For many people, eating and exercising sensibly comes naturally.  Other people can accept their bodies as good enough whatever their shape and size.

However, for many others, the whole area can become fraught with anxiety and distress.  Even people who don't usually give a thought to their eating habits can find themselves binging on chocolate, or find that they can't face eating at all during stressful times.

Some of us start off by controlling our food intake in order to lose a bit of weight.  If we are successful at this, we may continue to 'diet' for a time before returning to our usual eating habits.  This can become a roller coaster of dieting and giving up on diets, always feeling troubled and guilty about food and our figures.

Others of us pursue this apparent initial success: we start to eat less and less, and feel that eating is a disgusting and unnecessary business.  As we lose weight we also the ability to think rationally.  We look in the mirror and see fat where in reality no fat exists, and perhaps we have become dangerously thin.  This is 'anorexia' which means, literally, 'an absence of appetite'.

Yet others of us may start off in the same way, on a weight-reducing diet, but find that we feel really miserable, punished and deprived by not being 'allowed' to eat what we want.  We find we break the diet and eat whatever we fancy, and in larger quantities than we would usually have done even if we were not on a diet.  Then we feel sick from the binge and sick with ourselves for losing control, and so we make ourselves vomit.  This is called 'bulimia' and is physically damaging and emotionally distressing.

Then there are those of us who eat compulsively.  We eat too much and we don't vomit, even though we might wish we could.  We eat secretly and/or publicly.  We eat frozen food which has not thawed out properly.  We eat standing up in the kitchen, straight from the packet, and we finish every last crumb!  We eat to make ourselves feel better, although it makes us feel worse, so we eat some more: a vicious circle.  Many of us who eat in this way feel humiliation about being obviously and visibly overweight.

If eating has become a problem, what can you do?

1. Contact the Eating Disorders Association, Sackville Place, 44-48 Magdalen Street, Norwich, Norfolk, NR3 1JU. Telephone 01603 621414

2. Your GP may be able to offer you help, or refer you to specialist services within the NHS

3. Contact me at new life horizons for information about counselling.  Come and talk, in confidence, about your concerns.