B.E.D. - Yep, I have it.

Yes! It’s a thing I have. As a 46 year old man, I have binge eating disorder. If you don’t know what binge eating disorder actually is, I will attempt to at least explain how it presents itself for me, how long I’ve been dealing with it, and various ways I’ve attempted to control it.

I grew up in a time when eating disorders were not considered real. I can vaguely recall me and some members of my family making jokes about it. I mean… how does someone actually become addicted to food!? How ridiculous is that? Sometimes I like to believe it was my cavalier attitude toward it that caused it. It’s karma, really.

So the earliest things I can remember related to food are stealing boxes of fundraiser candy that we had in the basement when I was in middle school. I’d eat as many of them as I could in hiding, usually at night time before bed. Started pretty tame, but that’s my earliest memory of doing anything over the top with food. In high school I got to a point where I was getting two lunches during lunch period and eating them both. I was into sports at the time so being a teenager and getting a lot of movement, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. Until I graduated, that is, and maintained the caloric intake and not the physical activity, and things spiraled from there.

Cut to 20+ years later and I’m still struggling. I’ve had one major success where I was able to lose the weight and keep from binging for almost a year. A health scare at the end of it caused me to regress though. Really it should have pushed me forward, but I was going fairly heavy on the vegan front, and doing a lot of running, and what I found made me stop the running, and the veganism, while making my body feel amazing, was making the rest of me feel miserable. It was the no processed foods at all kind of veganism. No oils, no salt, no sugar, no eggs, no dairy, etc. There were a few meals I found to enjoy and I do sometimes still make them. I also learned quite a large amount about finding ways to reduce salt, sugar, and oil in my cooking that I’ve kept with me.

Therapy has been on and off for this. It mostly turns into going through a long list of things I’ve already attempted, followed by weeks on weeks of “how was this past week” type therapy. Which I absolutely hate. Yes, I have stated this with my therapists, but it devolves fairly quickly when they can’t think of what to do next.

Anyway, it’s been a battle. I certainly will be digging deeper into various aspects of my struggles with this, as well as things that I’ve found that worked for me. While I must stress that what works for me may not work for you, perhaps an approach I took or something I tried is something you haven’t done yet (pending you have the same issue) and you can give it a shot.

-TFMD