THE HUNGRY MIND
A Psychiatrist’s Story of Binge Eating — and the Systems That Actually Helped

Dr. Ankush Bhatia had built his career understanding the human mind. He could explain the neuroscience of a binge in a lecture hall. What he couldn’t do, for over a decade, was stop having one.

It started at seventeen, in a rented room in Chandigarh, the night he failed two subjects and ordered three pizzas to make the shame go quiet. It followed him through medical school, through breakups, through night shifts, through a body that grew to 128 kilograms while he hid the evidence in wrapper bags and timed his eating around everyone else’s schedule. He was, by then, a psychiatrist — trained to treat exactly the disorder he couldn’t name in himself.

The Hungry Mind is the book he needed and couldn’t find: written by someone who has sat on both sides of the consulting desk. Part one is his story, told without euphemism. Part two steps back into the clinical lens — the reward circuitry, the restriction-binge cycle, and why “just use more willpower” was never going to work. What follows is the heart of the book: ten specific, practical systems Dr. Bhatia built in his own recovery — none of them a diet, all of them structural, tested first on himself and then in his own clinical practice.