Skip the primary navigation if you do not want to read it as the next section.
Primary navigation
| What is an Eating Disorder? | Getting Help | Recovery | Worried about a friend? | Other issues | Message Boards | Forum |
B.E.D. and Compulsive Overeating the facts
If you binge eat, you may eat large amounts of food in a short period of time (perhaps not at a normal mealtime) and feel a lack of control during these binges, but unlike someone with bulimia nervosa, you do not try to get rid of the food. You may feel your eating is out of control, eat what you think of as an unusually large amount of food, eat much more quickly in these binges, eat until you are uncomfortably full, eat large amounts of food when you are not hungry or eat alone. You do this for very similar reasons to someone with bulimia.
Compulsive overeating involves ‘picking’ at food all day. There may be different reasons why you do this, but as with eating disorders, food and eating is used as a way of dealing with difficult feelings. If you compulsively overeat or binge eat, you may feel depressed or inadequate because you cannot control your eating, which can lead to further eating and weight gain.
“I spent all my time thinking about food. I even woke up at night thinking about it.”
“Sometimes I just feel that I’ve lost all control, that nothing in the world can feel as bad as I do after a binge, then I just start worrying about my weight. It never goes away”
