Next Enrollment → Fall, 2025
sugar & food addiction
With Dr. Vera Tarman
Learn the facts about sugar & food addiction — and how to break free from long-standing self-sabotaging behaviors so you can feel confident around food and in yourself.
Do you feel...
- Completely out of control around certain foods.
- Obsessed with food – sometimes food is all you think about.
- Ashamed about how much you eat some days.
- Desperate to find the next “miracle diet” that will finally work for you.
- Your binges and “secret eating” have led to obesity or medical problems, but you still can’t stop.
- You make promises to yourself about taking control of your eating... and then promptly break them, every time.
- Hopeless... will I ever be able to change my eating habits?
If this sounds like you, then you’ve come to the right place!
The Sugar & Food Addiction course with addiction specialist, Dr. Vera Tarman, is exactly what you’ve been looking for!
No matter how long you’ve been living with sugar or food addiction or how far-gone you feel, you can take control back.
ABOUT DR. VERA TARMAN
Vera Tarman, MD, is the Medical Director of one of Canada’s largest treatment centers for substance abuse. She is an internationally renowned expert on sugar & food addiction and is the author of Food Junkies: Recovery From Food Addiction. Additionally, she co-hosts the Food Junkies Podcast, runs educational workshops, and is a featured speaker at medical and academic conferences. Dr. Tarman is a highly respected authority on diagnosing and treating food addiction and has lived the food addiction experience herself: she is a recovering food addict who has maintained a 100-pound weight loss for more than 12 years.
A video message from Dr. Tarman:
COURSE OVERVIEW
The Sugar & Food Addiction course will guide you through why you feel out of control around food—and how to break free. It is designed to help you understand the biology and neurochemistry of food addiction so that you can identify the specific foods and food behaviors that are problematic for you in order to create your own food plan that you can implement and enjoy for the long term. Equipped with the plan that works best for you, you can begin to be free of the hold food has over you, take control of your eating habits, and finally, achieve the weight loss and health goals you’ve so desperately been seeking.
Course
Duration
9 Hours
Course
Price
USD $167.00
Course
Level
Beginner/Intermediate
Still need more? Click the FAQ button below.
HOW THE PROGRAM WORKS
The Sugar & Food Addiction program is made up of 2 components.
Modules & Lessons
The course is self-paced and accessible through an online student portal. It consists of video lessons with Dr. Tarman and supporting educational resources that will give you actionable advice for the real world—such as how to manage cravings, combating the thoughts and feelings that lead you toward self-sabotaging actions around food, and dealing with the “food pushers” in your life. Complete transcripts are available for all video lessons and all the pdf resources in the course library are yours to keep. You can log in to your student portal and watch the video lessons as many times as you wish, even long after the course ends.
Live Sessions
In addition to the course lessons, students will have 4 LIVE, INTERACTIVE sessions with Dr. Tarman and a team of certified sugar and food addiction counselors. There will be one session with Dr. Tarman for course review and Q&A, and three live coaching sessions with the certified counselors. All live sessions will be recorded and the replay will be added to your student portal the following day – so you never have to worry about missing anything. We encourage you to watch live if you can – having a safe, understanding, and supportive community is a critical part of recovery from food addiction.
what YOU WILL LEARN
- Why your self-destructive behaviors around food are not your fault.
- How specific foods are engineered to hijack your brain chemistry.
- The role of hormones and neurotransmitters in creating and perpetuating cravings and urges around food.
- How “wanting,” “knowing,” and “doing” are controlled in the brain and how to make this work to your benefit.
- The differences between food addiction and various eating disorders and why this matters for diagnosis and treatment.
- The different stages of food addiction and which treatment approaches are best for each.
- The critical importance of social support in recovery from food addiction – why treatment must go beyond just the food.
- How to create a recovery plan that’s realistic, enjoyable, and sustainable, so you can achieve food freedom and reclaim your life.
- There is hope: no matter how far gone you feel, no matter how alone or out of control, you can recover from sugar and food addiction.
YOU WILL FINALLY HAVE ANSWERS FOR WHY…
- Willpower is not needed to break food addictions – and what does work.
- So many diets failed you in the past, despite your strongest efforts.
- You self-sabotage with food even though you feel desperate to lose weight or improve your health.
- Weight loss surgery and medications are not permanent solutions for binge eating or food addiction.
YOU WILL GET
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These lessons are the heart of the course. Dr. Tarman makes complex, high-level science understandable and accessible so that you will have actionable information you can use to begin your recovery from food addiction. You can watch the videos as many times as you wish during the course, and you will have continued access to your student portal after the course ends so that you can log in and replay them anytime you’d like a refresher.
Beyond the pre-recorded video lessons that constitute the course itself, you will have 1 LIVE session (via Zoom) with Dr. Tarman. This live session is your chance to go beyond what’s in the course lessons and ask Dr. Tarman to dive deeper into issues of specific interest to you or to provide more clarity on anything in the lesson videos. While Dr. Tarman cannot provide personalized medical advice during this session, it is a unique opportunity to learn more, directly from a medical professional who not only specializes in diagnosing and treating food addiction, but who is a long-term recovered food addict, herself, and who has personal experience with the recovery process. Don’t worry if you can’t attend live: all live sessions will be recorded and you will receive an email the very next day with a link to watch the replay. (Replays will also be available in your student portal.)
Recovery from food addiction requires more than simply learning about it. You need tactics, techniques, and actionable strategies to implement in order to make genuine, lasting change. That is exactly what you will get during these three LIVE coaching sessions with certified addiction counselors whose careers are dedicated to helping people succeed on the path to food freedom.
You will receive the complete audio version of Dr. Tarman’s groundbreaking book, Food Junkies. Food Junkies is an excellent complement to the course material. It will help you dive deeper into understanding the biology behind sugar and food addiction and how to identify and overcome a variety of eating problems, such as binge eating disorder, compulsive overeating, and compulsive restriction. The book combines solid science with years of clinical experience and includes multiple patients’ inspiring stories of recovery.
A compilation of books, videos, podcasts, and other resources from trusted authorities on sugar and food addiction. These resources will provide you with ongoing education and support long after the course ends. This compilation also includes recommended papers from the scientific and medical literature for professionals and interested laypeople who want to explore select peer-reviewed publications in this area of research.
All 18 lessons come with complete transcripts that you can use to follow along while you watch the videos or print out to read at your leisure and refer back to at any time. (Like all the pdf resources that come with the course, you can download and save these—they are yours to keep.)
Dr. Westman guides you through his “prescription-strength” keto method and food list, through which he has helped thousands of patients for more than twenty years. It’s the simplest, least complicated, and most straightforward approach to ridding yourself of food cravings and conquering your addictive behavior around food.
Multiple pdf resources with actionable strategies for managing and avoiding food cravings, dealing with “food pushers,” and getting past the lies the food-addicted brain uses to keep you mired in self-destructive habits. This information will be invaluable for aiding in your recovery from sugar or food addiction.
COURSE CONTENT
Module 1: What is Food Addiction?
- Lesson 1: Setting the stage: the processed food industry
- Lesson 2: The hunger hormones
- Lesson 3: The neurochemicals
- Lesson 4: Willpower in the face of addiction
- Lesson 5: The four stages of food addiction
Module 2: Am I a Food Addict?
- Lesson 1: The diagnosis of food addiction
- Lesson 2: Food addiction and eating disorders
- Lesson 3: The arguments: food addiction does not exist
Module 3: Food Addiction Treatment
- Lesson 1: The standard treatments for obesity do not work
- Lesson 2: Eating plans that do NOT work
- Lesson 3: Abstinence for the food addict
- Lesson 4: Abstinence food plans for the food addict
Module 4: It’s Not Just About the Food
- Lesson 1: Relapse prevention
- Lesson 2: Support, support, support!
- Lesson 3: How to say NO when all my friends are food pushers
Module 5: Food Addiction Issues
- Lesson 1: What is volume addiction?
- Lesson 2: What is transfer addiction?
- Lesson 3: Intermittent fasting
HOW DO I KNOW THIS COURSE IS FOR ME?
There are logical scientific explanations for why you engage in behaviors that may feel irrational to you. Certain foods have very specific effects on your brain chemistry – effects that override the “higher-order” part of your brain that controls conscious decision-making and sensible actions. Learning about these effects and identifying which foods are the most problematic for you are the keys to using this biology in your favor rather than trying to follow diets that work against it at every turn – a strategy that has failed you every time. The Sugar & Food Addiction course will teach you how to make peace with food and gain control of your eating, by harnessing your brain chemistry and directing it to work for you in a way that supports healthful habits and food serenity for the long term.
Additionally, the support and coaching you will get from Dr. Tarman and her team during the live sessions will give you an invaluable foundation for your recovery. If you found it impossible to make lasting change in the past because you were doing it alone, this course will provide you with a completely different experience—one that’s inspiring and empowering.
**This is the first course of its kind! Nowhere else is this information laid out so clearly for students, professionals, or the lay public.
