What is a Binge Eating Disorder?

The binge eating disorder is probably more common than you might think. Out of all the people around you who are quite overweight, what percentage of them do you think are eating out of an addiction or mental need for food, rather than mere gluttony? Even if you aren’t like that, you can try to relate to how they feel. Think about what it’s like when you haven’t eaten for most of the day and you have those big hunger pangs that are telling you: “You’d better go eat!” How easy is it for you to ignore those hunger pangs?
Would you be able to stop from thinking about eating if you were starving? If you would honestly find it hard to ignore the need to eat, particularly when your body is begging you to eat something, then you can possibly understand what a binge eater feels like.

The binge eating disorder is sometimes subcategorized into a deprivation-sensitive type and an addictive type. The deprivation-sensitive type will force themselves not to eat or exercise excessively in an attempt to lose weight, and then overcompensate in the other direction by binging. An addictive type might never try to lose any weight, but simply start to use food as a means of self-medicating or feeling better, much like a drug addict or alcoholic uses substances to give themselves a high.

A binge eating disorder is a serious condition that is difficult to control once the “ritual” begins. Many binge eaters reportedly have inner dialogues where they try to convince themselves not to do it, but the need to overeat wins out and they go through with it anyway. The compulsion is often too strong for most people, and it’s not surprising that it can happen. After all, you hear all kinds of stories about women who are depressed on a Friday night because they don’t have a date, and so they console themselves with a romantic movie and a gallon of ice cream. Imagine that the depression was more permanent and the ice cream was just a lot of food in general, and you might get a better picture of how some addictive binge eaters will use food to feel better.

As a matter of fact, the need for food boils down to biology. If you overeat for a week on vacation, and then you come home and realize you used to eat less, you’ll probably feel hungry on the food you had before for a while. This is because your body has adjusted to the new amount that you started eating, and you have to readjust back downward. Well, what would happen if, instead of adjusting downward, you continued to eat more and more as you started to get hungry? Your body clears out the blood sugar that you consume because you would die with that kind of blood sugar, but then you find yourself starving because your body overcorrected.

Once you are on a blood sugar rollercoaster, it is no different than addiction to substances. You need it to just feel normal, and you usually overcorrect and feel really good for a while, then crash later. Now that you know more about a binge eating disorder, you will be more prepared to recognize it if it shows up in yourself or others.