Binge Eating Quotes

“There ARE people who won't customarily eat an entire row of cookies, or hear food calling their name from other rooms, or who don't grind up food in the garbage disposal for fear of eating it, or get it back out of the garbage so they could eat it. Of course, my binge eating was just a cover-up for the larger issue: Trying to fill the emptiness”
― SARK, Transformation Soup: Healing for the Splendidly Imperfect

“A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience." -Naomi Wolf”
― Stacey M. Rosenfeld

“Bingeing is such an emotionally frenetic activity that no other concerns can exist in the same space. It is a hell that people who are food-sensitive are familiar with; and, because it is known, it is therefore not so terrifying as some of the problems that are outside our control. Problems like divorce, illness, death.”
― Geneen Roth, Feeding the Hungry Heart: The Experience of Compulsive Eating

“The Americans as a nation are killing themselves with their vices and high living. As much as a man ought to eat in half an hour they swallow in three minutes gulping down their food like the [dog] under the table which when a chunk of meat is thrown down to it swallows it before you can say 'twice.' If you want a reform carry out the advice I have just given you. Dispense with your multitudinous dishes, and, depend upon it, you will do much towards preserving your families from sickness, disease and death.”
― Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Volume 13

“No food will ever hurt you as much as an unhealthy mind.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“Eating disorder recovery becomes possible when you keep making the next right decision over and over. With time, these decisions become automatic.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“No two eating disorders are the same.
No two individuals are the same.
No two paths to recovery are the same.
But everyone's strength to reach recovery IS the same.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior.”
― Carol Lee, To Die For

“When we are true to ourselves, all that is toxic and burdensome simply falls away”
― Dina Hansen, Stop Eating Your Stress!: Discover the Secret to Inner Calm, Comfort & True Nourishment On and Off Your Plate

“I realized that I couldn’t knowingly look to food for a way out when it had so clearly led me here. It wasn’t hunger that beckoned me to eat more. It wasn’t my stomach that needed to be reconciled. It was shame. It was guilt. And food can’t remedy such things”
― Andie Mitchell, It Was Me All Along

“I promise no food will ever hurt you as much as a negative mind.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“As I searched for food perfection, and as I gained weight, I began to realize that the race for perfection in anything was the path to destruction.”
― Rachael Rose Steil, Running in Silence: My Drive for Perfection and the Eating Disorder That Fed It

“No one could see the thoughts when the body looked normal to them. The voice wanted it to just be the two of us. It wanted to hide. If no one saw it, then no one would believe me.
No one would ask.”
― Rachael Rose Steil, Running in Silence: My Drive for Perfection and the Eating Disorder That Fed It

“Binging on food and 'content' should be called what it really is: self-harm. Whenever you feel like binging, sit peacefully and give some love to the soles of your feet.”
― Shunya

“I was always crazy about any Chinese takeout since everything on those long menus is so tempting, but when the craving really hit, the folks at Panda Delight over on Richmond almost knew without asking to pack me up an order of wings, a couple of egg rolls, shrimp dumplings, pork fried rice, and the best General Tso's chicken this side of Hong Kong. When my friend at the shelter, Eileen Silvers, got married at Temple Beth Yeshurum, I had a field day over the roast turkey and lamb and rice and baked salmon and jelly cakes on the reception buffet, and when me and Lyman would go out to Pancho's Cantina for Mexican, nothing would do but to follow up margaritas and a bowl of chunky guacamole and a platter of beef fajitas with a full order of pork carnitas and a few green chile sausages. And don't even ask about the barbecue and links and jalapeño cheese bread and pecan pie at Tinhorn BBQ. Just the thought still makes me drool.”
― James Villas, Hungry for Happiness

“If too little glucose is available in your blood, which is what happens when you follow a low - carbohydrate diet, then your liver hoards glucose so that your brain, which needs glucose to function, doesn't starve. While your body will start to break down fat to use as fuel, your brain can't run that way for long, and it will send out the Bat-Signal for more calories. That's the reason why when you skip a meal or go too long between meals, you find yourself running to the nearest donut or bag of chips.”
― Cara Clark, The Wellness Remodel: A Guide to Rebooting How You Eat, Move, and Feed Your Soul

“An overweight person has similar cravings and binge eating habits as a pregnant woman.”
― Dr. Joel D. Wallach

“The most dangerous things in life are overeating and the lack of ambition.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“The main evolutionary explanation for the obesity epidemic is obvious; the mechanism that regulate body weight are poorly suited for our modern environments. Taking your body into a modern grocery store is like taking your computed into the summer sun. The environment is outside the range that the control mechanisms can cope with. Our environment is so different from the one we evolved in that it’s remarkable that anyone eats normally. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors walked miles each day gathering food and hunting game, eager to satisfy hunger with whatever they could find. The food they found was mainly high-fiber fruits and vegetables and lean fish and meat. That was only a few thousand years ago, less for many populations.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“In periods of binge eating in both Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating Disorder, reward is augmented when eating palatable foods. The release of dopamine to code reward continues during compensatory behavior.”
― Leighann R. Chaffee, A Guide to the Psychology of Eating

“Reward-related contributions to Eds instate disordered eating and hinder recovery.”
― Leighann R. Chaffee, A Guide to the Psychology of Eating

“Individuals with Eds evaluate food and body related cues as emotional events and these events trigger dysregulated responses, including deficits in healthy coping strategies and use of maladaptive strategies. Emotional dysregulation and disordered eating worsen in a vicious cycle: engaging in disordered eating, such as restricted food or purging, provides escape from negative emotion particularly when it is stimulated from a food or body related cue, like shopping for a new workout clothing.”
― Leighann R. Chaffee, A Guide to the Psychology of Eating

“Given that chronic undernutrition can harm cognitive processing, researchers postulate patients with Anorexia Nervosa use a habitual, rule-based tendency to abstain from immediate rewards and select the larger, delayed option. In contrast, patients with Bulimia Nervosa show impulsivity, a deficit in self-regulatory control.”
― Leighann R. Chaffee, A Guide to the Psychology of Eating

“Symptoms like distorted body image and lack of recognition for the severity of malnutrition demonstrate deficient interoceptive awareness and tend to persist after recovery, highlighting an important consideration for treatment.”
― Leighann R. Chaffee, A Guide to the Psychology of Eating

“Individuals who are perfectionists are more likely to comply with norms and to be critical of their own shape, and high trait perfectionism is a documented risk factor for anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa as it increases drive for thinness. Drive for thinness is notably predicted by anxiety sensitivity and poor interoceptive awareness, the ability to understand physiological and emotional cues within the body, critical to self-awareness in linking cognitive and emotional processes.”
― Leighann R. Chaffee, A Guide to the Psychology of Eating

“Parental concern for weight and weight teasing within the family predict Eating Disorder symptoms over a 5 year follow up. These factors may be coupled with the modeling of eating disturbances by family members, which reinforce the thin ideal and subsequent body dissatisfaction.”
― Leighann R. Chaffee, A Guide to the Psychology of Eating

“Risks for escalation from disordered eating to an ED include the use of food to cope with life events or emotions, adherence to restrictive or fad diets, and negative self-evaluation based on consumption or body image.”
― Leighann R. Chaffee, A Guide to the Psychology of Eating

“Goodsit (1997), for example argued that patients with anorexia nervosa manifest a facade of pseudo- self-sufficiency when confronted with parents who are themselves se lf-absorbed, anxious, or otherwise unavailable. In this process, the maturation of the anorexic's self-object and self-regulatory capacities are unable to fully develop, leaving them painfully dependent upon others for their well-being. Bulimic patients, in contrast, are seen as more tension-ridden impulsive, and conflicted about whether to pursue their own lives or to remain available to a parent who utilizes them to maintain his or her own psychic equilibrium. In this context, symptoms - whether self-starvation, bingeing, and/or purging - emerge as last-ditch efforts at self-soothing and tension regulation. Over time, eating disorders become chronic conditions that provide patients with a compensatory identity and sense of self.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“With an eye toward the striking difference in prevalence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa between males and females, Sands (1989 J suggested that young girls are presented with culturally shaped barriers to obtaining developmentally necessary mirroring and idealization. Whereas boys' needs for mirroring may be gratified through "showing off, being cocky, acting smart or aggressive”, girls are expected to be "lady-like." It is only in the realm of physical appearance that girls are encouraged to seek mirroring and, thus, in later life women are more predisposed than men to manifest psychopathology through bodily symptoms such as eating disorders.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“With an eye toward the striking difference in prevalence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa between males and females, Sands (1989) suggested that young girls are presented with culturally shaped barriers to obtaining developmentally necessary mirroring and idealization. Whereas boys' needs for mirroring may be gratified through "showing off, being cocky, acting smart or aggressive”, girls are expected to be "lady-like." It is only in the realm of physical appearance that girls are encouraged to seek mirroring and, thus, in later life women are more predisposed than men to manifest psychopathology through bodily symptoms such as eating disorders.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders