Why People Binge

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 2012 | POSTED BY DR. GOULD

"If I am all doped up on a food high, nothing else matters."
"When I feel inadequate, I eat... then I'm some body... I matter."
"When I concentrate on what I am eating I don't have to deal with other emotions."

Do any of these statements sound like you? If you're a binge eater, you're not alone. It is something that millions of people struggle with. It is more common than either anorexia or bulimia.

There are two main reasons why people binge. One is to cope with painful feelings and create the illusion of feeling good, and the other is to feel "safe" or to shut out the world.

The first thing a binge provides is something that I call the "Food Trance." The food trance is the mind numbing experience that makes you feel good for a little while. That little bit of relief feels worth it when you're faced with an uncomfortable situation, thought or feeling.

For some people, they'll even push off their feelings and "deal" with them later on by binging. I call this a delayed binge. You might be frustrated at work and spend the whole day thinking about what you're going to eat when you get home.

When your mind is screaming with unpleasant thoughts, you're willing to run into the comfort of food as a temporary safe-haven, anything for a few minutes of quiet. However, when you shut down your mind too many times with food, binging becomes a compulsion. That means your mind always believes it needs food to deal with stress. Once that happens, you can't control what you eat no matter how hard you try.

The second way that binging appeals to people, seems paradoxical on the surface. When the binge is over, you're filled with regret. Your mind plays a tape of how awful it was that you gave in to the binge. But that tape feels better (and more familiar) to your mind than the one that talks about the things you're afraid to face. The post-binge guilt gives you something else to think about.

Consider my patient Roxy, a 45 year old mother with three children. She told me about a frustrating day at the mall with her 16 year old daughter. Her response to the frustration was to binge on a whole box of donuts. She told me, "I was so mad at her, what else could I do?"

Roxy is very smart, but in spite of my prompting and questioning, she couldn't think of any other option but to binge. Her pattern of binging by stuffing down feelings with food was so deeply ingrained in her mind that it short-circuited her common sense. Binging felt like the only way to dial down her frustration and rid herself of angry thoughts toward her daughter. More than that, her guilt about the binge stopped her from feeling guilty about not being a good-enough mother.

If you're a binge eater you probably already know the painful cycle of desperately wanting to binge, giving in to a binge, feeling remorse after a binge, and then promising yourself a binge will never happen again. It is important to accept that there is a part of you that feels afraid to let go of the binging cycle, because you don't know what will happen if you don't have food to quiet your mind.

It is this emotional cycle and thinking trap that you need to understand before you can let go of the binging pattern. The first step is to understand how compulsive eating has been benefiting you. When you realize why you depend on binge eating, you'll be in a better place to let the pattern go and find better ways to deal with emotional hunger. Shrink Yourself will help you understand why you binge and more than that, it will give you the tools to stop.

Can you identify the primary thought, feeling or fear that triggers you to binge?