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What is Compulsive Overeating?
Compulsive overeating is an eating disorder, which can affect anyone, of any age, sex, social class or race. It strikes in an unassuming way, so the individual is not aware of the problem until the eating behaviours have become so ingrained that food rules their lives. |  |
Compulsive overeating is also known as binge eating disorder. Both names describe the nature of this problem. Sufferers use food to avoid dealing with their problems, feelings or body image issues. It is a coping mechanism that allows you to survive. The compulsion drives sufferers to eat more and more food, to suppress these feelings which have become too painful to deal with. Escaping into the world of food allows everything to be numbed, and a true unconditional friendship with food begins. In the early stages, the binges are infrequent and small in nature. However this is a dangerous and progressive disease, which stops for nothing, worsening as time goes on. Eventually if left untreated it will lead to frequent large binges on a daily basis. Even at this point the sufferer may barely realise they have an eating problem. It is a cunning disease, which “talks” to the person, encouraging them to have “just one more”, but the one more becomes a thousand more, and even that is not enough!
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| The binge foods can be different for each person, but many are addicted to high sugar, refined foods or high fat products. Some people will binge on one particular type of food product, while others may binge on any food available. As the binges progress, the person can eat an extraordinary amount of food, often “waking up” in the middle or end of a binge, not even knowing what they have actually eaten. This phenomenon is known as blackouts. |
Evidence of the binge, may simply be left over wrappers that will tell the sufferer what they have eaten. The binge is very compulsive in nature and the person is driven to find their food fix just like the drug addict seeks out their supply. No amount of knowledge about nutrition, dieting or consequences will stop the binge from occurring. Even nutritionists suffer from compulsive overeating. Often the person beats themselves up about what they ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t do’, but it is all to no avail as once the compulsion hits the sufferer is on a mission and will not cease until the emotions have been numbed.
Compulsive overeating is something that few people are ever able to talk about until they go into recovery. It is often the biggest kept secret in their life. Unlike dieting it is not a subject that is talked about, rather hidden away so that even closest companions have no idea what is going on. Shame prevents the sharing of this big secret. Shameful feelings come from knowing that their behaviour around food is not like others; along with the reasoning that “I should have more willpower” to eat properly. However willpower has absolutely nothing to do with preventing binges. It is not lack of willpower but an addiction to food that drives the cravings to binge.
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Awareness of compulsive overeating rarely comes in the early stages of this disorder. Most sufferers are not aware, for many years or decades, about how different their eating behaviours are. Denial and secrecy are a major characteristic of this disorder, allowing the sufferer to spend even more years hidden away damaging their bodies and minds in the process. Eventually when things get bad enough, the sufferer begins to realise that there is something wrong. As the binges increase, so too does the weight gain. What was once controllable, becomes so out of control that pounds can be gained every week; week in, week out, year in, year out, until finally enough is enough. | |
But the sad part of this story, is that there are many thousands of people suffering in the same way, in yet the general medical world has not woken up to this disease. So even to share this story with a medical professional will not be the answer to everything. Until compulsive overeating is a common word like anorexia or bulimia, we can not rely on the medical profession to guide sufferers into recovery, because they themselves do not recognise this as a problem. Many healthcare professionals mistakenly believe that the cause of obesity is simply eating too much food, which can be easily solved by dieting. But for the compulsive overeater, dieting only exacerbates the problems and is NEVER the solution.
Obsessional thinking is very common among compulsive overeaters. Thoughts of food are there, even when the sufferer is not hungry. As the disease worsens the thoughts come more frequently until the stage where they persist all day long. As the binges become more and more frequent the sufferer rarely ever knows what it feels like to be physically hungry. However they do feel hunger, but this is an emotional hungry that eventually no amount of food can dampen. Thoughts of food range from mild food cravings to a running commentary in the brain, during every waking minute of the day. It is not until recovery is found that the sufferer comes to realise that people, who do not suffer from eating disorders, do not have this constant tape playing in their head. They eat purely to satisfy a physical hunger and food is nothing more than fuel for their body.
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| The obsessional thinking tells the sufferer to eat, for example, “just one slice of cake”. Eventually they give into the craving and have that one piece of cake. But once that one piece has been eaten, they then hear the message, “ go on, just one more piece!” So off they go and eat the next piece of cake and the cycle keeps repeating itself until the whole cake is polished off, or they feel too stuffed or nauseated to continue. Sufferers have been know to eat the whole of their children’s birthday cakes or their own wedding cake leaving nothing left. So if you are reading this and thinking I have done this too, then you know that you are not alone in your behaviour.
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This is taken from my book Compulsive Overeating: A Journey to Recovery |
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