The Planned Binge as a Weight Control Measure

Why would anyone plan to binge eat? After all, for most of us, an eating binge is something to be avoided, and to be ashamed of when it can’t be avoided. We all binge eat now and then, but for some people, it can be a real problem. It’s that time when you lose control of your eating, when you eat well beyond the point of fullness, often choosing foods that are high in sugar or fat. Unfortunately, binging seems to be triggered by dieting, so it forms a vicious cycle. We diet to lose weight, then binge and gain weight, and so on. It seems like an endless, destructive cycle.

It may surprise you to know, then, that many people who are at a normal, healthy weight are not immune to binges, but that they have learned to accept the eating binge and even to plan it, incorporating binging into their overall eating plan. This may sound crazy – binging is excessive, out of control eating. The problem is that there may not be any way to avoid it or do away with it entirely. The binge is actually an evolutionary adaptation that worked very well for the first thirty thousand years of human history!

Early humans who used tools and had language – in other words, who were more or less like us – have existed for more than 35 thousand years. Agriculture – a method of producing food at will, and storing it so that there would be no scarcity, making food available all the time – has existed for only about six thousand years, or a bit more. So, for the vast majority of human history, people survived by hunting and gathering. Sometimes, food was plentiful, while other times, there was none. Now do you see how binging fit in? Of course, during the times when there was plenty of food, early humans had to eat as much as they possibly could. This didn’t lead to weight problems, because the food supply would disappear at regular intervals, and people would go without. Also, of course, these early humans used to move around a lot more than we do today! It is fair to assume that there were no significant weight problems among these early people, despite their acceptance of binging!

Among civilized people who practiced agriculture, on the other hand, weight problems started do develop. And why? Because the food availability changed, but human behavior didn’t. Humans still had the urge to binge, but there were no corresponding famine periods. Food was available all the time. This is pretty much the same state we are in today.

It should be clear to us by now that binging is a behavior that isn’t going to go away. So the thing to do is to is to accept binges as a reality of human life, and work around them. Take Christmas, for example. Many of us binge at Christmas, because of the availability of delicious food. Someone without weight issues will recognize that this is okay – they’ll simply cut back on food elsewhere, or when the season is over. If, for example, you love Christmas cookies, why not binge on them for a few days? You can eat the cookies instead of eating your regular meals, which you probably won’t really want anyway. In this way, though your intake of fat and calories will go up a little, the weight gain won’t be huge. And you’ll have had your fill of cookies, and will probably be ready to get back to healthy eating after a day or two.

This idea may seem scary to many of us, because we are used to the idea that we have to have close control over our eating. Of course, eating cookies instead of meals is not a good idea in the long run. A few days won’t hurt you, though, and may actually do you a lot of good. You’ll feel satisfied, so you won’t have to binge on cookies again for a long while. You may even have given your body something it needed – who knows? In either case, there is no harm done in the long run if you indulge in a planned binge like this, and make up for it later. It might not be your ideal eating plan, but it seems to be a quintessential human impulse!

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