You wake up on a sunny morning; feeling groggy and quite light-headed. You try as much as possible to block out the sun’s rays; you do not think you are ready to face its intense stares just yet. Despite your best efforts, you discover that it’s as though your curtains is conspiring with the wind to get you out of bed no matter what. The wind whooshes and the curtains come up for about three seconds – three seconds of blinding heat from the sun. “I get the message” you say. Trudging out of bed, you slowly walk to the kitchen for a glass of water. “When last did I take a glass of water” you wonder. As soon as you come within distance of the kitchen, the realization hit you: “You are losing control”.
Strewn around the counter-top are wrappers of different types of Chocolate, tossed with reckless abandon; a large bowl of almost downed ice-cream, crumbs of bread litter the ground. When you open the fridge, you find to your chagrin that the almost stocked compartments are now almost empty. All these food eaten in one night? You think to yourself. “How did I get here” you ask.
It all started when you had an altercation with a quite nice business colleague over the right idea to implement. That set the tone for the day as you had snapped at the delivery boy, deliberately slammed the front door in the face of your neighbor, cussed at the slow man on the bank queue and finally had a bad disagreement with your fiancé. What bites at you was that you knew you were wrong at every turn. To numb the feeling of disappointment and pain; here you are, feeling sorry for yourself and bound by your uncontrolled love for your food. You realize with a horror, you are binge eating.
Binge eating is a condition where a person eats compulsively due to emotional pressure. Eating is then seen as the escape route from these feelings of anger, anxiety and depression. This condition has deeper roots than the foods consumed as it is about dealing with a much deeper psychological situation. It could either be; to deal with emotions – anger, anxiety and depression or to fill-in the nutrition gap created by inadequate sustenance. Inadequate sustenance come to play when people follow starvation-diets during the day that deprives them of all nutrition needs perhaps, daily subsisting on cucumbers and water. When they hit this emotional patch, they run amok at night; trying to fill in the nutrition gap by eating everything in sight. If not curbed, the situation becomes even more problematic and the subject involved may find it harder to escape from the clutches of Binge Eating.
In the next post, we will consider ways to curb this menace.
