Goats Are Not Really Addicted to Food

If anyone were to ask Jacob why he binge-ate for twenty-five years, he would say that he had a food-addicted goat in his head that told him to. He doesn’t imagine anyone would ask him that, but he’s created a whole website devoted to the topic, so he feels he better come clean and admit that saying he has a food-addicted goat in his head isn’t being entirely truthful.

He doesn’t mean the bit about the bovid. Jacob genuinely finds it quite helpful to imagine that the stream of unsolicited snack recommendations is coming from a manipulative goat living in his pre-frontal cortex. He used to attribute those food thoughts to his weak-willed inner self, which meant he battled them with anger, self-loathing, and resentment, but he’s an animal person, in general, and he particularly likes goats, so he now treats those food requests with kindness. When Jacob says he has a goat in his head, he’s really being perfectly honest; it’s the food-addicted part that isn’t right.

By calling his goat a food addict, Jacob is implying that those snack recommendations might occasionally include some broccoli, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Goat is not addicted to food in general, nor does the problem lie in its constant desire to eat. Sure, The Goat does, on occasion, become so desperate to consume something that Jacob finds himself overeating salad, but those moments are rare and always preceded by the real addictive culprit. What’s really driving The Goat’s insatiable appetite is its very long, always-evolving, list of favourite foods.

And what is on this list?

It varies. That is, every food-obsessed goat has their own personally curated, regularly updated, seemingly never-ending list. For Jacob’s goat, the favourite food list currently includes satay noodles, spring rolls, salted peanuts, samosas, banana bread, zucchini cake, potato cakes, potato wedges, mango juice, ginger beer, salt ‘n vinegar... well… anything, and at least half a dozen fruit and nut-filled chocolate bars.  

The Goat’s list could go on. In fact, The Goat would very much like to go on adding items to its Eating: Best of list, but it is also attempting to turn this favourite foods brainstorm into a Friday fun night in, so Jacob thinks it would be best to just move on.

The point that he was trying to make (before The Goat got carried away), was that it’s not the junk food category that’s the problem, nor some particular ingredient in food. Goats won’t enter a convenience store and demand everything in the chocolate aisle; they’ll only ask for the chocolate bars they currently adore. This is a good thing, really, although it won’t feel that way at the time. Their requests will be intense, uncomfortable and impossible to withstand, but at least they’ll just leave with the treats they love most, not one of every item in the store.

Any binge eater reading this should now be feeling relief. It means they don’t need to worry about ingredients, additives, sugar, fat, or even the level of processing. They just need to figure out their goat’s favourite foods, then (slowly, slowly, EXCEPTIONALLY SLOWLY) work on reducing the items on that list. Goats have extremely short memories, even when it comes to food, which means if they can get through a month without something they love, their demands for that thing will ease up.

Most binge eaters won’t be feeling relief right now; more likely they’re feeling defeated. They’ve tried countless times to remove problem foods; they’ve just never been able to do it. This is perfectly understandable ­- Jacob had the same long-term issue – for nothing makes a treat more desirable to a goat than their human deciding not to eat it. Jacob failed countless times to successfully give up any of his goat’s favourite items, and while that wasn’t great for his self-esteem, it did help him realise something important.

He realised that goats don’t genuinely love or need any of the items on their favourite foods list — despite what a goat will ardently attest, chocolate is not a matter of life or death — rather, the reason they demand that the restricted foods are so quickly and lavishly reinstated is because they happen to recall feeling joyfully energised when they very recently ate them.

Every single food on a goat’s favourites list is a food that gives it pleasure (goats are all just pleasure addicts, really). More importantly, they are foods that energise it. Lettuce will never be on a goat’s favourite foods list as raw greens tend to make them want to take a nap. Chocolate and soft drink are almost always on the list as they rapidly recharge a goat’s energy. When a goat is feeling energised, it has more power, and when a goat has power, they use it to get more of what they want. For food-obsessed goats, that means more (and more and more) of its pleasure-laden, energy-intensifying, delectable favourite foods.

Despite what all goats earnestly believe, the specific foods are really not that important to them. What they claim to love the most are actually just whatever food options they happen to like best of whatever food options happen to be available at whatever location they happen to be in at that particular time of day.

This flexible attitude to favourite foods may appear to be a major flaw with this approach, but it is actually very beneficial. As goats have short memories and are not as attached to any product as they think they are, their favourite foods can slowly be transitioned out and, after some time has passed without them, their “cannot live without” foods will be forgotten.  

Every binge eater should be able to think of foods they loved as a child that they no longer crave or eat, but they can also name the foods their goat replaced them with. This tendency of goats to transition from one favourite food to another is why people think giving up allpossible goat favourites (i.e. every single processed food in the entire world) is the only way to successfully zap the energy out of their goats.

Jacob attempted this for years. He was sure the only way he would ever be able to take back control from his goat was if he eliminated, all at once, everything the goat currently loved, had previously loved, and would certainly love if given the chance. The trouble is, goats don’t do well with broad changes, and if The Goat wasn’t happy with Jacob taking away one or two foods it loved, it certainly wasn’t going to tolerate him taking away everything. It would put up such a well orchestrated, unbreakable line of defence that Jacob would quickly find himself buying multiples of everything on the “Do Not Buy Any!” list. He was stuck. If he couldn’t eliminate things one-by-one, nor in a single go, he didn’t think there was any way of defeating his goat.

Then, quite by accident, Jacob stumbled on the solution.

The key, he realised, was eating to a schedule. That is, instead of the “What do I feel like today?” mindset he’d had his whole life (which was really just asking his goat what it felt like eating and then eating that), he started asking himself, “What would be the perfect meal to eat for lunch every Monday?” And Monday dinner, Tuesday breakfast, Tuesday lunch, etc.

Jacob’s original reason for trying scheduled eating was to get his goat out of the habit of just eating all day, every day. He wanted there to be a few eating gaps in his waking life which, at that point, there were not. What he didn’t anticipate was that, by figuring out what the perfect meals were, then eating the same ones each week, he was forcing his goat to make decisions about what it really wanted to eat, and that meant the list of items on his goat’s favourites list naturally started to come down.

The shift from “What do I feel like?” to “What is the perfect meal?” changes the mindset of one’s goat. If a goat is currently encouraging binge eating, they likely have a lot of underlying anxiety about favourite foods being taken off the menu, so their favourite foods list is going to be enormous. Once that goat has successfully transitioned over to the ‘perfect meal’ mindset, it will actively work to avoid wasting one of its twenty-one weekly meals on something mediocre, therefore its favourite foods list will gradually become more refined.

It does take a while for a goat’s mindset to shift, so their human will have to be very patient. They should initially expect their goat to try to cram every food it currently loves into every meal slot, every single day. A little bit of post-eating reflection will help the process along.  If the binge eater asks their goat, after eating, if they just had the best possible meal, the goat will happily do a full analysis and suggest possible improvements.

Goats love this process. It means they will be free to flood their human’s brain with food ideas, without also having to do the work of forcing their human to eat everything all at once. Part of the fun will be figuring out how to best schedule their favourite foods in. They are also going to have to sample a whole range of meals as they are developing the perfect schedule, which will delight them. In fact, as plans, seasons, food availability and tastes are always changing, they will need to make ongoing tweaks to their perfect schedule, so this strategy will keep a goat busy and happy forever.  

The real key to this approach is that, over time, goats figure out what their real favourite foods are and, as they will eat them regularly, they learn to trust that they are not going to be deprived of them, so they stop demanding them all the time. In fact, they tend to become a little blaséabout the foods they claimed they couldn’t live without, which means they will be more open to reducing how often they eat them. Over time, Jacob went from eating his goat’s favourite foods at every meal to a handful of meals a week, to just having them on special occasions.*

By aiming to eat the same meals each week, Jacob and The Goat slowly figured out what their meals would be. Jacob wanted all the meals to be non-Goat-energising meals (unprocessed fruits, vegetables, wholegrains, beans, legumes, nuts and seeds). The Goat, on the other hand, wanted to enjoy (at least) twenty-one meals and twenty-one snacks per week that were (at least) moderately processed. The Goat slowly changed its mind. It realised that Jacob’s choices were actually quite satisfying. It also appreciated being able to take a nap, instead of having to work to get more food stuffed in, whenever Jacob decided to stop eating.

Gradually, Jacob’s non-energising meals became the foods they ate most of the time. It had to be slow as The Goat needed to be on board with each small change and then work on getting used to it. This meant that, for a long time, The Goat was still eating all the foods on its favourites list. It’s just that the list was slowly getting smaller. And it wasn’t asking for everything all at the same time, so the binging became less frequent. In fact, the pace was so slow and comfortable for The Goat that, when the binging finally stopped, Jacob didn’t even notice.

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 * Once the favourite foods list has been whittled down enough, and a goat has grown accustomed to not eating everything it loves every day, the (ex)binge eater can start working on moving some of those foods to ‘special occasions’. That is, they can become weekly treats, then fortnightly, then monthly, then on public holidays, social events, vacations, etc.

It is very important to ensure those special occasions are actually built into the schedule (e.g. cake at birthday celebrations, pancakes on public holidays, an ice cream cone every fourth Sunday, etc.). If not, a goat will tend to get anxious about never getting their ‘special occasion favourites’ again and will demand them at ad hoc times (i.e. constantly).

Like everything, this will take time, practice and adjustments to figure out what works best, but a good indicator of a well-controlled goat is one that is happy to just have hot cross buns over the Easter long weekend, rather than from Boxing Day to the end of May.

Published 10th October 2026