How to stop binge eating
Want to know how to end your binge eating and know the reason behind your bingeing episodes? It has nothing to do with willpower or discipline and has nothing to do with you!!
Do you want to stop binge eating and lose weight does it seem like that the harder you try to diet the more you binge and obsess about food and you have no energy left for anything else?
I remember when I was a binge eater I had bulimia following anorexia, by then I had lost so much weight my periods had stopped for 2 years and I looked like the walking dead. I was basically a walking skeleton looking drawn and emaciated, I starved for days or weeks.
Starving yourself eventually leads to bingeing afterwards it was always followed by purging, excessive laxative us
e, extreme exercise and or extreme starvation for the next few days or weeks. My eating was completely out of control, my eating was black or white all or nothing.
I used to literally inhale my food during a binge a lot like a ravenous wolf, I would be lucky if I came up for air!
I would eat basically anything I could lay my hands on. All of this was done in secret I was living at home with my parents. I would hoard food or I would buy food on my way home from school and find somewhere quiet in my home where I could have my binge, then I would feel so ashamed of what I had done self-loathing and guilt kicked in.
I didn't understand how I got here how could I let this happen again I would berate myself and feel so utterly ashamed. My willpower must have been so weak maybe if I try harder next time. Restricting, dieting and obsessing over my body became my main focus over the next few years, does this sound like you?
Are you a binge eater or have bulimia?
Signs of bulimia – Fear of putting on weight being very critical about your weight and body shape, severe mood changes, feeling very tense or anxious thinking about food a lot.
Feeling guilty and ashamed and behaving secretly avoiding social activities if it involves food, feeling like you have no control over your eating you may notice physical signs like feeling tired, a sore throat from being sick, bloated or tummy pain, puffy face, self-harming.
Purging immediately after a binge, excessive exercise, excessive starvation following the binge.
Binge eating disorder - Eating unusually large amounts of food in a specific amount of time such as over 2 hour period . Feeling that you’re eating behaviour is out of control. Eating even when you're full are not hungry, eating rapidly during binge episodes eating until you're uncomfortably full.
Frequently eating alone or in secret, feeling depressed, disgusted, ashamed, guilty you're upset about your eating habits. Frequently dieting possibly without weight loss unlike a person with bulimia after a binge you don't regularly compensate for extra calories eaten by vomiting using laxatives or exercising excessively.
Why do people binge eat?
Often people tend to binge eat are not happy with the way they look you might think badly about their body or you might compare yourself with TV and magazine photos that emphasise thinness that might give you what is known as a negative body image and have low self-esteem because of this which could lead to binge eating.
Another key reason for bingeing is Constantly under eating, restricting food and chronic dieting this can also be linked to depression and low self-worth, stress and anxiety can lead to bingeing maybe you have gone through a major break up, lost your job or going through a divorce?
This may just be emotional eating and can be temporary, Trauma can also cause bingeing, it can serve as a protective mechanism not facing your feelings and stuffing them down with food, building a protective wall of fat to protect yourself.
So how does one develop binge eating?
Essentially binge eating is a behaviour that is ingrained in our DNA from Hunter-gatherer days back then there was no abundance of food it was either feast or famine. Once our ancestors didn't have access to food for an extended period of time their bodies understood that they had to drive up the hunger hormones to make them seek out food.
Then when they finally killed an animal or found something to eat their bodies made them eat like there is no tomorrow the reason was that quite literally tomorrow there might not have food anymore for a long time.
Our bodies are very smart they want us to survive they understand that once there is not enough food aka once we are in a calorie deficit through dieting and restriction. They have to make us hungrier and more obsessed with foods that we find food to eat it’s simply our bodies way of trying to keep us alive it’s genius.
The reason we have no control over putting the food down is that in our heads we are already planning our next diet for our body. This means that it understands there would be another period of starvation coming up the result of this is that our body will make us eat an insurmountable amount of food in one sitting.
This way it can store up this energy to use for the upcoming days of our restrictive behaviours. But why do we never binge on lettuce and broccoli?
We eat very calorie-dense foods that usually have a combination of carbohydrates and fat think baked goods pizza ice cream. These foods are loaded with tryptophan which is an amino acid and it increases a brain chemical called serotonin. It creates a sense of high our brain is looking for pleasure that's why it seeks out these sugary carbohydrate fatty foods. This is also a very smart mechanism. Our body wants us to eat the largest amount of calories in the shortest amount of time this way it could store up as much as possible for the upcoming famine.
Our body knows that if we ate broccoli we would feel full way sooner and it wouldn't get the same amount of calories in just think if our ancestors wouldn't have had these mechanisms in their body they would never have survived, binge eating used to be beneficial for our survival now it's time to teach our bodies that we don't need to binge to survive anymore.
What are the hidden meanings behind bulimia or binge eating?
Ask yourself do you have difficulty receiving love and nourishment? do you constantly self-criticise? do you feel a lot of guilt? Have self-sabotaging behaviours?
Maybe you're trying to control situations using food to push problems away instead of facing them, instead of fighting our compulsive eating we need to listen to it and hear its deeper message once you have decoded the message in the symptom then it can finally resolve itself often binge eating which is an out of control behaviour is actually a balancing act for someplace in life where we are in tight control.
I'll mention that some of the ways we might be in tight control in life are when we try to control our emotional expression, controlling other people when we are withholding speaking the truth or stopping our creative expression. Most common, many people are trying to artificially control their appetite or the amount of food they eat.
They tightly control their consumption of pleasurable foods controlling their weight by eating a very low-fat diet.
So, what's the first step in beating binge eating?
Stop restricting yourself, start loving your body and start eating more consistently at regular intervals. Sometimes it can be hard to do this, and I'd highly recommend doing this with the help of a coach like myself if you are currently not able to do that. I encourage you to start noticing your patterns and thought around food.
Maybe by having a food journal, writing down the time you eat and your hunger levels and your emotional level, how you're feeling before you eat and then noting down how you feel afterwards.
Also, ask yourself do you feel guilty when you eat certain foods? Are you planning on another diet in the future? Do you feel like you can't control yourself around food, so you always try to restrict that food? All of these things are red flags to watch out for.
Binge eating is very rarely all about the food. It is a form of dissociation used to escape from uncomfortable feelings. Address the root cause, and the binge eating stops.
Low self-esteem and critical thinking increase eating disorders' eating disorders when these negative thoughts are replaced with more positive ones, and dieting is the worst way to lose weight because you lose weight short term.
You gain it back, and dieting has been proven repeatedly to be ineffective for losing weight long term, so stop going on a diet. When was the last successful diet you went on and didn’t put any weight back on after?
Your body needs nourishment. This doesn’t happen if you’re a chronic dieter. Increasing the quality of your food to make sure you get the correct macronutrient balance is also a key factor, eating a wide variety of foods and not eliminating certain food groups unless you have intolerances.
Stop eating cheap processed foods that your body doesn’t recognise and eat foods as close to nature as possible real food that nourishes your body at a cellular level. We live in a diet culture where label food as good and bad. It’s the dose that makes the poison. Eating a piece of chocolate won’t harm you.
Eating a kilo of it might not be such a great idea, however. It would help if you started balancing your eating and not controlling or restricting it.
Forgiving yourself for the way you punish and abuse your body is especially important
Addressing the core reasons behind your binge eating can be a game-changer. That’s why EFT (emotional freedom technique) can be so impactful. Please read my blog article on how EFT can help with weight loss. It really helps many of my clients as it addresses and takes away all the negative charges you carry.
Eating disorders are so deep-rooted; simply eating a better diet will not get down to the key reason behind stuffing down your feelings. EFT works by reducing the sympathetic nervous system response, which is your fight or flight response.
Unhealed emotions are carried in the body as stress and EFT releases that by reducing the stress response, which is done by tapping on certain energy meridians similar to that of acupuncture,e except EFT doesn’t require needles.
Be kind to yourself
If you’re a binge eater, you can put your body through an insurmountable amount of stress start apologising to your body for everything you have put it through, finding compassion for yourself, knowing that you punish yourself so severely just for eating food.
You really owe it to yourself to get to the core root of why this is happening in your life. Be kind, compassionate and patient with yourself. This process takes time, and none of these methods is an overnight cure. It took me years to figure all this out, and I trained as an eating psychology coach which was a massive turning point for me.
You will be eating for the rest of your life its time to release the struggle and live life without the drama of food. If you would like to work with me, take a look at some of the packages I offer or book a discovery call.
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