Compulsive eating: spiritual or biological.

I just love it when people reply to your posts and then block you. I "love" it just as much as when people try to universalize their own experiences. Both of which are going on here.

What you actually said, LadyTazz is:

Anyone who eats their way to 100lbs or more overweight has a eating disorder.  Notice I said "eat their way".  Nothing to do with medication reaction or metabolic disorder.  You said yourself that your eating brought you to 441lbs.  That is an eating disorder.  Don't fool yourself. 

Now you are trying to day you only meant some people and that you meant "eating issues" and not "eating disorder." Sorry, but it's still bs. Most obese people have an over-active appetite that comes from having too much ghrelin. That's where that drive to eat comes from. There's nothing mental about it and this has been discovered via research. They also have less leptin and the part of their brain that registers satiety shows weak brain patterns. Among other things.

Yet people continue to insist that obesity is largely a behavioral/mental/spiritual issue. Holding even stronger to your beliefs after they've been disproven is called cognitive dissonance. Which is a fancy way of saying the person who is fooling themselves isn't the OP. 

I think you will find that if you read through some of the posts here, you will see that many people of all surgery types will eat more and eat  unhealthy foods at stressful times in their lives.  That doesn't make them have a "mental problem."  It just means that food gives them some sort of comfort which probably is of an emotional nature.

Many people have some kind of habitual behavior they turn to for comfort whether it is drugs, sex, gambling, shopping, excessive exercise, or food.  It doesn't make them less of a person or defective in some way.  It just makes them human.

I'm not sure why this is attached to my post as I never said anything that implies that people with mental health issues are lesser in any way or that anyone who eats in response to anything but hunger has a mental illness. In fact, I am saying the opposite.

What I am saying is that it's not true that anyone who is MO or SMO has an eating disorder. An eating disorder is a mental illness that's very hard to cure (especially anorexia nervosa). It's not eating sometimes when you aren't hungry or using food to celebrate. Everyone does that to some degree even people who have a normal relationship with food and never struggle with their weight. If eating a small bit of birthday cake when it's not very good and you aren't very hungry to be sociable or out of habit meant you have an eating disorder than 99.9% of humanity has one.

In her book, The "Rules" of Normal Eating, Dr. Koenig says that the reason she put "Rules" in quotes is that even normal people break these rules. The difference is that they follow them most of the time often without thinking about it.

So, yes, someone who eats themselves up to 300+ pounds because they were molested as a child does have what you could call an addiction or an eating disorder or a mental illness (depending on how you define these terms). But it's not true that the majority of people who are obese have these things as the PRIMARY cause. It's definitely not true that ALL of us have an eating disorder simply because we are/were obese as was stated originally by LadyTazz.

 *like*