If I eat too many healthy snacks, is that a binge? Or does it depend on my
frame of mind during the eating of the healthy snacks? Before I adopted the
healthy approach to eating, a binge would be sugary sweet snacks eg. candy bars, cakes, cookies etc...... So now if I get bored or nervous and eat raw veggies, or a low cal "something" is that a binge??
No...it is not a binge. Its just good old fashioned "overeating". The term "binge" gets overused in my opinion.
An exerpt from the Mayo Clinic:
Binge-eating disorder is a serious eating disorder in which you frequently consume unusually large amounts of food. Almost everyone overeats on occasion, such as having seconds or thirds of a holiday meal. But for some people, overeating crosses the line to binge-eating disorder and it becomes a regular occurrence, shrouded in secrecy.
I would consider a binge when you just can't stop eating whatever it is your eating even after you know your full and you end up feeling sick and ashamed of yourself. I don't see why it should matter if you do it with healthy food or sugary food it's psychological and when you lose control you lose control.
i think binging also means that you feel bad about it and you try to hid it.
i know that sometimes when i do it, i get really emotional and it feels like im fighting with myself in my head. one part of me says, stop, you're full, you need to stop, but then the other side of me tells me to keep going and it is really an emotional struggle for me.
That doesn't sound like a binge. Maybe emotional or boredom eating? You could replace this snacking tendency with exercise!
A binge is more or less 'planned' in the sense that you horde a lot of comfort food, go to a place where you can enjoy them alone, and eat to the point when you feel like vomiting already. From experience, I would go to KFC, Burger King, McDonalds and order everything I want from each place, buy junk food and ice cream, go home and eat them all for one meal in front of the TV or laptop just because I loved the act of eating. I lived my weekends like that for a year and gained 50 lbs...
I think it's the anxiety provoked and secret behaviors that point to bingeing. Bingeing appears to take a distinct emotional toll on a person. Some people to mix it up with overeating, being snacky, or simply having cravings but those things are normal from time to time.
The American Psychiatric Association identifies a binge eating episode as characterized by:
1. Eating a larger amount of food than normal during a short period of time (within any two hour period)
2. Lack of control over eating during the binge episode (i.e. the feeling that one cannot stop eating).
And then says, binge eating episodes are associated with three or more of the following:
1. Eating until feeling uncomfortably full
2. Eating large amounts of food when not physically hungry
3. Eating much more rapidly than normal
4. Eating alone because you are embarrassed by how much you're eating
5. Feeling disgusted, depressed, or guilty after overeating
this is what I was thinking~
I am an "occasional" binge eater, usually once per month (can you guess when that time is, LOL) but the way I look at it, doing it even once is bad for you. It's just bad for your body to eat more than you need to fuel yourself. And I always feel like crap (physically/mentally/emotionally) whenever I do it. And it almost always happens to me during TOM. Usually chocolate & salty foods (chocolate covered popcorn is a fav!!!!) but even completely healthy foods... if it's just THAT GOOOOOOD, I will eat & eat & eat until I'm so stuffed I can barely move.
And I just feel so.... ICK after doing so - & by after, I mean up to 2-3 days after. Bleh.
A binge for me used to be after dinner eating an additional sandwich, a bag of chips, cake or donuts or a brownie (or all three), and so on.
Now I have never eaten at that level since I have been losing weight BUT I think that I consider lower amounts of food a binge even though I shouldn't. I'm too hard on myself unfortunately Yesterday I had 2 slices of pizza and some breadsticks for dinner and I was mad at myself for "binging" but when I put in all my calories I realized that I barely even overate- in fact for my weight I probably could have eaten 200 more calories. And the scale today? No change!
I often wonder "why" you never hear of anyone "binging" on CARROTS & CELERY STICKS? I think that fact alone gives credence to the OP's ideals of just eating because of the sheer joy of the food she's eating! We've all overate something we like.
Based on the medical "definition" of binging, I'm not sure that you can binge on and off. It's a "psychiatric" disorder. That would be like being bipolar "sometimes".
Just something to think about.
Last edited by joyfulloser; 05-04-2011 at 07:53 PM.
I just wrote about binging in my thread a little bit ago! Binging ties in a lot of shame. I have been a binge eater for the past 10 years, but it comes and goes in spurts. An example binge of mine would be going to McDonald's, ordering enough food for four people, and then going home and eating it all as fast as I could...and then feeling so guilty and shamed that I started eating again to mask that pain. That, IMO, is what is considered an example of a binge. So, if you aren't feeling shameful and guilty and horribly depressed after eating that food, then I wouldn't consider it a binge, but rather emotional overeating.
What qualifies as a binge?
Yesterday I had 2 slices of pizza and some breadsticks for dinner and I was mad at myself for "binging" but when I put in all my calories I realized that I barely even overate- in fact for my weight I probably could have eaten 200 more calories. And the scale today? No change!
