Hi, my name is Katie Chandler and I am part of the graduating class of 2019 from Wakefield School. I will be attending Auburn University, class of 2023, for a pre-nursing major. Although I have never had to witness the horrors of food addiction personally, I have always had a fascination with diets and how sugary foods are so harmful yet so ignored. This fascination started when I was younger, growing up outside of Atlanta, Georgia where everyone felt an obligation to keep up with all of the latest trends. My mother and grandmother would always talk about diets they heard about or were currently following, but the diet trend would constantly change and there would of course be flexibility to cheat.

 

As I got older I realized that, one, there was no cheating in diets, and two, new diets surface so often that nobody can keep up with what is real or not. That was the moment when I became hooked on the idea of diets, as well as, how food really effects your health. Even though I became hooked on these two topics, I never followed a diet myself. This eventually led to my fascination dying out, until the obesity crisis reached shocking numbers in 2017. I decided to delve into my newly redeveloped fascination by researching food addiction for my senior thesis.