I recently came aware of therapist Amy Pershing via a blog post on psychcentral.com in which she was interviewed. I found a lot to agree with in what she said — that binge eating isn’t diet failure but is an eating disorder deserving of treatment, not societal scorn, for example.

But one passage bothered me enough to track her down for a few more questions. Here’s the passage, which came in response to interviewer Margarita Tartakovsky’s question: “What are common challenges that make it tougher to overcome BED or problems with overeating?”

”From a cultural perspective, we begin to teach people to distrust and dishonor their bodies from childhood. We do not, as a society, value size or shape diversity; in fact weigh bias and stigma fundamentally underlies any eating disorder. “Thin” has to be presumed more valued for the symptoms to coalesce. We are taught to distrust our food preferences and our appetites, especially as girls, from early in life. We are taught to “exercise,” but not to play. Children learn their bodies are to be controlled, not honored. So the ability to hear cues, to really feel the positive impact of playing and eating well, typically must be relearned.”

Additionally, weight and being “fat” is so completely vilified now that the idea of body wisdom is more remote than it has even been. We have a “war on obesity.” Literally now people are encouraged to be at odds with their bodies. Then, we are sold a profound “bill of goods” by the diet industry (with a 95% failure rate over 6 months), further removing us from simply listening to our needs. The current system makes recovery a veritable act of defiance. You have to be a renegade just to be in your body.

Writing in the Las Vegas Review Journal, Kristi Eaton covers the range of binge-eating disorder, and includes a passage on me and my experience. I have never been diagnosed, but certainly I could have been had the diagnosis existed when I was doing that sort of thing.

I'm used to learning about causes from hired spokespeople, but in this case, it's the other way around.

The Binge Eating Disorder Association has hired Chenese Lewis as its spokeswoman, and I've heard of it, but not of her. So I went to her website, of course, and I learned that she's making a good career of being of a larger size.

She was crowned the first Miss Plus America in 2003, and she's been on Dr. Phil and in Figure Magazine. She is the chief creative officer of Chenese Lewis Productions, which was founded "on the principal [sic] that you don't have to be size 0 to be beautiful."

A study at the University of Pittsburgh found evidence of binge eating in youngsters, leading its authors to argue that the condition should be accounted for in weight-management programs designed for severely overweight kids.

"Children in the Binge Eating Group were younger and had more depressive, anxiety, and eating-disorder symptoms, and lower self-esteem," the study found.

[I lifted this entirely from a newsletter from edreferral@aol.com. As some readers will recall, my issue is the recognition of food addiction, but that never was even on the table. Recognition of Binge Eating Disorder is important, but progress comes way too slow.]

By John Gever, Senior Editor, MedPage Today May 29, 2010. Primary source: American Psychiatric Association. Source reference: Walsh B, "Approaches to the diagnosis and classification of eating disorders in DSM-V" APA 2010; p. 106.