Auckland PSI^TM  Institute                                                       

The Binge  and Diet Cycles

Let’s start by defining compulsive eating as any eating out of relation to physiological hunger and satiation.  This means that anytime one eats for reasons other than hunger or bringing hunger to satiation, we say that eating was compulsive in nature.  Which is to say we all eat compulsively at times (i.e. for reasons other than physiological hunger).

People with eating problems, however, eat compulsively consistently and feel terrible shame about both the behaviour and the effects of the behaviour (perceived or real) on their body size.  In fact, each compulsive eating episode tends to be accompanied by a great deal of shame, as shown in the cycles below.  Indeed it could be said that shame is the main ingredient that turns a "normal" experience of compulsive eating into a repetitive anguished pattern.

In my work with people with eating disorders, I listen to them carefully as they describe their eating in detail to me.  Below is a common pattern I have distilled from underneath the many stories I have heard.

 

© by Judy Lightstone, 2002

 As you see above, the binge (or perceived binge) is initially triggered by an event or thought that may also be associated to an earlier less conscious experience. The earlier experience may have included a great deal of shame.  That experience is then transferred to feelings of body shame, and self-critical thoughts.  At this point the person reaches for food to help salve the pain.

The shaming thoughts are then redirected onto the eating behaviour, which puts the eating in a paradoxical role.  While it is soothing the person, it also acts as a scapegoat for the bad feelings that triggered the binge to begin with.  The eating behaviour, and the soothing it brings, then becomes the enemy. The person then believes “I feel bad because I am eating” rather than “ I felt bad and so I ate”, because they no longer remember what made them reach for the food in the first place.

The person then has to keep eating because they still feel bad, and so they start to feel bad because they can’t stop eating.
The binge is experienced as out of control self-destructive behaviour. The eating must continue or the original shameful feelings (now forgotten) will return. Eventually the experience of being over full will force the eating to stop. When the shame returns, the person may seek out the redemption of a diet, "purification" fast, or purge.  By this time the original trigger is completely obliterated by the drama of the binge and purge or diet. But whatever one tries to do to deny hunger, hunger will return.  If it is ignored, it will return with a vengeance, and this extreme state of hunger will trigger a perfectly normal and healthy reaction…a binge. But the person may have difficulty distinguishing between a binge triggered by waiting too long to eat, and a binge triggered by emotions that have nothing to do with physiological hunger – because the behaviour is identical.  Confusing this healthy binge with a compulsive binge, the person will try to further resist his/her hunger, only to ultimately meet defeat (except for cases of anorexia). The diet, the purging, the fasting must end because the person must continue to survive, only now the view their survival instincts as harmful and shameful, and this begins the binge cycle again.

Example:

JL: What do you think made you go for the Oreos at 2PM yesterday?
Pt: Well, as you know, that's when I get home from my job, and then I have an hour to get to class.  I always binge then. I have trouble with transitions.
JL: Yes that seems to be a hard time of the day.  Can you remember what made it so hard yesterday?
Pt: I'm just stupid...it's stupid, that's all.  I used to see Joey during my break when we lived together…but that was so long ago and so that can't still be it.
JL: So you feel ashamed about still missing Joey? You should be over it by now?
Pt: I never get over anything. I'm so clingy and needy- no wonder he left me.
JL: So remembering that you used to see Joey then reminds you of the shame you feel for still needing him?
Pt: It makes me sick to think about it.
JL: Is that why you reached for the Oreos, do you think? Because of that sick feeling?
Pt:  Yes, but they just make me feel sicker! It doesn't make sense!
JL: Well it kind of makes sense if you wanted to forget the sick feeling about Joey, that you might cover it with a sick feeling about eating, which maybe doesn't feel as shameful.
Pt: But it does! I'm nothing but a big fat cow! All I do is stuff cookies to get fatter. Ugh!
**********************************************************
Here we see the shame originally associated with her clinging now reattaching to the relatively familiar and socially endorsed arena of her body.  From feeling isolated and humiliated by her neediness, she now joins the throngs of women who think they're too fat.  This feeling, as bad as it is, is clearly more tolerable.

Pt: I had a huge binge last night.
JL: Were you hungry?
Pt: I was starving, but I couldn’t stop eating. I was putting away food like I would never eat again – I just shovelled it in. It was disgusting.
JL: That is a normal way to eat when you are starving. How did you end up getting so hungry?
Pt: No. You didn’t see it – there was nothing normal.  I mean, I ate straight from the container – I didn’t even bother to heat it up.
JL: You must have been terribly hungry.  How did that happen?
Pt: Well, I had had such an awful binge the night before that I decided I could go the next day without any food.  I’ve done it many times before. But I was such a weakling.
JL: I don’t agree. There’s nothing “weak” or “bad” about feeding yourself when you are hungry.  We would do better to explore this idea that you have to starve yourself any time you have what looks to you like a compulsive eating episode.  Some of these “binges” may be perfectly normal reactions to abnormal deprivation.  In order to work through the actual compulsive eating episodes, we must first be able to distinguish them from binges that are in response to deprivation. The only way to be sure is to ask yourself if you are physically hungry first. If the answer is yes, then please, enjoy your food.

This approach goes against so many socially imposed beliefs that it is sometimes difficult to follow.  However, most realize that it makes sense, once they are more in tuned with their patterns of hunger and satiation.  There are even people in OA groups that are now defining abstinence in terms of only eating with hunger and satiation, which is a much more natural definition of abstaining from compulsive eating, in my opinion, than sticking to a low calorie food plan or avoiding "addictive" foods or food groups. According to the World Health Organization, an adult female requires 2,000-2,500 calories per day (depending on degree of activity).  Less than that is, by definition, substandard, and your body will fight hard to get and keep those calories.  Most restrictive food plans (as they are often called now that dieting has gotten a bad rep) attempt to keep your caloric intake below these basic requirements, and so, are bound to rebound eventually.  The dieter then blames him/herself and feels ashamed, fuelling the die/binge cycles to continue.

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