and what is not, and how to come at the one and avoid the other. It…aims to perfect not the will but the intellect in its practical decisions. Its function is to point out what course of action is to be taken… It has nothing to do with directly willing the good it discerns… without prudence… temperance [sinks] into fanaticism.
In short, he has to come up with a good plan.
The second task is to exercise restraint in accord with that plan. To do so is, precisely, to practice the virtue of temperance with respect to food and drink:
Temperance… may be defined as the righteous habit which makes a man govern his natural appetite for pleasures of the senses in accordance with the norm prescribed by reason.
The third task, one that is particular to the gluttonous addict, is to exercise his strength of will to bear the suffering that his body signals inflict on him when he disregards them. If he has decided to fast from a food, and his body craves the food, he has to resist the craving, and voluntarily endure the suffering even though he knows he could relieve it by going "off plan." You know what that takes, right? Fortitude, both supernatural and natural.
Fortitude as one of the gifts from the Holy Ghost is a supernatural virtue… but we still keep hold upon the natural principles of fortitude as those whereon grace has to build. Our exercise is mainly… in moral courage against the evil spirit of the times, against improper fashions, against human respect, against the common tendency to seek… the comfortable… We need courage also to be patient under poverty or privation…
The physical conditions of fortitude… are such as these: "goodness of nervous tone…; health and freshness; tonic coolness; light and buoyant spirit; elate and sanguine temperament; acquired mastery over terror…" These physical matters, though not directly moral, are worthy of attention; there is much interaction between moral and physical qualities, and our duty is to cultivate the two departments of fortitude jointly.
Prudence, temperance, fortitude.
Even though I numbered them first, second, third, I don't think they happen in that order in time. You really have to start working on all three at once. If gluttony equals intemperance, and addiction impairs the knowledge and the will, then the gluttonous addict is by definition intemperate, imprudent, and weak all at once. An example from my own experience: it takes fortitude even to BEGIN to take the prudential step of giving less weight to the bad signals from your body when you make your plan of attack. It was for me quite scary to take the intellectual step of admitting that it might be a good idea to try being hungry.
A final note on "beating" addictions.
I'm convinced that most of us who have a carbohydrate addiction can alleviate it or even cure it with prolonged effort. If it's true, that's great news. It means that your signals might get more accurate and you might experience less suffering. That would mean you'd need less fortitude and prudence to avoid gluttony.
On the other hand, maybe you're not one of those people. What if you can't alleviate it all that well? Maybe there's no cure for your condition. Or maybe (and this is a reasonable possibility to prepare for) it'll take a really long time for the effects to show up.
In that case you'll need more fortitude and prudence in this area than non-addicts do. You know what? That's a normal state of the human condition. We're all different and each of us has SOMETHING that requires extra virtue.
So… I don't think it's a good idea to get fixated on a plan of "first beat the addiction, then work on gluttony." I think that working on both go hand in hand, through the exercise of prudence, temperance, and fortitude.
UPDATE: What about the fourth cardinal virtue of justice? Justice also helps you overcome gluttony: if you possess that virtue, you recognize that when resources are limited, you ought to allow others to have a "fair" portion — you won't take the last helping if others at the table haven't had any yet. I don't think this was a particular problem for me, so it didn't occur to me, but completeness and an obsessive need to complete the list of four cardinal virtues requires me to mention it.
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[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness. This post is one of the better ones, as I’m actually trying to express that distinction here. “Addiction” might be better expressed as “clinical eating disorder.”
I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.
I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]
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