Another thought…. there are various ways of understanding what is going on with binge eating….. and I have come across a definite conflict between the two main ones, which are the ED perspective and the addiction model.
My simplistic grasp of ED’s generally is that anorexia nervosa was recognised first, then bulimia, and BED later. And that the early work on AN has influenced the treatment of both bulimia and BED.
In bulimia, bingeing is seen as a response to extreme dieting - a perfectly natural, physiological response to periods of food restriction. A caveman who had been through a period of food scarcity would initially eat a lot, rapidly, and regain some of the lost weight, but then as their weight normalised, the drive to eat would abate, and their intake would settle down. But the dieter is dismayed by the regain and resolves to redouble their efforts - another period of scarcity, as far as the body is concerned. The binge/restrict cycle starts with dieting - if they did not diet, they would not binge.
From this perspective, it is important to avoid dieting, including the avoidance of specific foods. Therapy encourages sufferers to reintroduce foods they may have banned, and to eat all things in moderation. And you can see why, for anorexics who often have extremely limited diets, leading to nutritional deficiencies as well as low weight, that’s a good and necessary thing.
The other perspective is the addiction model. Let’s take sugar as an example…. if you are addicted to sugar, then you really need to eliminate it from your diet completely. Not to do so is to set yourself up to fail. In the case of addiction to alcohol, or narcotics, this is generally accepted. If you can’t moderate you have to abstain. So if the substance you are addicted to is sugar, then “all foods in moderation” is a disaster.
It seems to me that a key question for binge eaters to ask themselves is which came first: the bingeing, or the food deprivation? Whether that was dieting, or perhaps food scarcity due to childhood poverty or neglect. If the dieting came first, with a side dish of societal pressure to be thin, then maybe the ED perspective is the right one for that individual. But if you were bingeing long before you ever dieted (as I was) then that suggests that there is addiction at play.
And of course, wherever you start, you can then acquire the other “problem” as well. You can end up with both addiction, and bingeing as a physiological response to food scarcity.
From both perspectives, giving up dieting is a crucial first step. But what comes next? If you’re not addicted to any foodstuff, then you should be able to eat 3 meals a day plus one or two snacks if desired, including any and every food - and the absence of food deprivation should make the urge to binge go away. Though if you are overweight (or think you are) and don’t lose much weight doing this, then many will struggle to stay the course, because overemphasis on shape and weight is a key feature of disordered eating.
But if you are an addict, then the regular inclusion of your trigger foods is going to maintain the urge to binge.
And just to make things more complicated, there is also the whole “food as comfort” piece, which most humans do as a matter of course - and is not problematic until taken to excess.