When you struggle with binge eating, there are a number of complicated factors involved. It is not a simple lack of willpower or a personal character fault, as advertisers would have you believe. There is an interplay between our bodies, our emotions, and our nutrition that often goes misunderstood or ignored.
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Do you ever feel like...?
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You've tried everything and nothing works
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If you could just change your body, your life would be awesome
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You have to hide what you eat from friends or family
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You avoid seeing people because you don't want them to notice your body
Nutrition for binge eating disorder
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At Austin Counseling and Nutrition, we use an anti-diet, Intuitive Eating approach to normalizing eating. It is hard to make such profound changes in beliefs and attitudes about food. Many people have explored these methods on their own and found they need the guidance of a dietitian to help them permanently change their relationship with food.
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Our dietitians provide a safe, gentle support for our clients. We are size-inclusive and work from a Health at Every Size lens, meaning all people should have access to health, but there is no moral imperative to pursue behaviors in the name of health.
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Therapy for Binge Eating Disorder
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Counseling for binge eating disorder recovery involves helping you understand what is going on internally. Many people struggle to identify and process their emotions, and don't know what they are feeling or needing at any given moment.
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If you don't know what is driving you to eat, you certainly won't know what to do about it. If negative feelings about your body are contributing to binging, it is important to get help with those body image issues.
Call or Text (512) 655-3878
Binge Eating Disorder Facts
Binge eating is a characteristic of binge eating disorder. There are many people of all shapes and sizes who struggle with binge eating. This can appear to be just an issue of emotional eating, but binge eating disorder has a major impact on your life.
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Binge eating disorder often develops as a result of dieting. After the psychological and biological deprivation of a diet, people often feel a complete loss of control with food. Because of the emotional regulation food offers, it can become difficult to stop turning to food when it has offered emotional comfort or numbing, perpetuating the binging behaviors.
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Typically criteria for binge eating disorder is as follows:
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*Eating, in a discrete period of time (e.g., within any 2-hour period), an amount of food that is uncomfortable.
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*A sense of lack of control over eating during the episode (e.g., a feeling that one cannot stop eating or control what or how much one is eating).
The binge eating episodes are associated with three (or more) of the following:
1. Eating much more rapidly than normal
2. Eating until feeling uncomfortably full
3. Eating large amounts of food when not feeling physically hungry
4. Eating alone because of being embarrassed by how much one is eating
5. Feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed, or very guilty after overeating
6. Marked distress regarding binge eating is present
7. The binge eating occurs, on average, at least once a week for three months.
8. The binge eating is not associated with the recurrent use of inappropriate compensatory behavior (i.e., purging) and does not occur exclusively during the course of bulimia nervosa or anorexia nervosa.
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Emotional eating, stress eating and binge eating are difficult to deal with alone. You may tend to feel totally out of control with food. Research has shown these behaviors can be overcome with help. Effective methods include nutritional counseling and emotional eating programs. Do not continue to suffer alone. You can take your life back from compulsive emotional eating, and we can help.
Emotional Eating in Binge Eating Disorder
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Emotional is something nearly everyone does, but hardly anyone talks about. People would rather try to control their eating (points, calories, pounds) than try to disentangle their relationship with food from their relationship with their emotions. Binge eating disorder is often partly driven by emotions and emotional eating, in addition to some kind of restriction, be it mental or physical.
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Emotional eating is one of the most common concerns we work with, and also see in the general population. Many people struggle with feeling out-of-control around food, and find their chaotic relationship with food to be very distressing.
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To be clear, eating for reasons other than hunger, like self-soothing, is not a bad thing. It can be an effective way to manage emotions when you don't know what else to do. It can also be helpful to learn to recognize feelings and needs in order to have additional methods of coping available to you.
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Many people may not realize they are emotionally eating because they struggle to recognize their own emotions.​
Have you ever been watching tv when suddenly, and without hunger pangs, you want to eat something? You are not aware of any emotion. But if you look closely, you are not hungry...so why do you want to eat? If you had been more away of your emotions in that moment, maybe you'd find that you were feeling bored, or sad, or even stressed.
​When people understand the food and feelings connection, a scenario like this doesn't usually happen. You become clear on the fact that food does not have any kind of hold over you. You can start to recognize that there is something going on underneath the urge to eat when you are not hungry, and that it usually has to do with how you're feeling emotionally.​
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Emotions commonly associated with eating:
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~ Boredom
~ Procrastination
~ Sadness or depression
~ Excitement
~ Stress
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There are many emotions involved in emotional eating. Even positive emotions can evoke an eating response. This is because when you are not comfortable with feeling, even feeling good is hard to handle.
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Using food to cope provides only a temporary relief, usually followed by more of the same feeling compounded with guilt about overeating.
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At Austin Counseling and Nutrition, our therapists and nutrition counselors specialize in helping people with emotional eating and binge eating disorder. We can help you understand what you may be feeling or needing, and we can help you determine the best ways to address this.
Our binge eating disorder dietitians can help you find peace in your relationship with food, and ensure nutrition is adequate throughout the day. We provide a safe, gentle approach to healing your relationship with food and body.