An honest look at the need for comfort food
- and how to stop binge eating

Furthermore, they are a great way to challenge one’s metabolism. How so? Balancing calorie input-output for extended periods can drop the metabolic rate, or worse, send you into starvation mode where your body begins to cannibalize itself. Not good. Aside from resetting hormonal levels, mixing things up a bit keeps you honest with your eating plan, improves your fat-burning potential, builds your body and, allows you to have those occasional trigger or ‘comfort’ foods without the added guilt. A REAL win-win situation.

However, an important caveat, and you’ll more on this below, clean eating or occasional binge eating, is all about eating for the ‘right’ reasons, and not associated with negative emotions as covered in the list below.

SOME OF THE SYMPTOMS OF BINGE EATING DISORDER (BED):

• Not feeling in control of your eating behavior

• Consuming large quantities of food in a single sitting

• Eating large amounts of food even when not hungry

• Not so much eating but ‘devouring’ your meal during binge episodes

• Eating even though you are satiated

• Feelings of anxiety, depression, guilt or disgust associated with eating

• Regular dieting, most likely with little or no result (stopping short of purging the body, as normally associated with bulimia)

• Eating alone

• Feelings of desperation and/or helplessness

You may or may not previously have thought it true but - we all eat for comfort or for emotional reasons from time-to-time. And unfortunately, some of us do it too often, or worse, ALL of the time.

Whether out of boredom, frustration or depression - this is a behavior which can sabotage anybody's weight management goals and leave one completely powerless in the process. Worse, for one who does not actively follow a healthy lifestyle, it can often end up becoming a longstanding eating disorder.

Although the topic of how to stop binge eating may not fall squarely into the category of health related fitness, there is a link. My aim is to throw some light on the subject, make certain observations and suggestions, and bring you some interesting or useful information about some of my own experiences. I would like to share some tactics I see as useful and practical to help one cope, or better, how to stop binge eating.

A purely clinical approach is not my intention, nor my area of qualified expertise. Let me be clear, if you are a sufferer of emotional eating or binge eating, and experience any of the symptoms set out above, you would be best advised to seek professional help from a suitably qualified individual. An ideal and recommendable source for such expertise can be found at 'Healthy Weight Loss for All'. You will find this resource of particular support, especially if you are struggling to lose weight, while at the same time not entirely sure why you find yourself in that unfortunate condition.

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