Cultural attitudes towards beauty and thinness may also be a factor in whether a person binges.
By eliminating the blood sugar swings that accompany carbohydrate binges, the South Beach Diet aims to make dieting easier.
Some binges may result in the consumption of more than 3,000 calories in a single incident.
Many causes are known to trigger individual binges, but almost all emotional eating can be traced to some trauma that a person was not able to effectively cope with at the time it occurred.
One lesson the patient learns in therapy is to accept that binges will happen.