Compulsive Overeating Psychology Compulsive Overeating or Excessive

¶ … Compulsive Overeating Psychology Compulsive overeating or excessive eating is one of several known eating disorders. Eating disorders are rampant diseases in western cultures. Eating disorders are expressions of abnormal and nearly always harmful behaviors, attitudes, and perceptions of food and eating. They usually center around a great lack or great abundance of food entering a person's body. Eating disorders also involved distorted perceptions of oneself and the development of compulsive thoughts and behaviors.

Eating disorders show up in male and female populations, when for most of the disorders' history, they were thought to only show up in women. Current psychological research shows that the degree of westernization in a culture is directly proportional to the likelihood and prevalence of eating disorders, particularly in women. Compulsive overeating is a form of binge eating disorder when people eat compulsively as a response to stress. Compulsive overeaters eat too much when they are hungry, and eat in instances when they are not physically hungry.

This paper will provide a brief examination and analysis of compulsive overeating. By the nature of the compulsive behaviors involved in eating disorders such as excessive eating, numerous professionals consider excessive eating a form of addiction. Other addictions or dependencies include alcohol, narcotics, sex, and eating. In the case of compulsive eaters, food is their addiction as well as the feelings they associate with withholding food from themselves and subsequently binge eating to dangerous levels.

In recent years, there has been an interesting clinical and scientific shift in perspective with many believing that addiction should encompass the compulsive engagement in activities such as gaming, Internet use, and shopping, in addition to its conventional relation with pharmacologic rewards…just as different drugs promote different degrees of dependence, foods also differ in their capacity to promote abuse (Volkow & Wise, 2005). Experts are now confident in claiming that the nutrients comprising fast foods are inherently addictive because of their concentration and high volume of fats and sugars.

And, like drugs of abuse, they have the ability to alter brain mechanisms in ways that contribute to their increasingly compulsive use (see Grigson, 2002; Del Parigi, Chen, Salbe, Reimna, & Tataranni, 2003; Spring et al., 2008). (Davis & Carter, Compulsive eating, 2009) With this kind of disorder, the food serves as drugs, as in a substitute for drugs in a normative substance abuse disorder as well as the drugs or chemical released in the bloodstream from the brain during bouts of binge eating.

Furthermore, the reverse is true; with compulsive eating, the drugs are the foods. Again, a comparison to narcotic addiction and a reference to the abundance of artificial ingredients and drugs found in the many of the most popular foods upon which people binge. Compulsive eating relieves stress for excessive eaters. It makes them feel calmer and better about stressful situations or people. Compulsive eaters may hide food in their environments. They may also eat secretly and privately.

They also, obviously eat to the point of excess, to the point where it hurts, or to the point of regurgitation. Eating disorders are often expressions of the need for stability and control in a person's life. Controlling when and how much one eats makes people suffering from eating disorders believe they are in control over their lives because they are in control over their bodies, although in a most unhealthy way. Compulsive eating is a response to stressors such as change and insecurity.

Therefore, for excessive eaters, binge eating helps them adapt to change (albeit ineffectively), relieve anxiety, and provide a false sense of security or stability -- ie, everything else in life may be changing, but the eating disorder behaviors stay the same, providing an unhealthy sense of consistency or continuity. Compulsive eating habits often begin in childhood and adolescence persisting into and through adulthood. In adults, binge eating is often associated with obesity and other disturbed eating behaviors.

Besides having less ability to control eating behavior, obese adults reporting binge eating also have greater concerns with body shape and weight, report an earlier onset of obesity and dieting, and describe a higher percentage of their lifetimes spent on a diet than non-binge eating obese individuals. Several studies have shown that obese adult binge eaters also report greater psychological distress…Binge eating is not restricted to adulthood.

Its onset is often traced by adults to late childhood or adolescence and surveys of adolescents suggest that it is highly prevalent among teens…In adolescence, as in adulthood, those with binge eating are more likely to exhibit depressive symptamology and abnormal eating attitudes or concerns. (Morgan et al., Losing Control, 2002) Binge, compulsive, or excessive eating is not typically a spontaneous behavior. It is a behavior that has been practiced and evolves over time, beginning earlier on in life.

Thus, young people are particularly vulnerable to developing eating disorders and carrying them with them into adulthood.