Compulsive Overeating

Stan is a compulsive binge eater. He's been that way for as long as he can remember. He's pretty sure it's not connected to emotions or stress. Rather, he grew up in a home in which food was revered and overeating was encouraged. Food was at the heart of his family's culture and was associated with happiness and togetherness. There's nothing deep here. He just can't stop.

Sometimes Stan's overeating is accompanied by a sense of euphoria which seems to become more important than the self-control he had earnestly set out to achieve just the day before. He even plans binges, although not consciously.

Stan doesn't realize the extent of his binge disorder. He thinks that his slow metabolism puts him at an unfair disadvantage, and he wishes he could do something about his physiology. He also doesn't realize how much food he consumes at night before going to bed, and in the middle of the night, when he finds himself compulsively raiding the refrigerator in a state of half sleep.

Stan has turned his denial into a science. During those night raids of overeating, he hides the evidence perfectly. The spoon and bowl get washed, and the empty ice cream carton gets stuffed down into the bottom of the kitchen garbage can. That way, in the morning he won't be reminded, and he'll be able to compartmentalize the episode in his mind. The night eating seems even worse whenever he's "on" a diet. Stan just can't stop overeating.

Stan has tried many kinds of diets, and has attended meetings in earnest. He has also tried ignoring the whole matter, thinking that the food-focus of dieting is making matters worse. But he doesn't lose the weight that way either. He is considering gastric bypass surgery.

Compulsive overeating, also called binge eating disorder, is characterized by recurrent episodes of eating unusually large amounts of food within a two hour period, larger than what most people would eat. It is accompanied by a feeling of lack of control in which the individual believes he us unable to stop binge eating.

According to the DSM-IV, (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) published and copyrighted by the American Psychiatric Association, these binge eating episodes are associated with some of the following:

• rapid eating
  
• eating past a sense of fullness to a point of pain
  
• eating large portions even when not hungry
  
• eating alone to hide the episode
  
• experiencing embarrassment or shame over the episode
  
• feeling depressed, guilty, or disgusted with oneself after overeating
  

Some overeaters, however, do not hide anything. They are so used to large portions that they believe it's normal to eat two dozen chocolate donuts in one sitting.

For more information about compulsive overeating, see the Renfrew Center.

Sadly, dieting often makes the problem worse. This is not to say that you cannot lose the weight you want to lose. You can. But a dieting mentality causes or aggravates black-and-white thinking. The black and white thinker believes himself to either be on his diet, or off his diet at any one time. When he is on his diet, he is faithfully following all the rules. Examples of rules might be: weighing his food, eating on a rigid schedule, avoiding certain "bad" foods, attending meetings, counting calories, counting fat grams, counting carbohydrate grams, measuring portion sizes, following a menu, and eating packaged diet foods. Stan is not working at developing his own internal cues for what he needs, and rather than apply reason and judgment from within, he is deferring to whatever self-imposed plan he's on.

If Stan makes a mistakes, or even wavers a little bit, he believes himself to then be off the diet. When this happens, he does not have the food wisdom he needs. At this time, all reason and judgment go out the window. Guilt over the mistake can push him over the edge into an episode of overeating. Since he has no internal cues, he has no idea when to stop eating. His memories of past euphoric episodes return, and what started out as a tiny transgression turns into a full-blown binge.

Happily, Stan can probably overcome his binge eating disorder on his own. It turns out that binge eating, or compulsive overeating has a lot to do with beliefs and self-talk. Turning for a moment to the field of psychiatry called "cognitive therapy," we will take a look at how Stan's beliefs and self-talk can be controlled and altered so that he can free himself from his chains.

Cognitive therapy assumes that irrational behavior such as Stan's is the result of distorted thinking patterns, called automatic thoughts. Instead of addressing the behavior itself, and instead of delving into his past to "discover" why he's behaving this way, Stan will begin a process of identifying his distorted beliefs and replacing them with truth.

All Stan needs is a desire to become a little self-aware of what he is thinking and believing. If he would like, he can read a book or two about cognitive therapy or cognitive-behavior therapy, or REBT (rational-emotive behavior therapy.) But most important is what he does next.

Stan will have the greatest success if he is willing to write down some of his irrational beliefs each day, and to continue to do so for a few months. Since he's been believing these lies for years, he should expect it to take some time to uncover them. At the same time, he will write new, more rational beliefs and meditate on those a bit.

Here are just a few possible examples of Stan's irrational beliefs and self-talk. Notice the musts, rules and judgments that have no basis in reality:

• I must learn better control over my behavior.
• I must lose this weight quickly.
  
• I am defective and will always have to follow some kind of plan.
  
• Avoiding certain foods religiously will lead me to permanent weight loss.
  
• If I ever do lose this weight, I'll be trading away my happiness.
  
• I don't have enough willpower.
  
• I have to find more somehow.
  
• I must alter the content of my food so I can keep eating a lot.
  
• I'm not willing to change my relationship with food.
  
• I just want to lose the weight.
  

Stan can then replace these beliefs with more rational beliefs and self-talk. He will be helped most if he is willing to write them down and spend a few minutes each day reading them. In this way, the new self-talk will eventually become part of his thinking.

Can you safely go on a diet? Take the Can You Safely Diet? test.