This website introduces a new idea that helped me stop binge eating and lose weight. It communicates a hypothesis that I’ve been developing for decades: a story of misguided biological signals, mistaken beliefs – and freedom.
I have a long history of chronic dieting. I was a compulsive eater with severe episodes of binge eating for almost two decades. I feared that this would be something I was stuck with for life; that I would be endlessly recovering and relapsing, never cured. But after years of searching – while starving, binge eating, gaining and losing weight and everything in between – I stumbled upon an idea that helped me stop. I escaped dieting-roller-coaster-hell and returned, slowly, to a normal, healthy weight. I am now free of the urge to binge and the desire to compulsively overeat – and I accomplished this ridiculous feat with minimal concerted effort.
I want to scream it from the rooftops, but I’ve chosen an anonymous internet platform instead: wildly pouring thoughts onto a computer screen. I’m whispering via the keyboard so that you, too, can hear. Binge eating is not something we want to talk about with friends. It’s something that we hide in humiliation: bury inside ourselves, like endless sticky wrappers shoved away in rubbish bins.
If you arrived at this website as the result of typing ‘I can’t stop eating junk food’ or other such desperate phrases into Google…welcome. I’m so glad that you’ve found your way here.
Despite fearing that changing my eating behaviors might be impossible, a different way of understanding binge eating brought rapid relief. Whether you binge eat at night, in your car, every weekend, on rare occasions, or throughout each and every day in a mindless, endless trance – I believe these ideas can help. ‘Emotional eating’, ‘compulsive eating’, ‘binge eating disorder’, and other problematic eating behaviors can and do change. Excessive overeating is NOT the result of a character flaw, genetic malfunction or a messed-up part of your psyche. It is a predictable behavior that was cultivated by accident and is sustained and perpetuated by false beliefs that have arisen as the result of repeated exposure to deceptive foods (those that mislead the body about the nutrition within), disrupting learned relationships between flavour and nutrition. This situation is often initiated and exacerbated by restrictive dieting. And the best thing of all is that understanding the situation can be all that is required to change.
Can understanding change binge eating?
Let’s begin with a quote from Dr. John Sarno, author of Healing Back Pain and an expert on chronic pain:
I have been successful because we have made the right diagnosis, not because we have found the right treatment. We do not have an “approach” to the problems of acute and chronic pain – we have the diagnosis.
– Dr. John Sarno, Healing Back Pain
In other words, a cure often arises out of the correct understanding of a condition. When you see exactly how and why something occurs – you can understand how to stop it. In my experience, learning about the impact of deceptive flavor molecules upon the body was the missing piece that made permanent dietary change not only possible, but enjoyable.
If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing.
– Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Although it may sound implausible, I stopped binge eating immediately by grasping a few simple concepts, such that the change in eating behavior felt remarkably rapid and easy. Viewing the situation in a new way was all that was required to change my eating patterns and for the undesirable overeating behavior to cease.
Jack Trimpey, the author of Rational Recovery, says this:
Recovery is not a process, but an event.
He is right. Physical transformation may take weeks, months, or years, but the beliefs driving a behavior can change immediately: via an illuminating mental shift. In my case, the acquisition of new information led to a dramatic change in desire and behavior, terminating the problem at its core.
So let us start with a definition.
What is binge eating disorder?
According to the experts, binge eating disorder is the act of regularly consuming large quantities of food (far more calories than the body needs), feeling a lack of control while doing so and not purging this food from the body afterwards. This may involve eating a lot in a short period of time (at night, alone, or in the car, for example) or grazing all day, picking constantly at food (also known as compulsive eating). Binge eaters often feel over-full and appear to eat when not physically hungry. They may gorge upon food, sometimes to the point of sickness or in pain. Binge eaters may have a wildly fluctuating or escalating weight, with 10kg (22lb)+ gains per month not uncommon. Unsurprisingly, the behavior is prevalent in many of the super-obese. However, it may occur in those you might never suspect, such as bodybuilders and fitness professionals. In his book, The Cycle Diet, Scott Abel describes how he lost 50lbs over 12 weeks in preparation for his first bodybuilding contest and, then, after winning, gained it all back in less than one week.
Binge eaters can feel compelled to consume vast quantities of junk food (and sometimes nourishing foods) despite knowing that the excessive intake harms their health or life. They may fear the negative effect that binge eating has upon the body and feel desperate to stop. It may seem as though they fall into a downward spiral as the behavior escalates: overeating, feeling awful and then binge eating again to restore the illusion of relief. Binge eaters often feel trapped: desperately wanting to change, but not knowing how.
I was caught in this trap for almost two decades. This quote by recovered bulimic Julie Kerr sums up how I felt:
I was absolutely terrified that that there was something wrong with me. I couldn’t understand how something I had done occasionally and had seemingly been under my control, had become something that now had a mind of its own.
I alternated from extreme dietary control to the opposite. I succeeded and failed at diets so many times that I sometimes reminded myself of the disputed Edison quote to keep myself sane:
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
– Thomas Edison
Even while experiencing the awful consequences first-hand, and desperate to change, I kept overeating. In the face of mounting evidence, rebukes from loved ones, and my ever-expanding figure, I continued to damage my health, my happiness, and my future.
But I have found a way out.
To communicate this idea to you, I need first to explain how I believe binge eating develops.
My hypothesis about what drives binge eating
While experts seem able to offer a clear binge eating definition and describe it in great detail, when it comes to the cause of binge eating disorder, they are less certain, issuing broad, all-encompassing statements (which neither exclude nor explain anything), such as:
Like other eating disorders, binge eating disorder seems to result from a combination of psychological, biological, and environmental factors.
– WebMD
Correlations are made with poor mental health, a history of depression, ADHD, obsessive compulsive disorder, and other psychological diagnoses, however, it can be difficult to tell whether these related behaviors are the cause of binge eating disorder or the result. Binge eating disorder also seems to run in families, as do many other food traditions and non-genetic behaviors.
Without a clear understanding of what causes binge eating disorder, we struggle for a cure.
My hypothesis is as follows: Eating large quantities of deceptive food leads to an intermittent relationship between flavor and nutrition. This uncertainty causes the body to demand more food than usual and to resist eating normal amounts, increasing appetite and food-related obsession. Repeated attempts to overpower this hunger introduce a second problem: a set of inaccurate beliefs that lead the individual to believe they are fundamentally flawed and broken.
Note: This is the model that best explains my own experience. It has not yet been established via scientific studies as a complete clinical explanation for binge-eating disorder. I compile all the scientific evidence in support of this hypothesis in my book, Foods That Lie.
Priming the trap
I believe there are two common routes by which this pattern may begin – and they both involve the cultivation of extreme hunger.
1. A person grows up eating an inferior or inadequate diet that does not reliably meet nutritional needs. For example, a child who grew up in poverty or ate predominantly ultra-processed foods, or was restricted nutritionally by parents – often with good intentions (this is more prevalent in this day and age, as fears about the obesity epidemic grow). In this situation, the child is likely to experience increased hunger and a tendency to overconsume deceptive food when encountered.
From the feeding dynamic’s perspective and from my own clinical practice and from my reading of the research, the biggest cause [of paediatric obesity] is restrained feeding, is restricting the child’s food intake. Many times restrained feeding is based on a misinterpretation of a child’s normal growth…When you restrict a child’s food intake they’re going to become food preoccupied and prone to overeat when they get the chance.
– Ellyn Satter
2. A person begins a self-initiated diet that fails to meet nutrient or caloric needs. As with above, hunger increases and the individual is more likely to eat large volumes when deceptive food is encountered.
Both of these scenarios follow the same pattern: the only difference is that the latter example is self-imposed. In my experience, restrictive dieting is the most common path to overeating, so we will dwell on this for a moment.
Dieting and binge eating disorder
Dr. Halmi, a professor of psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, said she had found dieting a frequent “proximal trigger” among people with binge-eating disorder.
When we are born, young humans typically eat like all normal living creatures: consuming food when hungry and stopping when full. Hunger exists to ensure that we swallow an optimal quantity of energy and nutrients. In ordinary circumstances, we eat until these two needs are met and then hunger abates (food loses its appeal). This is a handy and reliable system that has evolved over eons.
Throughout most of human history, flavour was a dependable clue about the nutrition a food contained. The flavour of an apple reliably predicted that the nutrients commonly found in apples (vitamin C and suchlike) were about to enter the body. The flavour of meat predicted the nutritional consequences of eating meat. Through experience eating a range of foods, the body could learn these flavor-nutrition relationships.
Many modern foods make those relationships less dependable. Flavours can be intensified, reconstructed, or transferred to foods with very different nutritional properties. A growing body of evidence suggests that this makes it more difficult for learned appetite mechanisms to predict what a mouthful of food will actually deliver.
You might think our hunger and satiety systems have malfunctioned in the face of modern food, but it is precisely because this system works so well that we are in this situation at all. If the body could be fooled into thinking that deceptive food was food, we would never overeat it. It is only because the amazing regulatory system that is the human body quickly ascertains that an inadequate level of fats, vitamins, minerals, and nutrients has been consumed (with these found in unpredictable locations), that hunger remains firmly switched on until the need for nourishment has been met.
Think about the young children that you know (or perhaps your own childhood). Kids who are fed ordinary nutritious meals (i.e. a combination of carbohydrates, meat and animal fat, dairy, fruit, and vegetables) almost always end up a normal healthy weight, with genetic and behavioral differences resulting in small variations in muscular and body fat distribution. A child who is fed a greater quantity of junk food must consume more calories in order to gain the necessary nourishment. Upon reaching teenage years, whether the child is genuinely overweight or not, they are surrounded by a population who is outwardly struggling with an obesity epidemic. In response, they may decide to start their first diet.
When someone first decides that they are too fat, they typically ascertain that weight loss appears to require deliberately restricting energy intake or increase energy expenditure through exercise. Depending on the level of motivation, initial weight loss attempts usually involve one or both of these strategies. This requires that you summon the willpower to ignore the natural hunger signals of the body and eat less, often while moving more.
If this unpleasant approach is abandoned after a day or so, eating is likely to rapidly return to its previous pattern. For many, however, this prospect feels unacceptable. If you prioritise a desirable appearance (as most young humans do) because you understand, either consciously or subconsciously, that an attractive physique is an advantageous attribute (impacting, through mate selection, the survival of your genes), you may summon a very strong dose of willpower to achieve this goal. This is especially the case if you are a high-achieving individual, capable of delaying short term gratification for long term gain (many of those who develop eating disorders appear to fit into this category). I should note here that the desire to be physically appealing is a normal healthy goal (although the level of thinness desired is often unrealistically low, due to Photoshopped and starving models, actresses, singers, and influencers distorting our perception of what is normal). The problem, however, is not that one desires to achieve an optimal body weight, but that the popular approach used to do so is wrong.
At this point in early dieting adventures, however (and even, often, decades later) we hold faith in the idea that a forced reduction in calories is the answer…because it seems so logical, from a mathematical perspective (we don’t realize that the simplicity of this premise excludes other crucial variables involved in this equation) and because, initially, it seems to work. If you are able to summons a superhuman effort and restrict your food intake for an extended period of time, you see results.
At the same time as you lose weight, however, a cascade of bodily consequences is set in motion. The body quickly realizes that you are eating less than it needs to survive and it tries to save you by issuing tremendous urges to eat. It does this relentlessly until you oblige (or die from anorexia). In most people, thankfully, this urge is eventually met with an unplanned consumption of ‘allowed’ food (an extra spoonful of peanut butter, an additional bowl of cereal, or a larger than ideal serving of grapes at a meal). This small deviation then triggers the seed of doubt that, somehow, the diet has been broken.
Once broken, of course, the floodgates open. There is suddenly a small window of opportunity (usually until tomorrow) when the rational brain must accept that you are not on a diet, and that you have temporary permission to eat all of the previously ‘forbidden’ foods. In the words of Geneen Roth, author of Breaking Free From Compulsive Eating:
The fourth law of the universe is that for every diet, there is an equal and opposite binge.
Of course, rather than binge eating nourishing foods that would heal your starving body, the tendency is to charge full-throttle for those that deliver a fast and immediate hit of enhanced flavor. In contrast to the gnawing pain of hunger, vast quantities of easily digested junk food immediately create the illusion that the nutritional crisis is over. However, because few of the promised nutritional benefits have arrived, satiation does not occur (or is significantly delayed) and the deceptive food feels as though it is never, ever enough.
Hence, the natural tendency is to eat and eat until at the exploding brink of capacity. In addition to a swollen belly of artificial foods, we now drown in thoughts of failure; terror at the impending fatness; despair that we ‘lost control’ again. Despite a bloated stomach, we have often obtained very little of the nourishment we desperately need. We make a misguided attempt to alleviate the hunger and misery of a restrictive diet with one of the most addictive items in the world.
If you are lucky, after your first few diets and reactive binge eating episodes, you realize the futility of the situation, get a grip of yourself and stop. In ‘diet recovery’ food intake typically normalizes after a few months or years and you settle close to your original weight, as happened to the men in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.
However, at this point in your dieting war, the futility of the situation rarely sets in. If you believe that you are fat – and, worse, that your original starting point was unattractive – it is irrational to accept a period of lavish overeating in order to arrive at a slightly plump set point that may or may not eventuate.
This leaves the individual with a terrible dilemma. When we find ourselves consuming ludicrous quantities of deceptive food yet again, we begin to consider more dramatic alternatives. Those who are able to self-induce vomiting may turn to bulimia in a misguided attempt to rid themselves of the excess calories (a method that exacerbates hunger, rapidly depletes nutrient levels and may end in death). Those who cannot vomit may initiate periods of fasting, diet pills, restricted intake, or increased exercise as we try in vain to succeed at weight loss using the ‘restrict calorie’ method (a method that has a spectacular failure rate of over 98%).
Instead of acknowledging that forced calorie restriction is an absurd approach to weight loss, we vow to increase our willpower and try harder tomorrow. A cycle of dieting, binge eating, purging, and more dieting becomes entrenched.
As time passes, the diets become more obscure, restrictive and deliberate, eliminating whole food groups, or types of food. These are appealing, as they rely on less willpower – a rule to never eat wheat, for example, is easier to uphold than weighing food every meal, counting calories or tallying points. We veer towards orthorexia (a new term to describe those who pursue obsessively ‘clean’ eating and adhere to extreme dietary rules).
As the pattern continues, the gap between diets often widens and the out-of-control periods sometimes extend to days, weeks or years. As the number of failed diets increases, your faith in your ability to succeed diminishes and the effort required to restart a new one becomes greater.
At some point despair sets in. You fear that you have lost all motivation and self-control: that you cannot summon the willpower to ever diet again. Part of you abhors all forms of restriction, exercise, and dieting, while another part idolizes it and festers a growing hatred and disgust towards your own body. You believe, deep down, that you must regain ‘control’, and, perhaps (as in my case) constantly tell yourself that you will, but there is always an excuse as to why the time to do so is never now. We enact tens or hundreds or even thousands of ‘final feasts’: enormous junk food meals that are never final, before a ‘perfect diet’ that never takes hold. This journey is often accompanied by endless research and obsessive reading of diet books, websites or any other damn thing. It is here that obesity begins to rear its head, yo-yo dieting gets out of hand and panic and depression take hold.
At a certain point, a quiet sorrow edges into your soul. When you’ve battled with your weight for an extended period of time, a sludgy, brain-thick misery envelops you and you cannot tell if it is the result of your weight or if the misery was there all along.
Richard Kerr, author of The Bulimia Help Method describes this as the 9th stage: believing you are mentally ill.
Progressively declining health, constant anxiety, disgust and slavery to food, not to mention mood swings, body dissatisfaction, food obsession and feeling like you’re going mad, all take their toll. Your self esteem plummets. Your confidence shatters and you worry for your health and your life.
Let’s be clear: it is normal to be filled with despair when weight loss efforts continually fail. It is normal for binge eating to rip holes in your self-esteem. This is the reaction of a normal human being; not someone who is flawed and ruined beyond repair.
Here is the truth: It is possible to escape junk food addiction and take back your power.
The ideas that helped me stop binge eating
The first part of my escape came when reading a book called Brain over Binge by Kathryn Hansen (it is a little known self-published book, with phenomenal reviews). This book is one of the best I have read on the subject and I highly recommend it. I was not able to stop binge eating as a result (many readers quit instantly and I was distraught, yet somehow unsurprised that I did not) however, I knew that it contained some of the best truths about the subject.
This book makes it clear that changing eating patterns does not require waiting for the perfect circumstance, resolving every psychological difficulty, or summoning endless willpower. According to Hansen, stopping is not only possible but instantly achievable.
It made it clear that I didn’t need to wait for the stars to align or for willpower appear. It implied that something about the overeating was driven by the overeating behavior itself – that the problem was not an inherent part of ME.
Although I did not stop binge eating after reading Brain over Binge, it provided the first real insight that was needed.
Escape was possible.
Allen Carr, author of the most successful stop smoking book of all time, argues that addiction is almost entirely sustained by beliefs (which he calls brainwashing), coupled with minor physical withdrawal. Once the brainwashing is peeled away, he shows that ending an addiction is easy. Rather than enduring deprivation, Carr’s fans describe the process as feeling like liberation.
In the case of deceptive food, physical withdrawal is almost non-existent. There are rarely headaches. No delirium, cold sweats or convulsions. Deceptive food withdrawal is a quiet, lethargic, restless feeling, combined with reduced taste sensitivity that is misinterpreted as the urge to consume more of the deceptive food that makes one feel this way in the first place.
Junk food addiction can be escaped easily, once the right understanding is grasped.
Nowhere in your body is there an instruction to eat deceptive food until you die. Your body wants to thrive. If you starve yourself, you will create hunger. If you ignore it, your body takes control and nags you until you binge. The only problem is that you binge ate chocolate or sweets or cake or some other deceptive, manmade concoction that felt good but gave you nothing…and after months of suffering this humiliating cycle, you lost all faith in your own body’s ability to know what to eat, how much to eat, and how to stop.
You’re here, right now, just as you have spent countless hours scouring other websites, blogs, books, vlogs and whatever else you can find, sucking away your time and your life, trying to work out how to stop something that is devastatingly simple.
This website and accompanying book present the hypothesis that sustained binge eating is an ordinary response to intermittent flavor, caused by eating deceptive food, and triggered by the unhelpful notion that eating less than your body needs to maintain a healthy weight is the way to return you to optimal health; combined with mild physical withdrawal, and a misunderstanding about where the culprit lies (despite common logic, for example, refined carbohydrates are not the enemy; nor is saturated fat, processed food, or animal products).
Junk food addiction is caused by swallowing deceptive meals that do not deliver what they promise…combined with the insane, crazy idea that somehow you have lost your self-control to be or do any different; that you are permanently flawed – disordered – unable to return to normal.
This hypothesis finally made sense of my own experience and allowed me to change. For me, ending binge eating involved:
- Understanding precisely what makes some food addictive, so that I could diminish the onslaught of addictive meals and give my body a chance to absorb the nutrients it so strongly desires, reset sensory mechanisms, and heal. (No, this did not mean consuming 100% blended green smoothies or abiding by any other ridiculous regime – it meant consuming ordinary meals of genuine, nourishing, flavor-honest food).
- Understanding that addictive substances are a thief and a con: they provide a temporary illusion; pleasure that leaves you with pain. They leave you worse off than you were before, and prompt you to seek the same deceptive agent again, creating a downward cycle.
- Understanding that cravings are caused by an incorrect understanding of the situation and that if you no longer desire something, the addiction is gone.
- Understanding that addiction is sustained entirely by false beliefs. Failing at diets, over and over again, drums a false idea into your brain: that you had lost your willpower: when really, you had acquired the knowledge that subjecting yourself to a restrictive diet is ludicrous, painful and absolutely insane. You have lost the ability to willfully starve because you are a survivor, born to thrive. This does not mean you have no willpower. Chances are that you have more willpower than most people you know. In many cases, it is your extreme willpower that got you into this mess. (Don’t worry. This false belief can be undone instantly through contrary proof. That’s where the magic of the Allen Carr method lies, and that’s how I escaped too.)
Once I understood these things – and a few other minor ideas to help cement this knowledge – I was able to quit binge eating immediately (even though this prospect felt absurd and impossible at the outset), and returned to eating a diet rich in nourishing, flavor-honest food.
Your body is born to seek health; it longs to acquire a normal, healthy physique, with the bouncing energy of a child.
I discovered that you can conquer the urge to binge, not by charging it down with willpower, but by dissolving it at the source. With the right information, you can leap out of the maze and land with both feet in the sun.
Once I understood addiction for what it is – I found the escape to be easy. The best thing about this change in perception is that it fills you with joy. It makes you realize that if you beat this thing, you can do anything. 😊
Want more? Start here.