You're spot on coming from the perspective of a physically and mentally healthy person. You are in control of what you want to eat and how you go about it. But there's an element of mental health concern which greatly influence binge eating. For some people with depression & anxiety issues, binge eating is a way out of their state of mental health. These people aren't too concerned about what or when they eat, they just eat, and eat, and eat without control. So while you're absolutely right on what works for you (to achieve satiety), it is not necessary how a mentally troubled individual would see it.
It has more to do with lifestyle.
When I was a kid I was extremely active, probably 10hrs a day of exercise. When I was a young adult in college that suddenly changed over night when I was expected to study for hours everyday and then transition into a job that was 12hrs a day. I did have the benefit of a being a competitive cyclist, but that had me set up to eat thousands of calories everyday because I was training 50 to 100+ miles everyday so I could eat anything I wanted and never gain a pound.
When I was growing up in the 70's and 80's people worked physically hard, we didn't have obesity we have now even though personally I consider the food back in those days not very healthy with all the criso and sugar we consumed contrary to popular belief.
Physical activity is what occupies the mind, even great zen masters that champion sitting meditation as the key to pure consciousness will suggest hard physical exercise(practical work in their case) instead for those that have mental problems because sitting still is actually counter productive to a mind that won't calm down.
We have created a world where sedentary lifestyles are not only the norm, but are something to be striven for with many hours of sedentary education chasing as many credentials as possible in order to obtain a cushy position in life where you can look forward to more sitting and less activity until you roll into retirement with a pot belly and soft mushy bones.
Humans as we know them have been around for at least 50,000 years, perhaps 200,000 years and our ancestors go back millions of years in one form or another. Being sedentary is something our biology hasn't had enough time to evolve for, we were meant to be active for probably at least 25% of the day doing hard physical exercise to survive.
Take an elephant out of the wild and put him in a cage with a chained foot and feed him all day long and he'll become obese. Same thing for a Grizzly bear. We're no different, it's not a mental disorder, it's a modern over-socialization-civilization disorder.
Humans need water, food, shelter, basic tools, basic education and very basic healthcare. We have moved far past this point and because of that we have created a civilization that is way over populated and over fed with minimal effort.
