As far as I can recall, I don’t think I ever ate an entire can of frosting at a time because there comes a point where your tongue feels like it’s on fire from all that sugar and you’re bound to get canker sores anyway, no matter how much milk you drink.

I totally see what you’re saying, but I wonder if that’s a little like an alcoholic saying, “I drank that quart of vodka cause I wanted to, not cause I couldn’t stop.” You know what i mean? Like non-alcoholics hardly ever drink quarts of vodka at one sitting. And non-disordered eaters very, very rarely ingest cans of frosting.

Maybe you think or thought you could have stopped (and obviously, at this point you’ve broken for now the hold of any food addiction you may have had or may not have had), but it’s tough to say, or at least, for me it’s tough to say when one are in the process of “eating the odd thing you either want to eat or can’t resist eating” whether it’s like “I could stop like I can stop watching this tv show that’s on” or whether it’s “I could stop, but let’s face it, it would be really, really hard to put this can down. And I don’t wanna.”

I totally don’t mean that as any kind of attack on your reasoning, but I don’t know if one can easily chalk that up to … sort of an cluelessness about caloric value and bad eating habits. If it was more like, “I eat McDonalds cause I like it,” I think that’s a little differnt. But the frosting is a special, special little minx. :) It’s a little like the guy who microwaved the pints of ice cream and drank them. It was doing a “hit” of an intense amount of sugar and fat straight into your blood stream and into your brain to fire your pleasure censors. It was like doing a whole bag of coke, or … something like that.

In fact, i think lots of fat people have weird issues about frosting, me included. You know whatI mean — like, that can of chocolate or vanilla Duncan Hines frosting sitting in someone’s pantry. This may be a gross generalization, but people with weight problems just don’t have that can just existing in there, getting old as the months pass without baking. Cause the can can’t just be there. It has to be either eaten, or not in the house. If there was a can of frosting in my cupboards right now, I would be so aware of it, and attempting to resist it. Whereas my lanky boyfriend wouldn’t even notice it. And it would never even dawn on him to eat a can of frosting.

I’ve consumed large amounts of food at a time…almost always the sugar/starch/fat/nuts type of food. If I was in that mind-set (felt like eating and eating sweet & starchy foods) & there were no “sweets” etc in the house or readily available, then I’d eat a loaf of toasted bread with butter & jelly.

Over my lifetime, I’ve had lots of days of eating 10,000+ calories of that type of food in one day. It was common for me to eat to the point of feeling nasuated and sleepy, but I didn’t purge, went to sleep instead.

I am an obsessive-compulsive type of person, which is reflected in all my behavior areas, and I’m sure my drive to overeat is compulsive, but overeating has never been a pleasureless act for me. My food tasted good. I enjoyed it and liked eating it, even when I was very full and felt I couldn’t stop.

I don’t remember ever feeling personally “guilty” or “ashamed” of eating too much, but knew that I was “supposed” to feel that way. I chose to overeat privately, not because I was embarrased, but in order to avoid receiving negative feedback from others. I didn’t want to be fat; knew this eating was making me fat; but wanted to overeat more than I wanted NOT to be fat. I was embarassed because I was fat, but not because of the act of eating whole boxes of crackers, sacks of potato chips, boxes of cookies etc.

When I see a fat person eating ice cream or cake etc. in public, inside I go: “Good for you”. I feel like a Fat person Deserves delicious foods far more than a thin person….because they’ve paid a FAR HIGHER PRICE for it…(in terms of health & vanity).

Other people have many foods that they binge on. This sounds like you. It’s relatively hard to avoid irresistable foods when you have so many you can eat a lot of.

Yet other people compulsively have to binge, and find foods that meet their needs, including their irresistable foods. It’s very hard to stay away from compulsively binging when food is in the house.

There’s a big difference between “simply” binging and compulsively binging. If you’re just eating too much sometimes because it’s there, and you eat it, and don’t stop, that’s simple binging. If you can’t ignore food until you’ve binged, that’s compulsive.

It’s the difference between “having to eat it because it’s there” and “having to eat because you NEED to eat”

My trainer was telling me she once worked with someone who would microwave pints of haagen dazs and drink them on a binge.

The way I look at binge eating/food addiction, is that I find it strange that we easily accept the concept of a drug addict or an alcoholic, but food addiction isn’t truly accepted as a compulsion/problem. Yet, our whole BEING is designed around getting and consuming food. The pathways in our bodies/brains have been there for millions of years! So the idea people would have an addiction to overeating isn’t that shocking. But I think it’s harder to detect, because EVERYONE eats and EVERYONE loves eating.

One interesting show I once watched on food addiction was a documentary about the super-mordibly obese called “I eat 33,000 calories a day.” It followed four extremely heavy people (each close to, or already bed-bound) and documented everything they ate in a day, and then went out, duplicated everything they ate, and placed it all on a table in each of their kitchen to film their reactions. So it was just an enormous amount of food -like a huge bowl of m&m’s, several sandwiches, etc. etc. for one woman, tons of weird bacon sandwiches, etc. for the english guy they had on there, etc.

Anyway, one guy lived in Harlem, and was lucky enough to have a loving family around him, who fed him (he was bed bound). The show asked the family why they fed him so much and they said “Well, he’d order it if we didn’t cook all this stuff for him, he’d order in. It’s like any addiction, he’d find a way to get his fix. He’d lower money in a bucket for the chinese delivery guy.”

So, with this guy, they did the whole “lay all the food he eats in one day on the kitchen table” thing to get his reaction. Now, for the three others on the show, they kind of hung head in shame and were like “I know. it’s out of control.” But this guy managed to PULL himself into the kitchen, even though he was bed-bound, which shocked his family and the camera crew. Then, as he was discussing it, he started eating from the table. It was like he was totally out of control.

I don’t know if binging is related to that kind of problem, but I think it’s like a compulsion that is hard to stop.