Читать книгу Only Fat People Skip Breakfast: The Refreshingly Different Diet Book - Lee Janogly - Страница 35

Let’s profile the binger for a moment. Not all dieters are bingers. Some people are overweight because they just eat too much of the wrong foods at mealtimes and do no exercise. Bingers are another category altogether and comprise a significant proportion of my clients.

Compulsive eating is more than an activity; it is an all-absorbing state of mind. Bingers come in all shapes and sizes and lead all kinds of emotional lives. What they share is their obsession with food and weight. This dual preoccupation with food and body shape is the hallmark of the compulsive eater.

The clients who consult me are not necessarily very fat. Although we are accustomed to equating fat with gluttony, I have found that the shape of someone’s body is not necessarily a reliable indicator of their relationship with food. Some people come to me just to learn how to stop bingeing. Although their weight fluctuates wildly over a six-month period, they don’t allow a binge to go on long enough to cause a lasting weight increase. They go back to a strict diet to bring it down again. As one of them said, ‘No-one believes me when I say I have an eating problem. I know I don’t look as though I have, but not a day goes by when I don’t obsess about food.’ Privately, I call these ‘thin fat people’.

Most bingers though, offer convincing proof of their struggle by their increased girth. They are constantly eating more food than their bodies require, reaching for food for emotional reasons rather than natural hunger, and if they do start out hungry, they continue to eat way past the point of physiological satiation. Therefore, no-one can diagnose compulsive eating based on size. Only you know if you are a binger.

Given the all-too-human capacity for denial, a binger is simply unaware of the inordinate amount of time she spends thinking about, choosing, buying, cooking and eating food. (I use the term ‘she’ because most bingers are women but that’s not to ignore those many men who have the problem.)

For our typical binger, her mealtimes, socializing, weekends and celebrations are the focus of her food obsession: what she should or shouldn’t be eating, will she manage to stick to her diet, is she having a ‘good’ day? So much mental energy is expended on a substance she is trying desperately not to eat.

It is senseless to label a binge habit simply as obesity – just as you can’t say that alcoholism is simply drunkenness or drug addiction merely the problem of being stoned. The fat is simply the symptom of the underlying eating disorder, albeit a significant one.

Most bingeing is done in the hours between the evening meal and bedtime—unless you are a mum with young children, when it starts at afternoon teatime. Food eaten during the early part of the day doesn’t seem to stimulate the need to continue eating as much as the evening meal does – probably because most people’s days are fairly structured and food eaten towards the end of the day signals a release of tension.

There is a difference between the eating habits of an ‘overeater’ and a ‘binger’. Returning from work, an overeater will nibble on peanuts or olives with her alcoholic drink while preparing the evening meal. This will probably consist of something like thick soup with a roll and butter, followed by roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, rice and a green vegetable. She will finish with apple pie and custard or ice cream. Tea and cake will follow a couple of hours later. She can’t understand why eating this way—plus a substantial breakfast and lunch—keeps her fat.

Our binger, on the other hand, who is constantly on a diet, will eat sparingly at her evening meal, preparing grilled fish with steamed broccoli and carrots and avoiding the mashed potato she serves to her partner and children. She too may serve apple pie for dessert, but only to the other members of the family. Unfortunately, one of her children may leave the crust of his pie and she absent-mindedly pops this into her mouth. This activates the need for more of the same and she will quickly finish the rest of the pie, then nibble on biscuits while clearing up. Later, preparing the children’s lunch boxes for the following day, she will open a five-pack of chocolate biscuits, put one into each box and eat the remaining three. Now into full binge-mode, she will continue eating for the whole evening, often indulging in weird food combinations like spooning lemon curd and muesli into a tin of condensed milk and eating it out of the tin with a teaspoon (as you do). She will do this stealthily, keeping an eye on the door in case anyone should come in and see her. She knows why she is fat and tells herself she will ‘start her diet again tomorrow’.