Binge Eating

First and foremost, despite what time of day you get your hunger attacks, binge eating begins when your day begins. Breakfast is and always will be the most important meal of the day. You must know, though, that it’s not just the fact that you eat something for breakfast, but it’s what you eat that will directly result in when and how hungry you will be later in the day. There are a combination of physical and emotional factors resulting in over-eating, but I feel these are the most important ones that everyone can take stock of in their daily lives and, in turn, make easy changes for the better. Here’s the Who, What, and How of Binge Eating:

Who binge eats? Anyone can. You are as unique as your fingerprint. Everyone is a unique individual, and what is right for one person may not necessarily be right for you. You have a different cultural background, family history, career, activity level, stress level, constitution, and metabolic rate than the next person. It doesn’t take a multitude of blood tests and scientific evaluations to figure all these out either. All it takes is respect for yourself as an individual, experimentation and the willingness to listen to what your body is trying to tell you.

What causes it? One of the biggest causes of binge eating and weight gain is eating…nothing! The longer you go without eating the more your body will think it is starving. Starving?!! That’s right; your incredibly intelligent body has built in balance mechanisms for everything! In a time of food shortage, your body was designed to survive off of its own fat deposits. (This might make a lot of you that get discouraged looking at those uber-skinny actors and models feel a lot better. If there were to be a famine….guess who would be the first to go?) What happens is your body feels it needs to hold onto the calories you have consumed in the form of fat, and not burn them off, because it’s not sure the next time you’ll be eating!

The biggest culprit however is sugar. I’m not just talking about just the white stuff you put in your coffee, or on top of your cereal, but massive amounts of sugar are hidden in way too many foods that you think are healthy, for example your cereal itself! Let’s dispel one myth once and for all. It seems nice that many breakfast cereals are on a Whole-Grain kick nowadays, but the reality is every cereal begins with a whole grain, and they are just advertising the heck out of it so you buy their product! It’s what they do to the poor grains afterwards that make all the difference. Read your labels. If the flour ingredient says “refined” in front of it, it is no longer a whole grain. They have stripped out almost all nutritional value. Also, one gram of sugar= 1 teaspoon. Kellogg’s Smart Start® Cereal, for example, has 17grams of sugar per serving/per cup. First of all, would you put 17 teaspoons of sugar in your morning coffee, and second, does anyone actually measure and only eat one cup or ¾ cup of cereal in the morning?

OK, so you don’t eat cereal? Bagels, Croissants, Donuts, French toast, Pancakes, Pop Tarts, Toaster Strudels, and any other kind of refined carbohydrate quickly breaks down giving you a fast and immediate rush of sugar to your bloodstream. A crash soon results, leaving you hungry for guess what …more sugar. Vicious cycle isn’t it?

How do you fix this? The answer is going to be a little different for each person, but overall it’s a healthy balance of whole foods that contain protein, healthy fat, and complex carbohydrate. One way you can figure out what’s best for you is by experimenting with different breakfast foods. The following are some great suggestions to try:

Natural Sugars- White sugar is refined. Refined anything=bad. Your body wants food in its natural and complete form, “cause if it doesn”t get it, it will crave more because it knows something is missing. 100% Maple Syrup, Raw Honey, Brown Rice Syrup, Molasses, Agave Nectar, and Stevia are wonderfully jam-packed with vitamins and minerals that your body breaks down and uses at a slower rate, preventing that sugar crash.

Use sweeteners sparingly, your taste will change as you slowly wean yourself off of the crazy amounts of sugar you’ve been assaulting your system with, and you will be satisfied with much less. Corn syrup is crap and unfortunately is in a multitude of commercial products because it’s cheap, it makes things sweet so you buy more, and you buy more because you’re craving more due to the blood sugar crash it just contributed to! I also cannot stress enough that despite what the clever commercials say, a sugar substitute is NOT the answer, as they have a whole plethora of health concerns associated with them that are worse than the real sugar itself.

Eggs- are a perfect whole food and a great source of protein as well as essential vitamins and minerals that support health. Forget about all the bad egg-hype once and for all. Those tests were done in the 1950’s and funded by the Cereal Institute of America to increase cereal sales. They only tested dried egg yolk powder (drying many foods removes many nutrients), excluding the whites which are the parts that contain no cholesterol and balance out the egg. Talking about cholesterol, eggs contain great amounts of the “good” cholesterol (LDL) which is essential for health, and have been proven to actually lower bad cholesterol. Eat the whole egg not just the whites. Not only would you be missing out on most of the nutrition of the egg, but your body will know something is missing and will crave more food to feel full.

Buy organic free range eggs whenever possible as they have significantly higher nutritional content and lower chances of salmonella than conventional eggs.

Whole Grain Breads. Read the label to make sure they are truly whole grain. Do not buy refined or enriched flour products. Refined means they stripped most of its nutritional content from the grain and enriched means because they stripped out the nutrients they went back in and added synthetic ones for ya. Woo hoo. Also, if one of your bread’s ingredients is “high fructose corn syrup” or corn syrup in any form, throw it down on the ground in protest. That company not only put an inferior and cheap product in your bread to make more money, but has also simultaneously contributed to your sugar crash later in the day. Find breads that, if sweetened at all, are made with natural sweeteners like vitamin and mineral packed honey, brown rice syrup, or molasses to name a few.

Top your fabulous bread off with a nut butter of your choice and you’ve got a perfect and tasty combo of protein, complex carbs, healthy fats, and lots of vitamins and minerals

Whole Grain Cereals. Now, when I talk about cereal I mean porridge like oatmeal. Steel-cut oats have the lowest glycemic load of all the “oatmeal” products out there, meaning they release a healthy and steady stream of glucose to your system that does not cause a crash. You can make warm breakfast cereals with any grain too! Try brown rice, barley, quinoa, or kasha (a Russian breakfast staple made of buckwheat). Flavor with a natural sweetener some dried fruit, seeds, nuts, cinnamon and you’ve got yourself something Quaker could never compete with!

Fruits and Vegetables. In the Middle East a common breakfast food is Salad. When I visited for the first time it was a mini culture shock as I, like many Americans, are used to our “breakfast foods” and reserve vegetables for lunch and dinner. The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense.

Vegetables and Fruit provide fiber, water, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, complex carbs, and are a natural source of sugar that not only get you going in the morning but keep you going steady till lunchtime.

Healthy Snacks. Bring fresh fruit or veggies, dried fruit, seeds, or nuts to work. If you get hungry they provide you with all the nutrition and satisfying carbs, protein, and or fat that keep you full and not craving junk till your next meal.

Slow down and enjoy your meals. Your mind and body are connected. If you eat too fast, your brain isn’t given enough time to let your belly know it’s full. This results in over eating and leads to that uncomfortable “overly full” feeling, other stomach discomfort, heartburn and indigestion. Skip the TUMS and just slow down and chew.