Our Dirty Little Secret? We Can’t Stop Bingeing

By Leslie Goldman

In a Health poll, we found that losing control is epidemic. Here’s the #1 way to curb your cravings.

The word binge brings a distinct image to mind: A woman stuffing all sorts of foods—from cream puffs to chips to pizza—into her mouth at a frenzied pace. For some, this is pretty close to reality.

Take now-recovered binger Kristin Gerstley, 27, of Houston. Her typical binge: hitting multiple drive-throughs—McDonald’s for a Quarter Pounder and fries, Taco Bell for nachos, and more. “As I got the bags, I’d pretend to check off the items on a fake list I’d created,” she says. “I didn’t want anyone to think I was ordering all that food just for myself.” After paying, Gerstley would drive to a secluded area of the restaurant’s parking lot and (before she even knew it) eat it all.

Gerstley’s overeating may sound extreme, but it’s more common than you think. Earlier this year, ground-breaking research out of Harvard University–affiliated McLean Psychiatric Hospital showed that Binge Eating Disorder, or BED, is America’s most common eating disorder. According to James I. Hudson, MD, ScD, a psychiatry professor at Harvard’s McLean Hospital and lead author of the study, bingeing is “extraordinarily underrecognized, both by health professionals and by the public at large.”

If BED is more common than anorexia and bulimia combined, we wondered how many more women are struggling with lower-level bingeing—the kind that has you downing a box of cookies without thinking because you’re hungry from dieting or inhaling a bag of chips when you’re angry.

What we found: Almost all of us have binged. In a Health.com poll, 82 percent of respondents said they’d gone on a binge where they felt they couldn’t stop eating, and more than half reported uncontrollable urges to eat until physically sick.

What’s going on? Are we all treading into eating-disorder territory? Or just having high-caloric lapses in judgment? Here, what you need to know about the bingeing epidemic.

Anatomy of a binge 
You eat a whole basket of chips with salsa while waiting for a friend at a restaurant. You nibble on a donut, only to find you’ve eaten three before even finishing the morning paper. Are these binges? Yes. While the clinical level of bingeing identified in the Harvard study is defined as uncontrolled eating at least twice a week for at least six months, most experts call any uncontrolled eating “bingeing.” The key words: “Loss of control,” Harvard’s Hudson says.

The number of American women with the clinical bingeing disorder hovers around 5 million, while the number of women who mini-binge at a more moderate level may be about three times as high, estimates Roger Gould, MD, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Shrink Yourself: The Ultimate Program to End Emotional Eating. And frequency, Gould believes, isn’t that important. “When people are binge eaters, they’re binge eaters—whether they do it once a month or once a week.”