Controlling Binge Eating

The Top 3 Current Weight Loss Products on the market:

Lose Weight Fast System is a diet and fitness system for the female body that has taken a new approach to weight loss for women.

The Fat Loss Factor is A 12-week online weight loss program that involves a comprehensive diet and exercise regime in combination with supportive activities such as goal-setting and stress management.

Customized Fat Loss is a nutrition and workout program to help you burn off unwanted body fat and lose weight so you can get that great, healthy and sexy body.

Question:
I've been struggling with a negative body image/unhealthy relationship with food for about 5 years. Recently it has spiraled out of control and I feel like I've hit my lowest point. I tried going to therapy but didn't find what I was looking for, so about 9 months ago I turned to yoga, meditation, and your book, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga for guidance. Reading your book and others really opened me up to my spiritual being and being conscious in the present moment. I realize that my body and food does not define who I am really am. However, even though I understand and embrace the concepts in your book, I'm still struggling with out of control binge eating. Each morning I review the spiritual law of the day, perform the sun salutations, and try and meditate for at least 5 minutes (meditation is a struggle for me) but when the afternoon rolls around all I can think about is food. I start eating and don't stop until I'm extremely full. It's as if I become unconscious and don't know what has hit me until I feel so sick and disgusted with myself.
Is there hope for freedom from this suffering?
Answer:
Yes there is hope to control your binge eating, but it will take some time and persistence to retrain how your body and mind relates to food. Your afternoon cravings are likely based on "emotional hunger" more than real physical hunger. A key element in your gaining control over your eating habits will be learning to listen to the actual physical signals from your body and being able to distinguish those signals from your emotional discomfort. For instance when you are really hungry, your body will send you physical signals that you can feel in your abdomen. When you have eaten enough and are no longer hungry and not yet full, your body will also send you a signal that you can notice if you are paying attention. Your body will provide the intelligence to guide you on when and how much to eat if you learn to listen to it. These two signals are what you need to learn to recognize in order to shift from emotional false-hunger eating to body-intelligence eating.
This is why Ayurveda places such importance to having full attention on eating during your meal. If you are watching TV, checking your email or driving while you eat, then you are not listening to your body and your mind is not fully cooperating with the digestion process.
For many of us, eating has accrued many emotional associations that can confuse and distort our body intelligence signals. We may think we are hungry when we are anxious or depressed and eat as a way to try to cope with those uncomfortable feelings. With binge eating you will need to identify what emotional discomfort is triggering your response and then find healthy, non-eating ways of dealing with it. It is important to learn to distinguish these two responses

Definition: Binge Eating

The Top 3 Current Weight Loss Products on the market:

Lose Weight Fast System is a diet and fitness system for the female body that has taken a new approach to weight loss for women.

The Fat Loss Factor is A 12-week online weight loss program that involves a comprehensive diet and exercise regime in combination with supportive activities such as goal-setting and stress management.

Customized Fat Loss is a nutrition and workout program to help you burn off unwanted body fat and lose weight so you can get that great, healthy and sexy body.

Binge eating is a pattern of disordered eating which consists of episodes of uncontrollable overeating. It is sometimes as a symptom of binge eating disorder. During such binges, a person rapidly consumes an excessive amount of food. Most people who have eating binges try to hide this behaviour from others, and often feel ashamed or depressed about their overeating. Eating binges can be followed by so-called compensatory behaviour, acts by which the person tries to compensate for the effects of overeating. Examples of such acts are purging (induced vomiting or laxative abuse), fasting, and heavy exercising.
Although people who do not have any mental disorder may occasionally experience episodes of overeating, frequent binge eating is often a symptom of an eating disorder. Binge eating is a central feature of bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder. It is also practiced by some people with an eating disorder not otherwise specified or anorexia nervosa.

Binge eating disorder (BED), is a psychiatric disorder in which a subject shows the following symptoms:

Causes
No one knows for sure what causes binge eating disorder. As many as half of all people with binge eating disorder have been depressed in the past. Whether depression causes binge eating disorder or whether binge eating disorder causes depression is not known for sure.

Treatment
People with binge eating disorder, whether or not they want to lose weight, should get help from a health professional including physicians, nutritionists, psychiatrist, psychologists, or clinical social workers for their eating behavior. Even those who are not overweight are usually upset by their binge eating, and treatment can help them. There are several different ways to treat binge eating disorder. Cognitive-behavioral therapy teaches people how to keep track of their eating and change their unhealthy eating habits. It also teaches them how to change the way they act in tough situations. Interpersonal psychotherapy helps people look at their relationships with friends and family and make changes in problem areas. Drug therapy, such as antidepressants, may be helpful for some people.
Researchers are still trying to find the treatment that is the most helpful in controlling binge eating disorder. The methods mentioned here seem to be equally helpful. For people who are overweight, a weight-loss program that also offers treatment for eating disorders might be the best choice.
Emotional cues such as anger, sadness, boredom, and anxiety can trigger binge eating. Impulsive behavior and certain other emotional problems can be more common in people with binge eating disorder. However, many people also claim that binging occurs regardless of their mood.
It is also unclear if dieting and binge eating are related. Some studies show that about half of all people with binge eating disorder had binge episodes before they started to diet.
Researchers also are looking into how brain chemicals and metabolism affect binge eating disorder, although this study is in its early stages.
Furthermore the use of certain drugs, ie marijuana, is well known to cause BED, more popular known as the munchies. Same behaviour is shown and the subject will eat far over the point of normal consumption. This behavior is then transferred to states where no to little THC is present in the system; a sort of conditioning.
* Periodically does not exercise control over consumption of food
* Eats an unusually large amount of food at one time -- more than a normal person would eat in the same amount of time.
* Eats much more quickly during binge episodes than during normal eating episodes
* Eats until physically uncomfortable
* Eats large amounts of food even when they are not really hungry
* Usually eats alone during binge eating episodes, in order to avoid discovery of the disorder
* Often eats alone during periods of normal eating, owing to feelings of embarrassment about food
* Feels disgusted, depressed, or guilty after binge eating

Wikipedia, the free enclyclopedia © 2001-2008 Wikipedia Contributors
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License

Best New Weight Loss Product:

The 3 Week Diet is a revolutionary new diet system that not only guarantees to help you lose weight — it promises to help you lose more weight — all body fat — faster than anything else you’ve ever tried.

***Breaking Free Of The Binge Eating Cycle

The Top 3 Current Weight Loss Products on the market:

Lose Weight Fast System is a diet and fitness system for the female body that has taken a new approach to weight loss for women.

The Fat Loss Factor is A 12-week online weight loss program that involves a comprehensive diet and exercise regime in combination with supportive activities such as goal-setting and stress management.

Customized Fat Loss is a nutrition and workout program to help you burn off unwanted body fat and lose weight so you can get that great, healthy and sexy body.

We develop patterns of behavior early in life. We start associating certain events with certain behaviors. One such pattern is our behavior with food. Being fed by our parents when we were young may come to represent being cared for or being loved. On the other hand, not being fed when we were hungry may have produced a deep insecurity about whether there would be enough food in the future.
Food can also serve as a distraction. For instance, we may have been told at the doctor's office that if we didn't cry when we got a shot, we would be rewarded with a lollypop. Therefore, we focused on getting the lollypop instead of feeling the fear or pain of the needle. We effectively blocked the pain and focused on the reward, the sugar. Is it any wonder that later in life when we experience pain, emotional or physical, that we think a candy bar will make us feel better?
We may associate happy occasions, holidays, and celebrations with food. We then look to food to recapture the feelings of togetherness, love, and joy that we felt on those special occasions. We may have been told we can have dessert if we are good or if we eat everything on our plate. Thus, dessert became a reward, an acknowledgement of success. We trudge through a hard day at work knowing a reward awaits us at the end of the day.
We can also use food to procrastinate; to avoid some action or responsibility that needs to be taken care of or just to get through the mundane, boring tasks of daily life. We may even recognize that food has become our best friend and our source of comfort. But inside, we feel like we have an empty hole inside us, and no amount of food seems to make us feel whole and complete.
We pick up so many associations between food and behavior early in life. Some are life enhancing, and some have become subconscious, core beliefs that interfere with our life today. We may be using food to cope with the stress in our lives. But, in time, our destructive eating behavior actually makes the stress worse. We find that we have less time and less energy.
Because we automatically use food, we cannot discover what is truly disturbing us. If we are not conscious of these associations, the first step in changing them is awareness. We can't change something if we are not even aware of it.
What Is Disordered Eating?
People with disordered eating have developed the habit of relying on food to cope with life situations. They use food as a means to displace or "stuff down" uncomfortable feelings or thoughts. They may use food to avoid some part of life by grazing or eating all day. This is called compulsive overeating. Some may binge, eating large amounts of food in a short time. Binge eating usually starts in response to a diet. Others may restrict their food intake with a rigid diet until they become so malnourished that they cannot think clearly or function physically, and until their long-term health, or even their life itself, is endangered. This is anorexia. Still others may overeat, and then get rid of the food. This is bulimia.
Disordered eating is not just about food. The primary thing that keeps a person trapped in the illness is FEAR: fear of getting fat, fear of rejection, fear of being found out, fear of abandonment, fear of being controlled, or fear of feeling. By concentrating on the illness, weight, diet, or body image, one can avoid the fear and numb the feelings.
A mental obsession with food, weight, diet, or body image has profound effects on our self-esteem, relationships, finances, daily activities, and quality of life. People often become depressed or anxious because of their eating patterns.
The Cycle
At the beginning of our eating disorder, we successfully managed to block out troubling feelings by occupying our mind with thoughts of food or thinness. The problem with this is that as our feelings get stuffed down over and over again, the internal pressure builds. We don't exercise other methods of coping, and soon food becomes our only coping mechanism. We become hard-wired to turn to our disorder whenever a feeling comes up.
After a while we have no room for any more feelings. We may find ourselves reacting to everything around us by turning to food. We don't acknowledge our pain, so we don't do anything to alleviate our growing desperation. We think food is the problem, when in fact, we have substituted food for a deeper problem

7 Magical Steps to Kick the Binge Eating habit out of Your Head.

The Top 3 Current Weight Loss Products on the market:

Lose Weight Fast System is a diet and fitness system for the female body that has taken a new approach to weight loss for women.

The Fat Loss Factor is A 12-week online weight loss program that involves a comprehensive diet and exercise regime in combination with supportive activities such as goal-setting and stress management.

Customized Fat Loss is a nutrition and workout program to help you burn off unwanted body fat and lose weight so you can get that great, healthy and sexy body.

Binge eating / overeating is mainly an emotional problem. The good news is you can stop your binge eating if you start to feel more confident, more powerful, more energised and more loved and loving. I guarantee that if you start feeling more positive about yourself it will be easier for you to stop your addictive habit.
To make things easier and more practical here are 7 Important Steps to kick binge eating out of your head.
Step 1.
Make a S.M.A.R.T. goal for yourself that is: Specific, Meaningful, Attainable, Realistic and Timed. For example a goal like "lose weight", "eat healthy", or