Cravings

You’ve heard the advice, “Don’t go food shopping on an empty stomach.” Anyone who’s inclined to overeat or indulge a junk food habit knows this is a good advice. When your stomach’s doing the talking, it’s just too tempting to throw a cheesecake into the shopping cart. Now we know the origins of such temptation.

All eating behavior occurs on a continuum, which you can picture as a horizontal line with perfectly heathy eating habits at one end, and full-blown eating disorders on the other. Every other type of eating falls somewhere in between these two extremes. Where do you fit in?

There are two ways to deal with compulsive overeating: Avoid your favorite binge foods, or embrace them.

 When the editors at Psychology Today approached me a couple of years ago with an assignment to write a book called Breaking the Bonds of Food Addiction, my first (very conservative) thought was, “There’s no such thing as an addiction to food.” How could I possibly write 375 pages of material about a condition that doesn’t exist?  I was wrong.