She has put food--specific kinds of food, with certain easily-identifiable characteristics--at the center of her life. Her days are spent obsessing over those foods, and building up anticipation for what she's going to eat next, and she has very little brainspace left over for anything else. Hobbies, relationships, career, plans for the future? She has no mental energy left for any of that, because she's too preoccupied with thinking about her next fix. The only time she's not obsessively thinking of food is right after she's had her fix, but it doesn't take long for her to come down off the high and start all over again.
When she cannot get the food she craves (or temporarily deprives herself of it), and has to eat something that does not fit within those parameters, she is as grouchy, dissatisfied, and unhappy as an alcoholic at a Baptist wedding. She can't even pretend she's enjoying it, and sometimes she's even irrationally hostile toward it, or the restaurant that provided it. The Greek takeout meal of just a couple of days ago illustrates this perfectly--it looked like a perfectly decent meal that most people would enjoy, but she clearly did not enjoy it, and ate it in a desultory way. The only part she appeared to enjoy at all was the part that most closely approximated the foods she's addicted to--the potato, drenched in tzatziki sauce. When the rice proved to be "bland," she was obviously pissed about it--an inappropriate response, but totally consistent with an addict not getting what they crave.
The biggest tell for me, however, is that she lies about her food consumption, because
addicts lie. ADDICTS FUCKING LIE. They lie to others, and they lie to themselves; they're incapable of honestly admitting how much of their preferred substance they consume, or how often, but they feel intense shame about it and constantly try to hide it. You don't get discovered to have a stack of empty pizza boxes hidden in your closet unless you're a fucking addict who knows her eating is way the out of control, will be judged as such, and feels the need to hide the evidence--you just don't. If she was an alcoholic, she'd be hiding empty bottles; it's the exact same behavior, for the exact same reason.
Chantal gorges herself on-camera, but there have been plenty of telltale signs that what she ate on-camera was not the only thing she ate that day. "I'm saving the rest for Bibi" or "The second sandwich is for Bibi?" We've always collectively eye-rolled at those blatant lies (and with yesterday's pasta and meatballs pig-out, the lie has shifted to "The leftovers are for Peetz"). We know she uses a drive in the country as an excuse to stop for fast food. We know she has no problem with going through multiple drive-thrus in succession; she's been caught by the turboautists here for posting two separate fast-food mukbangs that were actually made on the same day. She is a classic lying addict.
Chantal also gets hostile toward anyone who might come between her and her food--who might take it away, or deny her access to it--which is also classic addict behavior. When she eats, she resource-guards like a fucking dog, for crying out loud, and when eating with someone else she's constantly eyeing the other person's food as if they might eat it all and not leave any for her. In one of the last videos made at her old place, Bibi made an appearance, took a piece of the food she was eating, and the look in her eyes was like panic and rage all at once. That was the same video, iirc, where she had obviously eaten whatever he had saved in the fridge for himself, he was pissed at her, and she tried to placate him by offering to make him a grilled-cheese sandwich.
And last, she does the classic cycles of bingeing/indulgence with shame/repentance that every addict does. Being an addict is hard on one's body, the constant lying and covering-up is hard on the soul, and the wildly dysfunctional behaviors that come out of all this are hard on interpersonal relationships. So it's not at all uncommon for the alcoholic to swear off booze in the aftermath of a particularly destructive bender, or even in the aftermath of their spouse finding the bags of empties hidden in the garage. They're sorry; they've seen the light; they'll change. They may even go to rehab or AA meetings for a little while. But they don't really want to give up their addiction; they just want to avoid the interpersonal consequences of it--so they're "good" for a while, but they inevitably go right back to doing the exact same shit. Sound familiar?
Chantal's an addict.
Totally an addict. And yes, she knows it and admits it, the same way a hard-boiled alkie admits it. But she doesn't want to give it up, because if she does she will lose her only reliable source of joy and pleasure. Her life and mentality are so circumscribed, to not have the food she craves would be to have--nothing. And she lacks the intelligence or imagination to come up with anything else to take its place. She's an empty shell of a human, leading a meaningless existence, and incapable of creating meaning. The only fulfillment she gets is by stuffing herself with craveable garbage food, so she's going to keep on doing that until her body finally gives out, because that's what hopeless addicts like her do.
Even if she were, so what? What would she like any of us to do about that? So you've admitted you have an addiction. And?
She wants us to quit ragging on her for engaging in the behaviors that are part of her addiction. It's a play for sympathy: "I can't help it! I'm helpless before the compulsion to eat fast food!" She wants us to give her a free pass to eat as she pleases. She doesn't want help with her addiction because she doesn't want to quit. She could go to OA meetings, and has, but she'd be expected to actually do the difficult work of recovery--which means identifying and completely abstaining from the types of food she craves, and taking responsibility for herself and her actions. Does that sound like anything Chantal's interested in? Hell fucking no.
You've got the Canadian health care system,...
Which, if the Canuckistanis here are correct, is pretty much shit at providing non-pharmaceutical mental health care, even to the people who could actually make good use of it (in other words, not a Cluster B trashfire).
...all the time in the world,...
Actually, that's a liability in Chantal's case, because it gives her more time without interruption to obsess over and procure food. If she wasn't a Cluster B trashfire, I'd suggest she at least go volunteer somewhere--three hours a day, four or five days a week, doing something productive to help her community, which would also bring her back into interacting with other humans, and keep her mind off food for a while. But as she is, I wouldn't wish her on any non-profit.
...several available online resources,...
Which she will reject the moment they don't tell her exactly what she wants to hear.
...a decent immediate and extended family support system,...
Who have already heard every addict-tier excuse in the book from Chantal, and have heard countless lies, including her desire to get better. I'm pretty sure their relationship with her is as cordial as it is because they've all given up, know she'll never change, and have decided to keep the peace by taking a hands-off approach because she's family and they'll feel bad when she's gone. She's the family tragedy who is going to die young, but none of them have to live with her, so they can afford to be indulgent.
...and nothing but your own will and motivation to change that fact....
Will? Motivation? The only thing Chantal has any will and motivation for is cramming herself behind the wheel of that poor little overburdened car and hitting the drive-thru(s). Or making the heroic journey down the stairs to the front door to receive her food delivery, and hoist herself back up.
There are addicts everywhere; it's what they choose to do about it which defines how the world receives them.
The problem here is that a given addict has to have the mental toolkit needed in order to make a decent choice. A lot of addicts do have that toolkit, or at least enough of it to make some sort of change for the better, and stick by it. At it's rock bottom, that toolkit enables an individual to say, "I have a problem; I can't keep living like this; I have to do something different, even if I don't yet know what or how. I need help--" and then make reasonably good use of the help they find.
So you get alcoholics who realize they have too much to lose and that they need to change when they get their first DUI, and others who can only get there after their third stint in jail, and others still who end up stumbling around downtown streets in filthy rags like a vision from the zombie apocalypse until they get buried as a John Doe in the county potters' field because their toolkit was too deficient to either make that choice or act on it.
Chantal, by virtue of having a Cluster B personality disorder, as well as being unintelligent, incurious, and lacking in the ability to engage in genuine self-reflection, and having an addiction that has absolutely no legal consequences (unless she starts stealing food, or stealing money to buy it), is missing some crucial mental tools, which not only limits the choices she can make, but also (and most importantly) prevents her from following through with those choices.
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