Vitamodo School · Bundle 1: Addictions as Symptom · Brochure 5 of 10 · Version 1.0
Andris Saulitis, MD
For those who: recognise that their eating has come unhooked from hunger and want to understand what the eating is reaching for beneath the food itself.
Not for those who: are looking for a diet, a meal plan, a calorie target, or a tactic for weight change. The mechanisms below are about regulation, not body size.
What this is — the clinical reality
Binge eating is the act of consuming a large amount of food in a short period, with the sense that the eating is no longer under one's own control. The bingeing person is often not hungry when it begins, may not be enjoying it while it happens, and frequently cannot remember much of the episode afterward. Yet during the episode, the eating proceeds as if it were urgent.
Three systems carry the change.
The first system is dopamine, and the way it responds to the modern food environment. Foods designed to maximise dopamine response — combinations of sugar, fat, and salt that do not occur in nature — exist now in unprecedented variety and access. Each combination produces a stronger reward signal than the foods the human reward system evolved to recognise. The brain marks each of these foods as worth seeking. The seeking is not a moral failure. It is the reward circuit doing what it was built to do, with inputs it was not built for.
The second system is the stress-eating axis. Sustained stress raises cortisol; raised cortisol drives carbohydrate cravings; the carbohydrate spike raises insulin; insulin shifts amino-acid availability and indirectly raises brain serotonin; the serotonin produces a brief sense of calm. This pathway is real. People who say they eat to manage stress are accurate. The mechanism works — for the duration of the metabolic loop, which is short.
The third system is the parasympathetic activation of eating itself. The act of chewing, swallowing, and reaching fullness engages vagal pathways that shift the autonomic nervous system from sympathetic (alert, mobilised) to parasympathetic (rest, digest). This is one reason a binge often ends in a near-sleep-like state. The eating is not only about the food. The eating is also a way of changing the body's autonomic state, regardless of what is being eaten.