The Many Reasons Why You Binge Eat and Redefining What Restriction Is

Something I've noticed is that many practitioners in this food and body healing space are firm that binge eating is only a response to restriction. While restriction is a prominent reason binge eating can occur, there are other factors that contribute to triggering a binge.

Let's first get clear that binge eating is a very distinct type of eating that is different than emotional eating or overeating. Binge eating is eating a large amount of food in a short period of time with a sense that you could not stop eating. Typically the eat is done rapidly, until uncomfortably full, often in the absence of physical hunger, and usually done alone with no one else around. Binge eating experiences are often followed by feelings of shame, guilt, disgust, distress, frustration, and sadness. Binge eating is distinct from builimia where a binge may occur and then there is some compensatory behavior like purging or overexercising to compensate for the binge. Lastly, binge eating is typcially done several times a week for many months.

So that's what defines a binge eating experience, yet what sparks this food behavior?

A 2010 study in Appetite called The Biology of Binge Eating, identified 4 key factors that contribute to binge eating, including:

• Food restriction

• Stress

• The presence of hyper palatable foods

• Environmental conditioning.

Starting with restriction…

Restriction is often characterized by eating no food, eating minimal amounts of food, only eating specific foods in specific amounts, cutting out whole food groups, or fasting for long periods of time. Additionally, if restriction leads to fast weight loss, this can increase stress in your body that can lead to binge eating as your body is feeling unsafe at the speed in which weight was lost and also can be a weight that your body does not feel safe maintaining. In these circumstances, you can start to experience binge eating as protecting eating. Your body is trying to protect you and make sure you stay alive. Something that binge eating ensures is that your body is getting the nutrition it needs. If you're habitually not giving your body what it needs to stay alive, your body is going to take over at some point and thank goodness it does. I know this can feel difficult to experience though. Be grateful to something that is causing so much pain? Absurd! Yet, as I've said before and will say again binge eating is always doing something FOR you not TO you. 

Now, I want to add on to this restriction definition that binge eating activated by restriction does not only have to come from restricting food. This can also include restricting your self expression, your needs, and your sense of safety. Food comes in when your voice isn’t spoken out. Any perceived sense of scarcity can intiate a binge as your body is sensing that it is in danger and food is consumed to get enough energy to run away, to have a release of dopamine to feel better, to actually push your system into further overwhelm so it shuts down giving you a momentary break from feeling threatened. If you've been confused as to why binge eating keeps occurring when you've already challenged so much of your disordered eating and diet culture behaviors and are eating consistently every day, get curius about what else is being restricted. Is your attention toward yourself coming last? Are you holding back your truth for fear of how others will receive it? Restriction can come in many forms that you may need to check out many different areas of your life to assess what might feel malnourished.

Next, we have stress.

While we're not rats, one study found that "rats with a history of caloric restriction alone do not show significant increases in food intake in the sated state." So we can think of restriction as the wood and stress as the spark to build that binge fire. While there are some individuals who lose their appetite entirely when stress levels increase, for many high levels of stress often precede a binge. And, if you add a trauma response into this picture, you might be living constantly in the sympathetic nervous system where you're living on the edges of your window of tolerance where any small stressor can send you into a hypervigilant state. So something like dieting, which both triggers restriction and heightens stress, will send you straight into your favorite bag, box, or carton.

Talking about hyper palatable foods have become all the rage these days.

This term was first described by Tera Fazzino in 2019. Hyper palatable foods have specific combinations of fat, sugar, sodium and carbohydrates that make them artificially rewarding to eat and harder to stop consuming. So if you've been restricting and then in the presence of a hyper palatable food, it is more likely that binge eating is going to occur as your body is feeling deprived and needing some kind of feel good experience and has been set up to believe that restriction is around the corner tomorrow and so it better eat as much of these hyper palatable foods now. Eating these foods releases dopamine and activates your reward pathways. Something I have noticed though with those I've worked with is that when you eat these foods in a relaxation response, the intense need to continue to eat isn't as strong. This is something I go into detail in the Somatic Eating® Program so if you're interested to learn more, be sure to go to somaticeating.com to join the waitlist for the upcoming class starting in April.

Lastly, environmental conditioning…

Has to do with that binge eating is often associated to specific environments. Let's say you eat hyper palatable foods every time you get into the car. The more you do this, the more your body is conditioned to want to go eat a hyper palatable food every time you get into the car. You might reflect on where you binge, at what time of day, and with what foods to get curious about what has been connected and conditioned in your body to understand what your environmental binge triggers might be. This particular binge activation can take time to re-route in your body and with awareness and presence you can create new embodied memories where certain environments are no longer associated with binging.

As you can see, there are many reasons binge eating can occur and many more not covered here such as past trauma and the state of your nervous system. We cannot change what we're not aware of and so you might explore for yourself if you resonate with any of these binge triggers. Binge eating is a message from your body and it can take time to discover the wisdom within the food behavior. You get to take all the time you need and as always I'm here for you every step of the way.

Reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2694569/