It’s been a while since I posted here, my family members have been unwell and the work load has been intense but I myself am ok.
During these times of stress, I’ve been tempted to binge eat and skin pick many times, especially for binge eating these few months.
What’s helped is reframing my thoughts and having phrases like mantras and stress relievers that I can fall back on.
For mantras, phrases like ‘I don’t Have to eat’, or ‘if I keep eating, it is not healthy for me and I would put my body under a lot of strain’ have helped me. Mind you, if you really are hungry please do eat. I only used these phrases when I had a properly hearty meal and was wanting to continue eating for emotional and stress reasons.
Reframing thoughts are also powerful for getting to the root of binge eating and working on the core triggers of why we binge eat. As I have heard in a binge eating podcast, it’s not negative triggers themselves that cause binge eating but rather our thoughts and reaction to it.
I’m not going to go into the details of how to reframe thoughts as there are many resources out there on this including cognitive behavioral therapy (I strongly recommend the free app Woebot for trying out CBT). It’s not always easy to do by ourselves and it’s not the answer for everything, we might still want to eat after reframing thoughts, but it does help to organize our thoughts and feelings and feel a bit better.
Finally for stress relievers, there are so many and ones that work for you could look different for each person. For me, listening to music, doing short and relaxing yoga, taking a small walk, working out a bit, or even just lying down for some time are all helpful. Once again, I’m going to refer to my favourite podcast ‘Breaking up with binge eating’: alternative behaviours (I.e. things we can do instead of eating to make us feel better) should include options that are very very low energy because we will have moments when we just aren’t motivated or have the energy to do much. It could just be lying down like me, or coloring pictures, or hanging out with your pets if you have one, or taking deep breaths. Just anything. And it doesn’t need to take you away from binge eating entirely. If you feel the urge to binge, just try holding out for a minute. Even that is something to be proud of, because healing binge eating is a process and we may just have to start from small steps and that’s okay.