Does food really create pleasure?

A few days ago at work, I was reading an article in a women's magazine (I can't remember which one - Redbook? Family Circle? Good Housekeeping?) that discussed how people who overeat believe that they overeat because they love food, and are getting a lot of pleasure from their food, but in fact the opposite is true; overeaters don't love food enough. People who overeat don't spend enough time enjoying their food like they did when they were little kids - little kids play with their food, explore new tastes and textures, and take their time eating. Instead, they eat too quickly and don't enjoy their food enough, so they end up eating more to try to compensate for the lost pleasure. The author recommended eating more slowly, savoring each bite, and losing yourself in the taste and texture of your food.

I kind of thought this sounded counterintuitive - I overeat because I LOVE food too much and I enjoy eating, right? I didn't really give it much thought again until this morning when I came across this link to an article in Newsweek. They wrote about a study that was done in which obese women were given a chocolate milkshake while they went through an MRI scan. The researchers then looked for stimulation of the pleasure center of the brain and found that it was not being stimulated, even though the women stated that they expected to receive great pleasure from drinking the milkshake. The researchers concluded that obese women, due to a genetic difference, have an interference in their dopamine receptors. Dopamine is the chemical that allows us to feel pleasure, and when the receptors don't work correctly, we don't feel pleasure from things that usually would be pleasurable (like food, sex, etc.). So, obese women don't receive the same pleasure from eating that leaner women do, so they eat more and more to try to compensate for the lack of pleasure from the food. The study even compared this to an addiction - obese people, or people with the gene who had not yet become obese, were not getting the pleasure from food that they anticipated, so they ate more and more in order to try to achieve the "high" or pleasure from food.

What does this mean for me? I think that when I binge on food, I am trying to get more pleasure by eating more, which usually does not happen, and even if it does, an hour later I am so mad at myself and sick to my stomach that it is not worth the momentary pleasure. So why do I keep doing it again and again? Lately, I have been trying to pay more attention when I feel like bingeing, and I don't even really have a craving for anything in particular. I think, "do I want chips? No, that doesn't sound good, how about chocolate, no, maybe nachos?" I don't even really crave something in particular, I just want to shove something in my mouth to make me feel better. I think that if I am legitimately craving a particular food, I should get that food and enjoy it slowly, bite by bite, and if I still feel like bingeing on other foods, I know that I'm not really getting pleasure from what I'm eating and need to find something else to do to distract myself until the craving passes.