Why did I overeat?

Eating disorders, indeed any kind of disorder, are very rarely caused by only one thing. It took me years to work out the various aspects that were contributing to my steady increase in size. This posting is going to outline what I discovered.

Greed
For those who’ve never had a problem with food, the idea that people would eat so much over such a long period of time is bizarre, so it’s easy to just dismiss it as people being greedy. End of story. Therefore, if you want to get back to a ‘sensible’ weight, you just have to engage a bit more willpower and stop eating so much. What doesn’t seem to occur to these people is that if it was that simple, we’d all be doing it.

On the face of it, greed is an issue. I saw the food, I wanted the food. I might already have eaten a plateful, but there was more food in front of me, calling me, beckoning me. I know I shouldn’t but, what the hell, a little more won’t harm. Anything that tastes that good can’t really be bad for me. So that was me being greedy – wanting more than I needed. But this explanation is too shallow. It doesn’t address WHY I was feeling that.

Leptin
Leptin is a hormone manufactured by the body that helps regulate food intake. You would think that your body would work in such a way that when it needed food it would release a hormone to let you know that it’s time to eat. It turns out that it’s completely the other way round.

The natural state to be in is ravenously hungry - so hungry that you cannot think about anything other than food – and the body releases a hormone, leptin, to suppress it. When you have had enough, you stop feeling hungry. However, what happens if there’s a delay in the leptin reaching your system?

I’ve known plenty of people who would stop eating while there was still food on the plate, stating that they were full up (and it wasn’t even because they didn’t like the food). I never understood this. I don’t start to feel full for up to an hour after I’ve finished eating. This means that even if I had a full plate of food, I could eat it and still feel hungry. So I would have seconds. And then, if I took the plate out to the kitchen I would pick at the bits in the pans and, if still desperate, make myself a sandwich. About 30 minutes later I would start feeling full up, and about 20minutes after that I would start to feel uncomfortably full and bloated, by which time I would begin to regret that I’d eaten so much. At the time, all I could think of was eating. The mind is very good at conning you into thinking that it doesn’t really matter if you have a bit extra – no matter how many times you have felt bloated afterwards.

If there are abnormalities in the system, which delivers and activates leptin, the body can be in starvation mode at the wrong time. I don’t have proof that this is the case with me, but it certainly seems to make a lot of sense from my own experiences.

Habits
There’s no doubt that a lot of overeating is quite simply habit. If you are used to eating larger portions, or snacking at particular times of the day then you will, of course, come to expect that level of food at that particular time.

Then there’s the type of food you eat out of habit. Are you used to visiting a burger joint every week? Or are you used to putting excessive cream and sugar in your meals? My parents never liked their greens so my wife was quite surprised when she first cooked me peas and I expressed my dismay at the fact that they had not been cooked with a large knob of butter and a few spoons of sugar.

Another habit established in childhood for many people is clearing their plate – you won’t get any pudding until you’ve eaten your food all up.

Habits can be broken, but they have to be identified before they can be worked on, and it is rare that overeating is due to habit alone. It isn’t the only contributing factor, but it mustn’t be overlooked either.

Comfort
Comfort eating is another mystery to those that don’t indulge in it. But this is multi-layered too. Sweets are treats. From a young age, many of us are treated to sweets, chocolate, ice cream and puddings as signs of affection from indulging adults. So when we are low, quite apart from the sugar rush, eating these foodstuffs reminds us of a time when we felt good, or someone was expressing their love for us. Sugar and love is a potent combination.

Beyond this, in more extreme emotional states, many of us feel loss, grief, stress and unhappiness as a great gaping hole in our stomachs. Cramming food into it is a way of trying to fill that void.

Some people deal with these emotions with drink, drugs, gambling, shopping and even sex. Some use food instead.

Self-Loathing
Some people are dealing with past or present instances of emotional, physical and/or sexual abuse. When going through such things a common reaction is to feel responsible in some way for the abuse that you’ve suffered and you will hate yourself for it.

But abuse doesn’t just have to be immediate and perpetrated by one or two people. If you are persecuted by society it is just as easy to lose your self-esteem and begin to hate yourself. And whatever reasons got you to being overweight in the first place, western society will sure as hell make you feel bad about being there. Fat people are viewed as being weak willed, stupid and un-sexy and we are constantly being bombarded with media images that tell us thin is good. So if you don’t feel bad about yourself before you become overweight you sure as hell will afterwards.

So what do you do when you feel bad about yourself? Comfort eat!

Beyond this there is another, darker side, and that is overeating as a form of self-harm. The self-loathing a person feels for him or herself can create a sense of wanting to damage this pitiful wretch they despise so much. In this case, the people are very aware of the damage they are doing to their bodies by overeating, but will abuse their body quite deliberately. This action can quite often be accompanied by alcohol and drug abuse, or even cutting and burning the skin.

Quitting smoking
Anyone who has given up smoking knows that one of the problems is finding something to occupy the hands and mouth. I quit smoking 15 years ago and put on weight quite quickly. Over 30 times a day I was used to placing a cigarette in my mouth, so mints, sweets and snacks very easily substituted this habit. However, it is worth pointing out that smoking is worse for you than being overweight, as well as worse for anyone near to you breathing in your cancerous fumes.

Addiction
Much of the processed food we buy, whether at a fast food outlet or even pre-packaged in the supermarket, has an excess of salt, fat, sugar and other additives in order to make the food tastier and more desirable. Simple economics – if you want people to buy more of your product then make sure they want to eat more of it. But where is the line crossed between creating something tasty and something addictive?

If you have never watched “Super Size Me” then I suggest you go out and rent it immediately. Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonalds for one month and this film follows the rapid deterioration of his health. Quite tellingly, he discovered after a while that his mood would get extremely low and he would suffer headaches, yet would miraculously feel better once he’d got a burger in his mouth. Clear signs of physical addiction.

Fighting addiction is not simply a case of being strong. There are help organisations available for alcoholics, junkies and gamblers, but fat people are just seen as weak willed.

Summing up
We all know that eating junk food is no good for us, and that we’d be much healthier if we ate more fresh fruit and veg, so why don’t we do it? Because it’s not about being weak willed, we are up against hard sell from the food manufacturers, society, physical and psychological addictions.

It’s taken many years to identify all the different aspects of habit, comfort eating, self-loathing and addiction, to bring me to a point where I was actually able to begin to effect change. Some of these issues may have been completely obvious to you, but each one was a revelation to me as I discovered them. But it was these revelations that made me realise that the move to healthy eating had to be about lifestyle change and not just some temporary diet.