The End to Compulsive Eating

To understand the relation between food and our emotions is a powerful thing. When I read about compulsive overeating (also named binge-eating disorder, a label I don’t like much, because I find the line between disorder and bad habit that should be tended to rather vague), I recognise the behaviour that a bad day brings to the surface in myself. I love food deeply, and sometimes that love can get a bit out of hand, with the comfort I find in eating sometimes being the only thing that seems to soothe a frazzled heart. Where an alcoholic would grab for the bottle of port, I gravitate toward the crinkly bags in the kitchen cupboard. And once I am eating, I find it difficult to reach my breaks.

For a person like me, with a personality that is prone to addiction, choosing food as a topic to learn, and eventually write about seems like an odd idea. I often lose myself in the things I focus on, and so making the switch from purely philosophical writing to food writing came with a sliver of fear attached to it. I was afraid that seeing eating as a form of research would enable my compulsive eating to grow to the scale it had been when I was a teen. Back then, I would come home from school, drop my bag at the front door and make a beeline toward the TV to spend the next hour or two mindlessly downing a large bag of crisps whilst watching yet another rerun of Avatar: The Last Airbender. If there were…