Obesity and Binge Eating Disorder

Because this piece does not have an abstract, we have provided for your benefit the first 3 sentences of the full text.

As noted by Stewart Agras in the interesting preface to this work, obesity and binge eating disorder (BED) have had an interesting relationship since BED was delineated about 20 years ago. The development of our knowledge about BED has been informative for our understanding of obesity in that we are able now to identify a behavioral marker for those who are likely to experience an early onset of obesity, develop more severe obesity, and have more psychosocial dysfunction than controls without binge eating matched by body mass index. As the literature on BED has evolved, the findings suggest that not all patients with BED are obese, just as not all obese subjects have BED or even binge eat, but the overlap is substantial.’ ‹