Binge Eating

Filed in archive Digestive Health on February 22, 2007

Are you a binge eater? I think we all are, from time to time. Mood has a lot to do with it. Your feeling blue, so you eat a couple of chocolates and then a couple more, and a couple more, until, suddenly, the entire box is gone.

But binge eating can get out of hand, as in the sad story in today's New York Tines Health section. The story starts out by telling us that:

This month, researchers at Harvard published a survey finding that binge eating is by far the most common eating disorder, occurring in 1 in 35 adults, or 2.8 percent - almost twice the combined rate for anorexia (0.6 percent) and bulimia (1 percent).

Yet unlike the other two, binge-eating disorder is still not considered a formal diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association.

Why is this? Read the story and you'll be asking yourself why, too. The Food Museum Blog has an excellent description of binge eating:

People who suffer from binge eating disorder often consume large amounts of food within short time periods uncontrollably, eat quickly and even though they are not hungry, eat alone out of embarrassment over the amount they eat, feel distressed over the amount consumed, and have such episodes two days a week for at least six months.

Unlike people with bulimia who purge after a binge, binge eaters eat until they ares so stuffed they are miserable. All that bingeing can add huge amounts of weight and destroy the digestive system. Mun's Fitness Blog lists these possible complications of binge eating:

• Diabetes
  


• High blood pressure
  


• High cholesterol levels
  


• Gallbladder disease
  


• Heart disease

If you are a binge eater and it's becoming a health hazard, talk to your doctor. It's a disorder that's almost impossible to control on your own.