Conditioned Hypereating Is Just A Fancy Word For Bingeing

July was a bad month for me, eating-wise. I know exactly how bad, thanks to my food journal. There were some 3,000 and 4,000 calorie days in there, and when I look at those totals, I just feel sick. But also during July, I read a book that helps me understand that behavior, and now I just need to figure out what to do about it.

I picked up The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, by David Kessler from the library after hearing interviews with the author on NPR, hoping to gain insight into my relationship with food. The book confirmed to me what I had already known, what I have discovered in the eighteen months since I took on the effort to improve my eating habits, and gave me some tools with which to fight that battle against what the author calls "conditioned hypereating."

Conditioned hypereating, as defined by the author, is characterized by loss of control over hyperpalatable foods, an inability to feel satisfied by food, and obsessive thinking about food. This describes my problem exactly. I feel like I lose control over certain foods, and I eat beyond the point where food loses its rewarding properties, and still do not feel satisfied. Those foods are the ones loaded with salt, sugar, and fat, which is why they don't satisfy.

The book describes the process that eating has become for so many of us: we respond to environmental cues, which differ for each of us, we feel the urge to eat, and we feel the reward of eating, and this becomes a habit, so that we eat for the reward instead of eating for hunger.

The key is to become aware of this cycle, so that we can make a consious decision to eat, instead of relying on habit to tell us when and what to eat. So from my food journal, when I look at those high-calorie days, I know that my binging comes when I eat with family, when I go out to restaurants, and when co-workers bring treats to the office. My goal now is to figure out how to deal with these situations so that I don't come out at the end feeling horrible about myself.

One of the biggest things I'm taking away from this book is the reason why it is easier for me not to eat any of my trigger foods at all than to eat just a little bit. By eating just one, I have lost the struggle for self-restraint. The point of intervention is the decision, that moment of control when I say yes or no. By delegating my decision to eat to my subconscious, which is conditioned to overeat, I set myself up for failure.

The book suggests forming a set of rules for yourself to give yourself a decision framework. This takes away the decision to eat from your subconscious and engages your higher level brain function, where it is easier to take control. This is why I had such success with Seattle Sutton: if it wasn't on the meal plan, I didn't eat it. I have to come up with a more complicated set of rules to help me deal with the situations that are challenging for me.

I'm thinking that if I put the rule into place that I'm only allowed to have one serving of a trigger food, that might help (I already have a rule that I'm only allowed to buy trigger foods in single serving portions, which isn't usually an option, so that rule gets broken too often).

I'm also toying with incorporating a "high calorie day" into my food plan to allow for going out to eat and eating at my parents'. Those two activities don't usually add more than 500-700 calories to my intake, but I still feel like I failed because I'm not hitting my 1500-1600 goal range that day. So if I aim for the 1500 end on a normal day, and do 500-700 over on my high calorie day, I'm still at an average for the week in that goal range.

If anyone else has problems with bingeing and has found ways to deal that work for them, I'd be interested in hearing them.