What a fantastic article.
I’ve heard “moderators” vs “abstainers” as a means of addressing the 2 primary types of eaters out there. The former camp are those folks that can have one Oreo, say “that was yummy”, and then go back on with their life. The latter camp will eat one Oreo and wake up 3 days later covered in candy bar wrappers and thick veneer of chocolate syrup wondering “what happened?” And SOME of those folks have “trigger foods” as well, such that they can take something benign like an apple and the sheer sweetness of the flavor sets off their binge response.
@Jon_Andersen has spoken as someone in the latter camp, a self-proclaimed sugar addict. His solution was to completely eliminate carbohydrates from his diet and binge on animal flesh. There was a two-fold benefit there. It would satisfy that binging instinct while being self-limiting (meat, though delicious, is NOT hyper-palatable, and eventually the body taps out, or the guts run out of room) without triggering that sugar response AND the food choice had a much better impact on physique and performance.
I know Mark Bell has spoken of a similar approach when dieting for a bodybuilding show: when the “late night munchies” hit, he was cleared to eat “as many egg whites as he wanted”…and found he didn’t really want to eat that many egg whites. And, again, if you binge on egg whites, all you did was take in a lot of extra protein. And like we’ve seen from some articles here on T-Nation: “overeating” protein can actually be pretty good (if not impossible)