The eating binge is something that’s well known to most of us – in particular those of us who are struggling to lose weight. In extreme cases, binge eating is even a disorder – folks seem to lose control of their eating, concentrating on a single food group and consuming literally thousands of calories in a very short period of time. Afterward, the result is a feeling of guilt, or that you have ‘blown it’ – and, certainly, the eating of that many calories at a time is disastrous to weight loss.
However, a lot of experts have commented that dieting or restricting food intake can actually trigger binging for those who have that tendency already. It’s almost as though the restriction of food makes us feel so deprived that we respond by binging, and the guild that follows a binge can derail the diet for an even longer time that needed. Many of us would give anything to be able to manage the impulse to binge – eliminating it altogether would be perfect, in fact. In this way, we would really be able to control food intake and lose weight.
The majority of folks look upon binging as a ‘problem’ behavior – an expression of some sort of distress, or even a kind of neurotic behavior to be cured. After all, this kind of eating is extreme – during a binge, people eat many times their ideal calorie intake for the day, and there seems no way to stay away from weight gain if this becomes a habit. On the other hand, there is besides proof that indicates binging may just be a fact of life for all humans, a leftover from the way in which we obtained our food early on in human development. Think about it. Before agriculture came on the scene and regulated the food supply throughout the year, humans spent many millennia as hunters and gatherers. As a matter of fact, we should all keep in mind that this pre-civilized, hunting and gathering existence went on for much longer than civilization had. Humans have practiced agriculture for little more than six thousand years, but humans (or advanced pre-humans) have been around for about 35 thousand years. So for the huge majority of human history, we were hunters and gatherers, and in that state, believe it or not, binging was a really good idea.
Think about it. This was before refrigeration or any other controlled means of food preservation. People moved around constantly, and sometimes food was plentiful, while other times it was scarce. When food was scarce, there was no way to get more. Humans just had to do without, or survive on very little. That meant that when a hunt was winning, or when the early humans stumbled upon a grove or fruit trees, binging was the most rational, well-adapted response. The food was there at that moment, and who knew when it would be there again? So the early humans would have eaten as much of it as was humanly possible – in short, they binged. They had to. It had to keep them going until the next lucky find.
Our bodily drives are stronger and more primitive than what our minds tell us. So, while we might know, rationally, that binging is not a fine idea and that we should eat a pre-approved number of calories per day, the urge to binge is still as strong in us as it was in early humans. The difference, sure, is that our food environment is not self-limiting – there are no natural limitations. We have access to almost all types of food at all times, unlike early humans. So, while our environment doesn’t necessitate binging, the behavioral drive is still strong.
That besides explains why dieting can bring on a binge. A diet is like a period of scarcity or famine – biologically, this makes us want to binge, to make up for it, as soon as food becomes obtainable. And the more you restrict your eating, the stronger your impulse to binge will be, as for early humans (physiologically identical to us) that was good survival actions. That’s why the behavior is so hard to overcome – at one point, it was not just acceptable – it was necessary to human survival.
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