Psychological Aspect of Binge Eating

It doesn’t matter how you binge (whether on drinking or eating); what matters is that all binge eating behaviors have similar causes with the psychological cause being the most common one.

According to Sondra Kronberg, a National Eating Disorders Association spokesperson, binge eating entails several components:

1: Emotional : In this aspect, food is used as a coping mechanism. This perhaps explains Dr. Michael Mantell (clinical psychologist) argument that binge eating is an unhealthy or un-rational way of dealing with negative emotions, which becomes a problem if done repeatedly.

It all starts in your mind; it’s how your mind reacts to certain situations that you end up being a binge eater.

Let’s discuss that in detail:

Binge eating behavior starts when you are anxious, stressed or depressed maybe because you feel powerless or out of control. This triggers you to look for a way of numbing the unhappy feeling. Our minds have been somewhat hardwired to look for look for solutions that help release feel good hormones to counter the effects of stress hormones like cortisol. Your brain already knows how it feels when you take different foods and other substances (especially if you’ve been exposed to them). In such cases, it will tend to make you to have a bias for the stuff that bring out the most feel good hormones to help you to cope with stress. Some ways that people help ease the stress is by taking carbohydrate rich foods and drinks, as these help one feel some relief.   If you settle for the carbohydrate rich foods or drinks, dopamine, a feel good chemical is secreted to make you feel good. At first, it will be simply feeling the urge to eat or drink certain substances when stressed until it gets to a point where the body actually starts associating stress with the food. At that time, your subconscious mind thinks that that sugary food or drink is a reward and this makes you want to eat more of it even during times when you are not as stressed or hungry. Keep in mind that pleasure is one of the things that your mind is constantly seeking. Unfortunately, more often than not, you will eat and eat until you realize that you have eaten copious amounts of the food.

This makes you feel guilty and regrets set in leading to depression. When that happens, you will find yourself eating again in order to get rid of unhappy feelings. As you can see it’s a downward vicious spiral of dependency, reward (stimulus) and depression.

Over time, this becomes your habit every time you are stressed, depressed or anxious and soon, you will be craving for that snack or food every time.

Cravings are very bad because they are biological responses mainly in the insula, caudate and hippocampus brain region and are strong than the reward center. You will find yourself craving for your emotional satisfying food every time you are unhappy and this will become your routine.

According to Sondra Kronberg, you get to a point where you eat whenever you are lonely or angry because the brain (subconsciously) thinks that food can always ‘solve’ (remember it brings pleasure when you eat while stressed) whatever your world cannot solve for you. And besides, food is a ‘friend’ who is always there and at your service! At that time, you sort of are constantly on a ‘reward seeking behavior mode’ where you only lose perspective and instead prioritize the nice feelings (reward) that you get from binge eating over the regret that inevitably comes after a binge eating session.

For you to overcome binge-eating especially once it has become more like an automatic response to different emotions, it is critical that you:

• Break the habit loop that makes move on autopilot especially in regards to your association with food.
• Replace the habit, which has been deeply connected to your emotions, with a new healthy habit or alternative

We will go into more detail on this in the next chapter.

2: Physiological : This has a lot to do with your eating patterns and how they affect your likelihood of bingeing. Ideally, if you don’t eat properly or follow a restrictive diet that only leaves you craving for certain foods because you feel deprived, this greatly increases your odds of having bingeing sessions.

Let me elaborate on this:

Maybe you didn’t know but the truth is, failing in your dieting process triggers binge eating. When you start dieting, at first (one or two days), you will not feel any effect of your dieting because you still have glucose and glycogen in your body.

As a result, you might continue with your dieting process but soon, your body will realize that it’s not getting the amount of food it is used to. It thinks that it is getting less than it needs in order to survive and hence it will try to help by relentlessly issuing tremendous urges to eat, overriding your satiety hormones (leptin).

If you were not aware that this was going to happen, then you will oblige. You will still eat your planned diet food but you will consume more than you are supposed to.

This triggers a seed of doubt in your mind and makes you think that you have broken your diet. Even before the day ends, your rational brain accepts that you are not dieting anymore and you start overeating all the “forbidden” foods. The hunger that never ends will develop and you will soon be a binge eater if you diet regularly.

Since the foods or drinks you binge on have sugar, you will soon be addicted to them because of their addictive nature. They will become part of you and you will find it hard to stop using them. This might later make you to develop various health complications like metabolism problems associated with sugar because of the high levels of sugar and you will feel like giving up on your life.

Some unhealthy dietary habits like skipping breakfast and other meals also increase the odds of having binge eating tendencies. Why is that so? Because when it is time to eat, we often tend to overcompensate while convincing ourselves that ‘we skipped breakfast/lunch or dinner. ( This is more of a psychological issue the physiological)

At other times, when you skip any meal, you are very likely to snack a lot throughout the day and not exactly ‘count’ that you’ve eaten, which means you are still likely to eat a lot in your main meals without considering that you’ve actually been snacking all day. 

This essentially means that if you are to stop binge eating, you need to:

• Eat healthy
• Not deprive yourself of certain foods
• Eat to your fill- make sure to eat foods that fill your stomach for long to avoid the urge to eat between meals for instance.
• Have a policy that you will not snack
• Make sure you don’t skip meals
• Eat at planned times and come up with a meal plan that clearly states what to eat (make sure what you have in your meal plan is healthy and filling e.g. healthy organic and unprocessed vegetables, proteins, fats but not processed carb rich).

We will elaborate more on this in the next chapter.

If your life is similar to what we’ve discussed above, don’t give up yet because there is hope! The remaining part of the book will take you through the liberation process.

Other Related and Recommended Books:

Obesity Weight Loss: Sedentary Life Style http ://amzn.to/2oTWhp h               Author Jenifer Cruz

Yoga Body Harmony:  http://amzn.to/2ovn6n3    Author Pamela Maverick