The problem isn’t the binge eating, the problem is the diet
Raise your hand if you’ve been on some kind of diet or “lifestyle” before and it didn’t work for you.
Now raise your hand if you blamed your “lack of willpower” and “lack of self control” for this.
Okay.
Now, raise your hand if you loved this “lifestyle” or diet at the beginning until the first “cheat” happened and you either binge ate or overate on something that was “off limits”. I am over here raising my hand at all of this.
We think that the diet we are following is perfect and we feel “in control” until we feel out of control. (Read about my experience with binge eating here)
I spent years of my life thinking that I was the problem. Not the Paleo Diet or whatever “lifestyle” I was following at the time.
I thought that I was being weak, that I just need to “pull my sh*t together and take control”. In reality, my body was in control all along.
How our bodies perceive diets
Our bodies don’t know that we want to shrink them. We wouldn’t be here today, if our ancestors were trying to shrink their bodies. They wouldn’t have survived without their bodies’ strong desire to live and sustain their energy as long as possible.
This hasn’t changed today. Our bodies still perceive food deprivation as danger. Their number one job is survival and food deprivation puts our survival at risk. This is our body’s DNA that has been thousands of years in the making.
Our ancestors didn’t have an abundant amount of food available. Whenever food was scarce (today’s version of food scarcity is dieting), our bodies had to learn to prioritize survival by making us humans seek food. And lots of it.
It’s not any different today. Dieting is our body’s version of a famine from back in the day. And our body is going to do a n y t h i n g to get us to eat more and be safe again.
That is why binge eating happens.
Binge eating or overeating consistently is a direct result of deprivation, it’s never the other way around
Even if your dieting days are long gone, you may still have a very restrictive mindset. You may feel guilty for eating certain things or you may plan another diet in the future. Even just thinking about another diet down the road will turn your body’s alarm bells on.
It will go back into survival mode and make you binge eat, just in case there is another famine (read: diet) on the way.
So, before you blame yourself next time, take a moment to reflect and see how much physical or mental deprivation you have put your body through.
It’s not your fault that you binge eat or overeat on simple carbs.
It’s your body trying to protect you and replenish/pre-load its energy stores as quickly as possible.
Eat more to binge less
My 6-Week course goes over all of this in detail (Enrollment starts again in January!) and it makes me so happy to watch all my students learn to eat more in order to binge less.
It’s healing and empowering to give yourself full permission to eat foods that make you feel good, without depriving yourself or feeling guilty.
If you are currently going through this phase of binge-restrict-overeat-restrict, know that there IS a way out.
There is hope and you are never alone.
My everyday mantra is this: Eat the damn cookie and move on with your day. xoxo
Here is one more helpful article on stopping the binge-restrict cycle
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