Binge eating disorder - the basics

Written By Nik & Eva Speakman

Binge-eating is a severe eating disorder, where you frequently consume large quantities of food and feel unable to stop eating. It affects around 2% of people worldwide. It’s true that all of us eat too much every now and again, but this is a regular occurrence for those affected with this disorder. Binge-eating disorder shouldn’t be paired or confused as being similar to bulimia; those with BED don’t try to undo the binge by throwing up, or over-exercising.

What are the symptoms?

  1. Eating huge amounts of food in a specific amount of time e.g., over 2 hours

  2. Eating until you’re uncomfortably full

  3. Eating rapidly during binge episodes

  4. Often dieting, possibly without weight loss

  5. Frequently eating alone, or in secret

  6. Feeling depressed, disgusted, ashamed, guilty or upset about your eating

  7. Feeling that your eating behaviour is out of control

  8. Eating even when you’re full, or not hungry

What treatment is there?

Binge-eating disorder definitely requires the right professional treatment and support, or else it can lead to very dangerous consequences. You’ll probably be offered a guided self-help programme, as a first step in treating BED. This involves working through a self-help book, combined with sessions with a therapist. If this alone is not enough, or if this has not helped after 4 weeks, you may also be offered CBT. This will usually be in group sessions with others but may also be offered as 1-to-1’s with a therapist.

Usually, it’s common that there’s approximately 16 weekly sessions of around 90 minutes in a group, or 60-minute sessions if it’s a 1-to-1. You will talk to a therapist to explore your thoughts, feelings and behaviours that could be contributing to your eating disorder, and they will also help you to plan out the meals and snacks you should have during the day, to help you to adopt regular eating habits. Moreover, they can further help you to change and manage negative feelings about your body, helping you stick to your new eating habits, so that you do not relapse back into binge eating.

How can you help someone with binge-eating disorder?

  1. Be mindful of their triggers and try not to centre food in conversations

  2. Learn about binge eating disorder as knowing more allows you to be better at supporting them

  3. Listen but don’t overstep (if you’re not a doctor!)

  4. Don’t force them to eat more or less

  5. Don’t judge them, or make them feel shamed

For extra help and information, please watch our YouTube video called Binge-Eating Disorder: Everything You Need To Know!

Nik & Eva Speakman

We have studied and worked together since 1992. Between us we have studied human behaviour and psychology for seven decades. We both share an uncontainable passion to offer hope and to help people lead happier and less inhibited lives.

After many remarkable breakthroughs we created our own behavioural change therapy, ‘Schema Conditioning.’® Subsequent work with trauma victims and their related symptoms, led to the creation of two further trauma-based therapies.

‘Schema Conditioning Psychotherapy.’®

‘Visual Schema Displacement Therapy (VSDT)’®

‘Visual Schema Detachment & Restructuring (VSDR)’®

Qualifications from the creation of our therapies, resulted in training psychology professors, doctors and masters students at Universities in Amsterdam and Utrecht. In 2015, this training produced the two sets of scientific studies conducted into the workings of our therapy; the first two study papers highlighting the remarkable efficacy, was published in the Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry in June 2019. A further third study was then published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology in April 2021, with a fourth clinical study with hospital patients is currently underway and will be completed by the end of 2022.

In addition to members of the public, we work with, and have treated many high-profile clients and ‘A’ list clients around the world, having had prodigious successes. We are resident therapists on ITV’s multi award-winning ‘This Morning’ and have been for over a decade, we have also had own television shows, one of which, ‘The Speakmans’, also aired on ITV and several countries worldwide. Over the last two decades we have appeared on numerous other television shows as experts, such as the multi award-winning Saturday Night Takeaway.

Our mission is to illuminate that there is ALWAYS HOPE and that overcoming trauma and improving quality of life is entirely possible. Many people have either never been given hope, or worse had hope taken away from them, our aim is to correct that by sharing our message in any way we possibly can, including live workshops, theatre tours, books, podcasts, radio, television, social media and YouTube.

At the heart of all we do, is our relentless mission to offer HOPE to as many people as we possibly can.

https://nikandeva.com
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