In a typically semi-coherent appearance on the Tonight Show a few weeks ago, Paula Abdul told a cute story about living with fellow Idol judge Kara Dioguardi when they were housemates in the 90s. She said that Kara had a tendency to sleepwalk and eat and that she would deny it the next day:

“She used to sleepwalk and eat me out of house and home… I had off white carpeting and I’d see ground food… a trail that would lead to the kitchen and then handprints of pumpkin pie.

“She wakes up and she goes ‘no I didn’t’…

[Transcribed from Paula Abdul’s appearance on the Tonight Show, aired 2/11/09]

Maybe Kara wasn’t sleepwalking and it was a lot more serious than Paula made it sound. Kara recently confirmed that she suffered from an eating disorder in the past for which she sought treatment. She said she was a binge eater and would often eat in the middle of the night.

“I’ve never spoken about this. I had kind of a binge eating disorder where, instead of dealing with my emotions, I would stuff them down with food,” the American Idol judge tells Extra.

“I never threw up or starved myself,” continues DioGuardi. “It was an eating disorder. I actually went into a treatment center for it…I would get up and eat in the middle of the night.”

DioGuardi blames her food problems on insecurity while growing up.

“I really was a creative kid who didn’t know she was creative and didn’t have those outlets because I was always afraid to join the theater group and not perform,” she says.

After she moved out to L.A. to become a songwriter, she became healthier.

“The moment I started doing music, the moment I did what I loved to do in my life and committed to it, I didn’t have those problems anymore,” she says. “I have my outlet. I have that form of expression. I can go to the studio and talk about my feelings.”

[From US Magazine]

I stress eat and I really have to watch it if I want to keep my weight down. It may be different from full blown binge eating, but it might feel similar as you can get out of control and eat mindlessly. I found some help from a cognitive therapy approach to eating through Dr. Beck’s Diet for Life (This is a good book that I recommend for help with emotional eating. Some of the methods are helpful and some are a little too complicated though.) One thing Dr. Beck said in her book is that we make very illogical decisions about food, like if we slip during a diet we’ll say “screw it” (not her words) and just eat whatever we want until the next day, which makes no sense because you’re taking in hundreds if not thousands of extra calories in that time and they do count! She uses the analogy that it’s like running a stop sign while driving and then deciding not to follow traffic laws for the rest of the day. She has methods to learn how to stop yourself if you get in the overeating mode and ways for substituting other positive activities for times when you often habitually eat. It’s not an easy thing to conquer though and for many people food is as much as an addiction as alcohol or drugs. You can give up those other things entirely, but we have to eat to live and learn how to eat moderate portions.

Good for Dioguardi for talking about her issues with binge eating. She’s not my favorite judge and I tend to think that Idol is worse now that she’s on the panel, but I have to give her some credit for this one. Binge eating can be serious and there isn’t as much awareness of it as other eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia.

Kara DioGuardi is shown at an American Idol party on 3/05/09 and at the Grammy Awards on 2/7/09. Credit: PRPhotos