Words by our Clinical Psychologist, Bianca Glajz
Difficulties with food and eating are so common in today’s world. Most people have experienced times of binge eating at some point in their lives, and for some, this is a frequent struggle.
Bingeing is characterised by eating in a way that feels out of your control, and eating an amount of food that is far more than a sensible healthy adult portion of food. It can even occur when you’re not hungry or already full, but can’t seem to stop.
Bingeing can cause a lot of negative aftereffects – feelings of guilt, shame, disgust, self-loathing, upset, depressed and defeated. It can also have a lot of unpleasant physical effects, including bloating, stomach upsets, digestive strain, feeling sick, weight gain and lethargy.
Despite all the negative consequences and peoples’ genuine efforts to try and stop binge eating, for many, they just can’t get control over the problem behaviours. In fact this is more common than not.
The reason is because this single behaviour is actually a very complex problem. It is caused by and reinforced by multiple interacting factors. Including thinking, feelings, behaviours, emotional and behaviour skill sets, self-talk, food and eating philosophy, eating patterns and relationship to food. As well as nutritional and health status, and environmental and lifestyle factors.
Although some of us have identified some of the factors that contribute to our binging, most of us haven’t. This is why it’s still happening.
So you can stop beating yourself up over not being able to fix this problem, it’s more complex than you realise! Which is why getting the help from a specialist eating behaviour psychologist is often needed to successfully resolve this. A psychologist will help identify all the critical causes and maintaining factors and processes responsible for your particular bingeing problem. They can help you pinpoint the targets for change, and to train you in the needed skills and knowledge to correct the things that keep the problem going. They will help you develop tailored action plans to make real achievable behaviour changes.
Book in with one of our psychologists here!
Read about Bianca here!