As someone who’s trying to overcome binge eating and having some success so far, I’ve been thinking about what methods have been effective to help me overcome binge urges and have grouped them into the following four ways:
1) Replace binging with another coping mechanism
Often, I binge when I’m feeling emotionally unstable, stressed, frustrated, tired, empty, depressed (or sometimes simply bored). For me, binge eating is a coping mechanism and I believe it is for many others.
The good news about this is that there are plenty of other coping mechanisms that we can try. The important point is that binge eating is something we do to help us cope with difficult emotions and situations, or fill in some emptiness, and if we aren’t going to binge, then we need something else to replace it. As simple as this is, this didn’t occur to me until my counselor pointed this out to me. We can’t just brute force take binging away from us and expect ourselves to be all good.
I’m still figuring out what is a good alternative coping mechanism for me, and it will look different for all. So far, I’ve found surrounding myself by nice scents/giving myself time to enjoy nice scents, taking walks, exercising/yoga, finding moral support in friends/family/or professionals have helped. But for me, these are all things to alleviate ‘overall’ binge eating habits rather than something that helps me ‘at the moment of urge’ if that makes sense. Which brings me to the next point:
2) BINGE- but on healthy alternatives like veggies
That’s right- sometimes we have this strong wish to binge out and we just have to embrace it. But we don’t have to go all the way to the unhealthy side.
I try eating a cucumber, or a good old salad, or maybe vegetable soup or cooked veggies. Fruits could work too. Just something non processed that our bodies won’t complain too much when we have a chunky amount.
3) Mindfulness of our eating
I’m not a huge fan of the word ‘mindfulness’, it feels overused. But for simplicity, I use it here- to mean ‘being aware of what we eat, being aware of our sensations and emotions as we eat’.
This is something I’m learning on the diet app Noom. (Now as a disclaimer, Noom isn’t designed towards people with eating disorder and I believe it’s super important to have some support for eating disorder in another way during your Noom journey. I was on counseling for the first few months of Noom, and after I had to stop counseling for financial reasons, I’ve tried to listen to podcasts on binge eating when I felt I need some support (my favourite being ‘breaking up with binge eating’ and ‘bingeproof brain’))
For me, the ‘awareness of what I eat’ comes from logging my meals each day. While Noom encourages you to do this to manage calories, counting calories may not be something for you, and in that case, you could try thinking of plate size or number of servings for example.
‘Being aware of our sensations and emotions’ while we eat, is another huge part for me. For example, I’ve realized that I mindlessly binge eat when I eat while watching tv shows or movies. After I started trying to eat without electronics on, I became much more aware of what I was eating, enjoy my food more, and as a result helped reduce my binging habits. I try to focus on sensations like how does the food taste in the first bite, does the taste change as we eat, how’s the texture, and also focus on emotions like how I’m feeling before starting the meal, how it changed when I start eating, and ask myself whether I’m continuing to eat because I’m hungry or because I’m trying to fill an emotional need (this is tough to identify!). I’m not saying I manage to do this with every single meal, but it’s really helpful to have this perspective in the corner of our minds.
4) ok treat yourself once in a while
All the above said, I don’t think it’s a setback to overeat or binge once in a while. It’s our overall behavior that matters and if you are starting to realize your patterns, if you have more time space between your binges, if you are becoming more compassionate to yourself, etc then it’s a win and they are all steps forward. It’s human to go back to binge eating habits sometimes, we have spent so long relying on this coping mechanism and it takes a while to move forward one step at a time. If we slip, we just need brush ourselves off, and keep moving forward.
Sending you all lots of love