Despite what I want to tell you, I don’t have my binge eating under control.
Quite often it flares up, and I’m left wondering why. Why now?
Why now, at the beginning of 2017, when everything is supposed to be regimented and better?
Why now, when all I see on social media is how good everyone is doing with their New Year’s Resolutions, am I’m sitting here stockpiling my mouth with leftover Christmas candy, telling myself it will be different tomorrow?
Why now, when I’m supposed to be getting better, when I’m so FUCKING SERIOUS about getting better?
It’s like the more I want something, the deeper I obsess over it. When it feels threatened, the monster inside of me rebels. It wants to remind me it’s still here and doing well. It wants to show me who’s boss.
It’ll come of no surprise to you that I’m horribly inconsistent at writing.
In fact, I’m using everything in my arsenal right now just to sit here and commit to a word count.
When I woke up this morning, the thought “YOU COULD WRITE RIGHT NOW” flashed across my mind.
As quickly as it came, I pretended I didn’t see it. Tossed it aside like a senseless idea.
Then a deluge of pointless obligations took over. Somehow they were all much more vivid and tantalizing than writing at my computer. Somehow searching for Swedish massage deals on Groupon seemed more worthy of my time than something I actually find to be fulfilling, albeit challenging.
It hit me that whenever I hear “YEAH, BUT…” in my mind, it’s a TELLTALE sign I’m avoiding an impulse that wants to serve me in some important way. For example, my morning looked like this:
Impulse:
Yeah, but I have to e-mail my advisor.
And then I should look up massage deals. And then…
This scenario plays out in other familiar areas of my life.
Impulse: “I could eat breakfast.” Yeah, but I’m not hungry. Yeah, but I binged last night. Yeah, but I didn’t work out yesterday, so I don’t need the calories.
Today, I challenged you to find your YEAH BUT moments, and do exactly what precedes them. Your mind will find a myriad of ways to convince you otherwise.
You don’t have to ignore these persuasions.
Sit gently with yourself, acknowledge these “ yeah, buts,” breathe.
This morning, I tried to put off breakfast as long as I could. I checked my e-mail three times, my Instagram five. When there was nothing new to discover, I read a chapter of a book and even wrote down a few jokes.
My addicted brain was trying to stall me, hoping he’d find the right moment to weaken me.
It’s so easy to get caught in this neural infective. It’s still something I struggle with on a near daily basis. However, after some trial and error, I’ve realized that resisting restricting is imperative in recovery from binge eating.
If you listen to your disordered voice when it tells you to restrict, you’re also going to listen to it when it tells you to binge.
If You Restrict, You Will Binge.
Whenever you make a conscious decision to restrict your calories or compensate for a binge or overeating in someway, you’re also making a conscious decision to binge later on down the road.
There is no way around. You cannot have it both ways.
Anytime you deprive your body of nutrients, your biology will revolt.
“Well,” you may say, sounding suspiciously like my addicted brain, “anorexics do it. They restrict and survive and never binge. If they can do it, why can’t I?”
My response to you is no, actually they don’t. At least not forever.
There exists only two ways out of anorexia:
Death, fast or slow.
Being placed on a medically observed* “binge” meal plan of upwards of 3,000+ calories a day in order to keep the body from shutting down and restore a normal weight.
*The binging isn’t always medically regulated. Sometimes anorexics develop BED on their own. This is the body’s attempt at keeping them alive.
These are your only options.
When I started therapy late last year, I tried my hardest to stick to my meal plan (3 meals, 2-3 snacks per day). However, slips-up happened, and I occasionally binged. Whenever I binged, I believed I NEEDED to restrict the next day to wipe the slate clean. I just couldn’t handle those surplus calories. So, I would restrict, perhaps more than necessary to “compensate” for the binge.
Without fail that one-day of restriction caused binges to happen faster and harder.
Until I learned my lesson.
So here’s the quick-and-easy tip:
If you binged, don’t restrict. I honestly do not give a shit if you ate two cookies or 9 sleeves of chips ahoy, do NOT restrict.
By restricting, you’re only further teaching your body that it can’t trust when its next meal is coming, so it had better get it all in now while it can.
Make sure you understand this:
RESTRICTING CAUSES BINGE EATING.
After a binge, continue to follow your meal-plan. Continue to follow your hunger-cues. Get a little bit of exercise. Go for a walk. Go to the movies with a friend.
I ate my damn breakfast this morning, and I wasn’t happy about it.
But that’s ok. You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.
I see so many girls on Instagram believe that they’re doing something good for themselves by partaking in the various “binge free challenges” that crop up. While I certainly agree that these challenges encourage a sense of community, I do not really understand how they are beneficial.
Are Social Media Eating Disorder Challenges Causing You to Binge More?
If you’re not familiar with these challenges, they are basically a list of questions. Each day, participants answer the question that corresponds to the number of days that they have been “binge free.” They are intended to be done consecutively in the hope that participants will remain “binge free” at least until they run out of questions. Responses are posted to their social media accounts (Instagram, Tumblr, etc.).
This is the most recent one that has been popping up on my Instagram feed:
Let’s take the first three questions and dissect their flaws.
DAY 1 question: Obviously.
DAY 2 question: This is a loaded question that belongs nowhere near an ED community.
First of all, binges are incredibly subjective. If you’re an anorexic dealing with episodes of binge eating, what constitutes a binge for you may be wildly different than what constitutes a binge for an obese person. When people search through these tags and see what other people define as a binge, they will, in all likelihood, compare themselves. Maybe one of these will sound familiar to you:
“His binges look like my snacks!”
“I’m glad I can’t eat that much…”
“She considers that a binge? I don’t think she really has a problem…”
“Will my binges eventually get as bad as her’s?”
“My binges aren’t as big as other people’s. Maybe I’m just exaggerating…”
These types of question create forums for disordered eaters to compare themselves, their stories and their habits to others.
When I used to look at these challenges, I felt so ashamed if my binges were larger than the others who posted their responses. I felt misunderstood and alone. Similarly, if I saw foods that I ate regularly without guilt on someone else’s “trigger food” list, I started to question myself.
Should I be eating bananas? I didn’t know they had so much sugar. She’s thinner than me, so she must know what she’s talking about. I should stop eating fruit…
And so your circle of fear foods expands.
And so your binges intensify.
DAY 3 question: If you want to stop binge eating, you need to stop worrying about your weight, EVEN IF you’re technically overweight (this is a topic for another day, but I just wanted to point out how detrimental this question is). You shouldn’t be thinking about your weight, especially as it pertains to weight LOSS. In my opinion, you cannot recover from binge eating if you’re sole motivation is to lose weight.
Stopping Binge Eating Isn’t As Important as Forgiving Yourself
Even though these challenges are made with the intention of motivating people to stop binging, they put unnecessary focus on things that tend to make people want to binge more. Furthermore, they provide no real skills or information that their participants can apply to their lives. Let’s say a person finishes the challenge, 30 days binge free. Now what? Will they go back to binging because they have no more questions to answer?
After counting my binge free days, I’m not sure it’s the most useful tool in preventing binge episodes. It may be a great place to start, especially if you are struggling to go more than a few days without binging, but it eventually becomes a crutch. The more days you go without binging, the higher the stakes. Zero starts to feel overwhelming.
For a binge eater, a “binge free” challenge isn’t necessarily a “challenge” at all. While I do not deny that resisting a binge can be crazy difficult, the hardest part is actually refusing to get caught back up in the cycle of restricting. Yes, you binged, but tomorrow will you get back on track? Will you follow your meal plan or hunger cues?
Forgiving yourself and moving on, that’s the REAL challenge.
Hello new and old friends alike! This is my first ever blog post, so in “celebration” I’m going to touch on a topic that opened my eyes when I was struggling to go even a few days without binging.
Is Negativity keeping you stuck in the binge cycle?
For most of my life, I followed a pattern of binging 3 times per week, with a day or two of restriction nestled in between. When I managed to restrict for longer than a day, I felt empowered by the thought that maybe this time was different. Maybe I had finally reached rock bottom and could start to rebuild my life.
Constantly obsessing over NOT binging proved exhausting, and eventually I would binge just so I could have a reprieve from trying NOT to binge. Not surprisingly, my old habits caught up with me, pinning me against the walls of my pantry and demanding I cave.
The quiet moments that follow these manic binges remain painfully vivid in my memory. Stuffed, sitting on a crumb-covered quilt, I promised myself that I would never let this happen again. This current discomfort, somehow greater and more pressing than all the pain that ever preceded it, was the last I would subject myself to. Tomorrow was a new day, a new me. Future me was going to finally commit to not binging.
While I know that my bloated self probably meant well, I understand now that focusing on the “NOT” caused far more harm than good. With the “NOT” constantly at the forefront of my mind, I set myself up to fail time and time again, simply because I was fighting against the way the human brain naturally works.
Why Telling Yourself to Stop Binging Doesn’t Work
At the time, I didn’t know that the more you try to suppress a thought, the more likely it is to occur.
This phenomenon is known as Ironic Process Theory, more commonly known as the pink elephant/white bear problem. The theory illustrates how people tend to think MORE about something that they’re told NOT to think about. In so many words, if you’re told NOT to think about a pink elephant, you’re probably going to think about a pink elephant (a lot).
This is because the brain is not capable of processing negatives. In order to process a command, it must consider the subject before knowing what to do or not do with it.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s take the command “DON’T EAT ICE CREAM!”
Here’s how the brain would process the command “DON’T EAT ICE CREAM”:
When you tell your brain “DON’T EAT ICE CREAM,” it has to first take into consideration the main subject (“eat ice cream”) before it determines how to proceed. In other words, “eat ice cream” enters your consciousness before the “DON’T.”
After your brain processes the “DON’T,” disappointment takes root. Moments earlier, it believed you were going to indulge in its favorite creamy treat (mine is huge fan of Speculoos gelato). Now, forced to relinquish this tasty promise, remorse takes the place of fiery enthusiasm.
And then you get involved.
You tell your brain it’s stupid for wanting that ice cream in the first place. It shouldn’t be disappointed because it’s fat and needs to lose weight anyway. Look at it! Its thighs are rubbing together for Christ sakes!
Negativity add stress.
Each time you have a negative thought about your body, it reinforces the command “DON’T EAT ICE CREAM” since this is the action you perceive will improve your body. If you’re in the throes of an eating disorder, I think it’s fair to say that this thought may fire anywhere from 1 to 10 times every five minutes.
After enduring this conversation all day, your brain inevitably becomes exhausted. Not only must it try to resist all that delicious ice cream you forbade it from eating, but it also must stomach your verbal abuses. Battling resistance makes it feel so incredibly deprived. Desperation renders it vulnerable. “Oh, what the heck,” it thinks, “I’m worthless and fat and I’ll never change, so why not eat ice cream?” Or maybe it thinks “I’m tired of suffering and I deserve this” or “I have to do this because I can’t calm down and there is no other way to soothe myself.”
The overwhelmed brain.
And next thing we know we’re sitting on our crumb-covered quilt wondering where the hell our good intentions went. After a day of binging, self-hatred reignites itself. You feel overwhelmed by thoughts of how your thighs rub together, how your stomach protrudes over the rim of your pants. You can feel your flesh eating the air, daring with every second to grow larger and larger. Fueled by loathing, you vow to never binge again. When morning comes, you awake with a single aim: DON’T BINGE.
So the process continues.
How to Work With Your Brain to Stop Binge Eating
Focusing on the negative, emphasizing the “DON’T” will only keep you caught in this cycle, like trying to spin your way out of spider’s web by making yourself look more appealing to your hungry host. While I know the desperate attempt to NOT BINGE comes from good intensions, a manic dash to prove our worth and cleanse us of our “sins”, it serves no purpose in our lives. It cannot alter our behavior or actions.
As much as you may not like it, you must work with your brain.
You can do this by concentrating on positive, measurable actions.
Try to replace “DO NOT BINGE” with a specific action on which to focus. Give your attention to statements that make you feel nourished and excited rather than deprived and fearful. Here are a few examples:
Today I WILLnourish my body by eating 5 vegetables.
Tonight I WILL celebrate my body by taking a relaxing, hot shower.
Today I WILL relieve stress by going for a 20-minute walk.
I don’t recommend adding anything related to binging or other addictive behaviors you’re trying to avoid to these statements.
A happy, empowered brain.
For example, you wouldn’t want to say, “I will take a bath instead of binging” because you are still bringing “binging” (and hence the “NOT”) to the forefront of your mind. Furthermore, they should be something you can quantify. If you simply say, “I will eat vegetables,” your mind has no clear indication of where to go. How many vegetables? When? Keep these statements as short and explicit as possible.
If you feel even the slightest bit of dread bubble up inside of you while reciting a statement, you may be doing something wrong. Play with the wording until it feels relieving and manageable.
Aside from a lot of smart stuff about relativity, Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Of course, this notion is harder in practice than in theory, but that doesn’t make it any less true. If focusing on NOT binging makes you more likely to binge, attempting a new way of thinking may be a way to escape the punishing cycle.
Let me know if you need help coming up with replacement thoughts. I will be happy to help!
gababytes 