What Causes Binge Eating And What Can Be Done About It?

Are you hungry all the time? Do you have to go to the fridge in the middle of the night? Do you eat more than you would like and feel guilty about it? In many cases, binge eating is caused by emotional factors.

The feeling of not being able to control the amount of food you eat can be distressing as it will not only damage your appearance but also your health. Even if you realize this, you don’t know how to stop eating. The solution is to change your relationship with food. Next, we’ll show you how you can do it.

What causes binge eating?

Eating is a vital function for survival. That way, your body gets the nutrients it needs to function every day. Eating problems start to raise their heads when the quantities of food are large and the quality of the food is poor. 

People who struggle with eating often eat nutrient-poor and high-calorie products. But what causes gluttony and what leads to such harmful behavior?

The connection to your own body has been broken

One of the reasons for binge eating is that a person is unable to recognize the sensations of their body. Already at birth, a person is programmed to have the ability to recognize hunger and act on it ; the baby cries when he is hungry.

Over time, the connections to these interactive sensations disappear, and this can be due to many reasons. One reason may be that food is associated with, for example, human encounters, partnerships, and social interactions. In this case, eating becomes a social and pleasant activity, leaving the value associated with food intake secondary.

On the other hand, the hectic rhythm and stress of modern life causes us not to have time to stop listening to our bodies. That’s when we lose the ability to recognize when it’s all about real hunger or when we’re just bored and want to share this social moment.

Emotional stress

One reason for binge eating is emotional eating. This means using food to regulate emotions. Do you notice more cancer when you are anxious, sad, disappointed, or overwhelmed?

There is an explanation for this. Certain foods stimulate pleasure-related areas of the brain, releasing a wealth of pleasurable sensations. In this case, eating these foods causes a person feelings of relief, satisfaction and happiness.

Unfortunately, this condition is only temporary and is not an effective or permanent solution at all. Soon the pleasant effects disappear and the untreated emotions come back, in addition to which there are still feelings of guilt for eating uncontrollably.

Restrictive diets

If you’ve been suffering from eating problems for a while now, you’ve probably also experienced the following paradox : Adhering to an overly restrictive diet may increase the need and desire to eat unhealthy food. 

By adopting an overly rigid eating style where a food is forbidden to eat, it can lead to increased anxiety about eating. For this reason, it is impossible to follow a diet without falling into compulsive eating behavior.

Soon after such a diet, you may even get back the pounds you lost with great effort. The body demands from you back what it has lost and what is so radically limited from it.

What can be done to prevent binge eating?

Clearly, eating is important for survival. So you can’t avoid it completely, unlike many other addictions that can be avoided. In such a case, the solution is to modify your own diet by recognizing its nutritional function and more conscious eating.

To make this possible, keep the person again in touch with their own body and learn to listen to and interpret the signals it sends. In other words, you need to learn to recognize when it comes to real hunger and when it comes to emotional eating due to anxiety or stress.

It is also important to adopt and develop useful and effective coping strategies to help you deal with negative emotional states.

The goal is to stop using food to regulate emotions, as it is important for you to find other ways to control them. Relieving emotions, therapeutic writing, or practicing meditation can be helpful options.

Build a healthy relationship with food. You should stop seeing food as an enemy or comfort. Remember that food is just the fuel your body needs, and you should learn to make choices based on your nutritional needs.

Eat healthy and varied without avoiding or demonizing any particular food group. Eat in moderation and most importantly, be aware of what you are eating.