Verified by 
Ladies Night Out. How long does it take six women, late 40s to mid-60s, to start talking about food? Not the food on the menu or on the plate - but the foods that aren't even there. We sit down and the first topic is, "What are your favorite binge foods?"
It's a little like, "Who is your favorite Beatle?" That is, fun! We divide into three camps: chocolate, ice cream, and crunchy-salty-sweet. That's my camp. I just had a birthday, and my husband brought home a pound-and-a-half box of See's peanut brittle, which I have loved since childhood and am powerless to stop eating. Once a year, at most, I relive the rush.
I have a system. The box goes immediately into the freezer in the garage, out of sight, behind the Trader Joe's pizza boxes. On a hot night in July, I could imagine standing in front of the open freezer, letting cold air wash over me while sticky fingers keep going back for more. But I ration. This time, it took me two weeks to finish the box, at about 250 calories a pop. Totally worth it.
Wheat Thins, my other binge food, are more difficult to ration. They don't respond well to freezing. Once the box is open, they fly out like children at recess. So light! I don't realize I've eaten way too many until I feel the bottom of the box or start to feel sick. We don't keep Wheat Thins in the house.
Both of my binge foods are prime examples of the manipulation of salt, sugar, fat, as explained beautifully by Dr. David Kessler in The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. It's a sensory extravaganza of flavor and texture -- and the way each changes as you chew, making the experience even more dreamy and pleasurable up until the moment that you wake up and realize you've eaten way too much.
The cover of Kessler's book makes me hungry. There's a hunk of carrot cake topped with creamy frosting and some combination of food coloring, sugar and fat shaped into a goopy carrot. Underneath are three fresh carrots. Which do you lust after?
After reading Kessler's book, I forced myself to look at the ingredients of See's fabulous peanut brittle: "peanuts, sugar, butter (milk), corn syrup, salt, baking soda, vanillin (an artificial flavor), may contain traces of tree nuts."
That is: Fat, sugar, fat, sugar, salt.
No wonder it says on the box: "See's Candies, A Happy Habit."
In Crave: Why You Binge Eat and How to Stop, Cynthia Bulik writes, "Binge eating involves the supersizing of cravings to the point of an uncontrollable urge that snowballs until the binge eater literally feels helpless to resist the urge to binge." The cover of Bulik's book shows a spoon lingering over a half-eaten, starting-to-melt, tub of chocolate ice cream. (Enticing, but for me, resistible. All one texture. Where's the salt and crunch?)
Bulik notes that binge eating occurs in about one in thirty-five adults in this country -- mostly in secret.
Therefore, talking about it, as my group did the other night, is a good idea.
