How to Stop Binge Eating for Good

I have a long history with disordered eating, and it has taken me a long time to develop a good relationship with food and my body.  That said, I have a particular soft spot in my heart for anyone struggling with binge eating or any disordered relationship with food and body.

To understand binge eating and how to stop it, you first really need to understand where it comes from.  There are two major contributors to binge eating.  The first one may surprise you as it is actually dieting, or any type of food restriction, that is the main precursor to binge eating.  The second contribution to binge eating is actually what drives dieting, and that is the desire to be thin.

Here in the U.S. most young girls have been raised with images of Disney princesses being very attractive and thin.  Their beauty is often times one of the things that is most prized in their character in each of their respective stories.  I am certainly not intending to bash Disney in any way.  I for one, am a huge Disney fan, I absolutely love a good story of hope, heroism, and happily ever after.  With this in mind, however, these pictures unintentionally influence how young girls come to value beauty and thinness in our cultures.  In addition to this, most young girls play with dolls that are thin and slender, further reinforcing that beauty ideal to be thin. 

As girls grow older they are also surrounded by other girls and women trying to reach the thin beauty ideal throughout their lives.  To start with, many girls recall watching their mothers make negative comments about their own bodies.  They recall watching their mothers look at themselves in the mirror saying “does this make me look fat?”  My mom and nearly every other woman in my life was on a diet at one time or another to lose weight while I was growing up, and that is not uncommon.  I believe most girls and women are around other girls and women who are dieting, trying to lose weight, or attempting to maintain a slim figure by way of food restriction. 

In addition to hearing messages at home, most girls and women go to school or work where they talk with other girls about losing weight, wanting to be thin, going on diets together, or comparing their bodies to one another with respect to these thin ideals.  This further entrenches us in the belief system that thinner is healthier, more beautiful, and better.  We look at magazine covers, watch celebrities, movies, and social media feeds that all emphasize this thin ideal.  Women and girls are praised for any weight loss and high fived for “sticking to a diet”.  This further reinforces our actions to diet or restrict food. 

Doctors, health care providers, the fitness industry, and diet industry all drive home a strong emphasis on weight loss and reinforce that “losing weight will make you healthier, more fit, and more attractive”.  With all of this influence it is very difficult, if not impossible, to escape the gravitational pull to be thin, go on a diet, and lose weight.    

We are all so immersed in this culture that we don’t even see it as problematic, it just is.  When culture normalizes dieting, and everyone you know promotes it as “healthy” it just becomes something that is part of our way of life, it is not even questioned as a problem.  We don’t even see how it can be so harmful.  Yes, I did say harmful. 

Let me explain how this could possibly be so through a concept called diet cycling.  Diet cycling is known and familiar to those of us in the world of healing disordered eating relationships with food.  It looks like this. 

You start by not being happy with your body.  You think your butt is too big, your stomach sticks out, your thighs need to slim down, or even that your face is too round.  This is driven by the desire to look beautiful, fit in, be valued, accepted by others, be loved, admired, and have that perfect ideal body that many women aspire to have.  You decide to change things by going on a diet.  You decide to cut out the carbs, stop eating junk food, limit calories, stop eating after 7:00 p.m., or some other type of restriction.  This restriction puts your body into a state of anxiety and panic.  You are not planning on going through a famine, but even the mere thought of cutting out food makes your body fill with anxiety.  You try your best to stick to this diet.  You are “good” for as long as you can stand it, until you just can’t take it anymore.  You become sick of restricting, sick of being hungry, and tired of not being able to eat so many things that you desire.  This then leads to the inevitable “binge”.  You feel out of control around food, consume everything in sight, all the brownies, all the chips, all the forbidden things—and you “fall off the wagon” as the saying goes.  You then feel so guilty for your “out of control binge” that you resolve to go on yet another diet….thus repeating the cycle. 

To boot, did you know that the ONLY thing that diets have proven to do scientifically is help you GAIN WEIGHT over time.  Diets actually have no research that supports long term weight loss.  Research actually shows that 95% of diets fail people within two years.  After that, they gain the weight back—and then some.  Those are terrible odds if you ask me.  Would you buy a new car if you knew that it had a 95% chance of falling apart after only two years?  I would hope not! 

Dieting is actually a set up for binge eating.  Your biology says to seek “all the food” when it feels it has been restricted.  Your body’s job is to keep you alive, and in order to do that it needs to keep you fed.  It will stress you out, increase your hunger hormones, increase your stress hormones, and make you crave food the moment you even think about going on a diet.  The binges you fall into are not a failure of your willpower, but a failure of the system we have created.  Your body is only doing what it was born to do, keep you alive in times of perceived famine.  It is actually very intelligent if you think about it.  It can even override your best efforts to stay away from food.  Your body never wants to see you go hungry.    

We have created a system that makes us feel we are not worthy in the God given body we were created to have.  We have created a culture where dieting is actually praised and reinforced, not noticing the terrible side effects of eating disorders, body hatred, depression, anxiety, and yes, binge eating, that follow dieting.  We have grown to see diets as normal, harmless, and actually healthy.  We wouldn’t even conceive of diets as being the source of the problem.    

The answer to stop binge eating is simple, but difficult to do, as it will go against everything that you have known up to this point.  It starts with choosing to end all diets for the purpose of weight loss and learning to respect the body you were given.  This actually makes perfect sense, remove the precursor to binge eating (dieting) and binge eating will stop.  It is normal to have a lot of fears about this at first.  That is why I have given you some helpful tips below.  I’ve got you covered! 

1.Start with learning to respect your body. Notice I said respect your body, not love your body.  Loving your body would be amazing, but I know loving your body could be a tough stretch for many of you out there.  I can still have days where loving my body can be hard too, but I have grown to a place of having tremendous respect and compassion for my body.

Think about how your body has served you.  Your heart beats every minute of every day.  Perhaps your mind has helped you to graduate or obtain a degree or job you love.  Your legs work and they get you from point A to point B.  Your body allows you to go for walks with people you love.  Your lungs take in clean air.  Your tongue allows you to taste the deliciousness of an ice cream on a hot summer day or enjoy special holiday meals with friends and family.  I am particularly grateful for the out of this world amazingness that my body has made two beautiful little boys that I love more than life itself.  My arms have given me the ability to hold them as babies and squeeze them tight as they grow.  Your body is truly a magnificent thing.  Without it, you would not be here. 

2. Another way you can begin to heal from binge eating is to take steps to reject diet culture, and the messages to be thin at all costs. Diets lead us to feel crazy around food, obsess about our bodies, and not live a life that is full of so much more than the way we look.  Join the club of people who have learned to ditch diets for good, and recognize the harm that they have actually brought to our lives—and our bodies. 

3. Next, learn to eat intuitively. Intuitive Eating was created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch and it supports the concept of eating according to your own body’s intuition.  Instead of eating according to the rules of a diet book or outside source of information, you listen to your body.  At each meal you ask  yourself,what sounds satisfying?  What kind of food would make you feel physically good right now?  You eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full.  It’s a lot like going back to eating the way you did when you were a small child.  It makes total sense.  My two year old does not need to be told when to eat, when to stop, or what to eat.  Instead, he refuses food he does not want, sometimes he eats very little, sometimes he eats a lot, and what he is interested in eating changes all the time.    

4. The last (and I would argue the most important) step to stop binge eating for good is to surround yourself with a community who believes in these alternative ideas. Changing your belief system is crucial to changing your actions.  Right now, if you struggle with binge eating, it is likely that you have subscribed to (and thus believe in) diet culture and thin beauty ideals for a long time.  That is not your fault!  I was sucked in too!  How could you not, it can often feel that it is the ONLY message out there. 

Building a support system around you, where these new ideas can be supported will make you feel LESS ALONE.  This concept was paramount in my own healing.  I know that this could be a stretch to do in person.  It was for me too.  Almost everyone around me thought that these ideas were a bit crazy.  Most people looked at me and said “Shelby that is crazy, if I stop dieting I will just eat everything in sight and blow up like a balloon!”  I assure you, that this is simply not true—but a lot of people don’t believe me on this point. 

Consider doing what I did:  I picked up books on intuitive eating.  I listened to podcasts on body acceptance, intuitive eating, and health at every size.  I have had clients tell me that they began following people on social media platforms who regularly post on these types of ideas.  Building your support system is KEY to stopping binge eating.  You can listen to a podcast on the way to work, while getting ready in the morning, or while making dinner.  This does not have to be hard.  Just merely being exposed to alternative messages will help you to consider and learn about alternative ways of life.  Exposure to new ideas will help you to consider alternative belief systems, and ultimately allow you to know that there is more than one way to think about your eating.  I have even included a list of some of my favorite resources down below to get you started!

You deserve to live a life that is free of binge eating.  You don’t deserve to live feeling guilty around food, stressed out around food, and feeling badly about your body. 

If you liked this article, remember to share it with your friends, because this also supports you to build your support system—and ours!!! 

Until next time, have fun learning and embracing all of the wildly wonderful and amazing parts of YOU!

Shelby

Resources: 

Real Health Radio Podcast with Chris Sandel.  Chris is excellent with giving science and education behind the concepts I discussed above.  He will also help you to begin to build a community of voices who think in the ways that I discussed above through numerous interviews he has done on his podcast.  Building these new voices in your mind will help shift your belief system away from diet culture and into more healthy positive counter-cultural messages. 

Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.  This is an excellent book that many therapists, dietitians, and disordered eating specialists use to support people with disordered eating, body image, and binge eating.  It is not too dense, I think anyone can benefit from learning about these concepts.  They have put out a few different books and their resources are amazing for learning this new world away from diet culture. 

Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon.  This is another excellent book to help you understand the other side to diet culture, how we become so entrenched in it, and learn how it has become such an accepted part of our culture.  Knowing more about what you currently believe and how it came to be is essential to helping you question whether your beliefs are actually serving you or not. 

Isabel Foxen Duke,  www.isabelfoxenduke.com I learned about Isabel on Chris Sandel’s podcast that I listed above.  Isabel is so candid, empathic, and compassionate about sharing her own story of disordered eating and binge eating, and she does such a wonderful job of helping people to learn other ways of being around food.  I encourage you to listen to the interviews she has done on Chris Sandel’s podcast and to also look her up.