One of the things I work on most frequently with women is sorting through the frustration around binging. They feel discouraged that they’ve been doing the “work”, have made progress but still end up binging.
It can be so immensely frustrating when you’ve spent weeks/months/years working on your food, letting go of weight loss, healing your relationship to eating, coping with life without food and STILL find yourself overeating!
Yes, I’ve been there a bizallion times on my own path 🙂 So you are definitely not alone!
Here are 3 things I want you to remember when you get frustrated that you are still binging:
1. We Don’t Just Stop Binging; We Let Go of It As It No Longer Serves Us.
This simple shift in how we view overeating can be life-changing…
We use food for a purpose.
We’re not just sitting on the couch shoveling food into our mouths because we love eating ice cream (unless it’s partly a habit, and in that case, check out this!)
Food fulfills a need, so to stop binging, we need to begin looking at what those needs are. Then we explore how to get those needs met.
Slowly but surely, binging begins to fall away as we no longer need it.
Binging has served many purposes in my life.
- It helped keep me numb when I didn’t want to feel.
- It kept me “safe” when I was afraid to quit my job.
- Overeating allowed me to fixate on weight/body instead of addressing the real issues.
- It helped occupy my time, kept me busy when I didn’t know how to be alone, and so much more…
As I began to heal, I began to let go of using food as a coping mechanism. I learned how to get my needs met and my need to binge started to dissolve.
It’s definitely not a once and done decision. But as you heal your insides, the outer need to binge will begin to dissolve.
(If you need more help on this, check out the 10 Day Stop Binging E-Course or the After Binge Toolkit)
2. Let It Point You To What Needs Your Attention
I like to think of binging as a signpost. It’s pointing you directly to what needs your attention.
When you turn to food, it’s just a signal that you haven’t yet learned to cope with whatever it is that’s happening in your life.
At the end of the day, binging is a message.
Can we let go of the self-loathing and the criticism to be open to hearing what that message is?
Learning to shift into a “healing” space rather than an “I’m disgusting and now need to diet” space will change the way you look at a binge.
Even now, when I want to eat a 3rd or 4th cookie, I have an almost instant reaction of “ok, Jenn, what else is going on here?”
Food is always a red flag to go deeper. Give yourself the space to hear the lesson; it’s truly where the long term healing lies 🙂
3. Progress Is Made With Small Steps
Yes, this is very cliche. And very true 🙂
I fought tooth and nail with this one for many years.
I didn’t want progress to be small. I wanted to wake up one day and have it all be done.
The reality is that progress happens with tiny changes made daily. It’s the opposite of the diet mentality that we’re taught (“just 30 days and you’ll lose 10 pounds!”)
Trust in the process. Have faith in the small, minuscule shifts you make in a day, week or month. They DO add up to the big changes that we eventually want 🙂
It’s Your Turn…
What tip do you most resonate with? What can you remind yourself after you’ve binged? Share in the comments below 🙂
