Binge Eating - How To Stop Binge Eating
Binge Eating - How To Stop Binge Eating And Get Back In The Driver’s Seat
By Melissa McCreery, Ph.D.
Binge eating is eating “gone wrong.” Binge eating is eating gone on automatic pilot, eating disconnected from physical body sensations like fullness and hunger. After a binge you may experience a glazed feeling and a “coming back to awareness.” “What happened here?” and “I wish I could undo that” are common thoughts.
Mindful eating is the opposite of bingeing. Mindful eating, conscious eating, and intuitive eating are all terms to describe eating that occurs when the mind and the body are in full communication.
When this process is happening, we eat in response to our body cues and our body’s needs. We eat
what we are hungry for and we eat until we are full (not stuffed). We are conscious of how we are feeling while we are eating and how we are likely to feel afterwards. Conscious eating does not leave us stuffed to the gills, sick to our stomachs and collapsed on the couch, too uncomfortable to move.
Conscious eating fuels us and gives us energy. The food we eat consciously gives our bodies and our
minds pleasure. It is a nice experience.
To stop binge eating, the first requirement is to turn off the automatic pilot and get back into the driver’s seat. This takes practice and won’t be easy the first or second time you try it. Like using a muscle though, your ability to stop a binge will grow stronger.
Try these tips:
Slow down. Don’t try to stop the binge at first, but communicate to yourself what you are doing. This means you are not on auto-pilot. Say to yourself out loud or in your head “I feel a binge coming on” or “Here we go” or “I’m starting to feel out of control with my eating.” Make the process
conscious.
Put your food on a plate. You’ve heard this before because it’s important. To be mindfully eating you need to be experiencing the food and how much of it you are choosing to eat.
Practice being a nonjudgmental observer. Try to notice what both your head and your body are doing–from a curious nonjudgmental standpoint.
What’s the dialogue going on in your brain? Is it silent, are you numb, are you criticizing yourself or already planning how you’ll do it differently tomorrow? Don’t try to change your thoughts, just be curious and collect data about what your mind is doing. Now put your hand on your stomach. Take a deep breath. Try to pay attention to how your body is feeling. Feel your hand on your stomach. Feel it move as you breath. Try to take note–nonjudgmentally of how your body feels. Is there tension anywhere, muscle tightness, are you holding your breath or breathing deeply? Does your stomach feel full or empty? How full? How empty?
If you feel courageous, put your other hand on your heart. Feel your heart beat. Keep breathing. Ask yourself what you are REALLY hungry for. Ask yourself what you could feed your self and your spirit IN ADDITION TO food. Sit for a minute and listen. Don’t worry or be afraid if you don’t know the answer this time. It’s asking the question that is important.
Afterwards, if you can do it, try to write down what you noticed about the whole experience. Work very hard not to be critical but to write from the standpoint of a curious observer. As you think about what happened, can you identify anything that brought you to that binge? What was going on before? When did you decide to do it? Can you identify how you were feeling–both in your mind (bored, lonely, happy, sad) and in your body (tired, tense, hungry)?
Practice doing one small, nice, compassionate thing for your body and soul every day that has nothing to do with food. It doesn’t have to be earth shattering. Put your feet up and sit for fifteen minutes before you tackle the laundry, take a bubble bath instead of a shower, wear something that you feel lovely in, put music on that you love, kick off your shoes and wiggle your toes.
Melissa McCreery, Ph.D. is a Psychologist and Life and Wellness Coach who helps her clients create and live their very best lives. She is also the creator of the Emotional Eating Toolbox (TM), Tools for Taking Control and Moving Beyond Dieting. Subscribe to her free newsletter, Mindspa, at her website: http://www.enduringchange.com
Copyright 2006 - Melissa McCreery, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, give author name credit and follow all of the EzineArticles terms of service for Publishers.
How I was able to stop binge eating
Binge Eating No More - I Used to Eat the Whole Refrigerator Plus Everything in the Cupboards
By Jana S.
What should you do if you feel like you are about to lose yourself in an eating binge?
I struggled with binge eating for many years. And I am about to share some ideas with you of alternative things you can do instead of bingeing. Choosing to do more healthy behaviors instead of bingeing is very important in recovery from binge eating.
However, I must tell you that for most people, another essential part of recovery and healing from binge eating is to do some personal internal work on what is causing you to turn to food as coping strategy in your life.
So, yes, these alternative healthy choices are very helpful and important to gaining freedom from bingeing - but you need to also know that working with a group or a trained compassionate counselor will also help you tremendously and is just as important as the following list of alternatives. Okay? Great!
Remember to be kind and gentle to yourself when you are dealing with that all-consuming desire to go crazy with food and binge. See the desire to binge as an opportunity to really delve into what might be causing the pain in you that makes you want to turn to food to deal with your life in that moment.
Here are just a few of the things I choose to do avoid a binge:
-Take a relaxing bath
- Go for a long walk
- Do yoga - I love this for taking my mind off food. I get to breathe deeply, stretch my body, and enjoy the break from stress and pressure.
- Go out to my garage and beat on my punching bag - it relieves my stress and helps get any frustration out of me that I might be holding inside.
- Put on my headphones and listen to several of my favorite upbeat songs - and dance around if I feel like it!
- Get away from temptation. Since recovering from binge eating, I no longer bring foods into my home that trigger my binge eating tendencies. But if you can’t control the foods that are allowed into your home and your roommate or your spouse has stashes of foods in your home that you like to binge on then you need to prepared with a strategy that will get you away from the food that is calling out to you. If you have tempting food in your home, get out of your house and take a break. Go to a friend’s home and visit, or meet a friend at a park and walk together. Go to church. Pray.
Learn what I did to stop binge eating and become happy, healthy and slim.
http://RawFoodDietWeightLoss.com
Get many more free tips on how to stop binge eating
http://HowCanIStopBingeEating.com/
21 Binge Eating Symptoms
Binge Eating Disorder - How to Figure Out If You Have it - Take the 21 Binge Eating Symptoms Test
By Jana Suzzane
I was a binge eater for over 20 years.
For me binge eating meant that I ate WAY PAST the comfortable place of feeling full - eating to the point of pain sometimes after eating so much food.
Binge eating was a frenzied hectic behavior for me - where food became the primary focus and everything else was ignored. A binge might last from 1 - 4 hours and during that time everything - even the food would become a blur. The only thing on my mind was eating another bite of something I considered a “forbidden” food such as chocolate, or caramel, or high calorie full fat haagen dazs ice cream, or deep dish pizza, or potato chips, or nachos with loads of cheese.
If you are wondering if you might be a binge eater answer the following questions:
Do you choose to eat when you are not hungry?
Do you overeat or binge on food when you feel stressed out?
Do you binge on food when you are bored?
Do you eat food as a form of comfort?
Do you eat way past the point of comfortable fullness?
Do you hide food wrappers so no one will see what you have eaten?
Do you eat alone so that no one can see the food you consume?
Do you feel bad or guilty after bingeing?
Do you eat when you are not hungry?
Do you feel compulsive about eating? Like you are driven to eat ALL of something - like an entire box of chocolates or a whole container of ice cream?
Do you feel like you are always thinking about food?
Do you plan for and look forward to times when you can eat all by yourself?
Do you hide food?
Do you eat like a normal person when you are with others and then binge in private?
Do you plan binges and go on special shopping trips to the grocery store with the sole purpose of getting special forbidden “binge” foods?
Are you concerned that you are out of control with food?
Do you eat to escape from your daily pressures?
Do you find that dieting never really works for you and that it causes you to binge even more?
Are you miserable about your relationship with food?
Do you feel like your food problems control your life?
Does your weight have an overall negative effect on your life?
If you answered yes to three or more of these statements there is a good chance that you either have trouble with binge eating or you are well on your way to creating a binge eating or emotional overeating problem in your life.
There is a natural way to be free of binge eating. I suffered from Binge Eating for over 20 years and I have recovered from it. It was a dark lonely place and I am so glad to be healed and healthy and happy and free from the food issues that seemed to control so much of my life. You can be free too.
How I got free from binge eating and became happy, healthy and slim. - http://RawFoodDietWeightLoss.com
Learn how you can stop binge eating - http://HowCanIStopBingeEating.com/
8 Common Symptoms of Binge Eating Disorder
Binge Eating - 8 Common Symptoms of Binge Eating Disorder
By Jana S.
Are you a binge eater? Are you afraid you might be suffering from Binge Eating Disorder?
Listed below are 8 common symptoms of Binge Eating Disorder.
Keep in mind that all binge eaters are different so not all the symptoms listed may apply.
A binge eater tends to:
1) eat an unusually large amount of food at one sitting - eating way past the point of comfortable and sometimes eating to the point of pain from stuffing down so much food.
2) eat lots of food when they are not hungry
3) eat quickly and not really thoroughly chew the food - not savoring the food in any way.
4) eat alone during a binge so that no one can see just how much food they are shoveling down
5) hide food wrappers or any evidence of food that has been eaten so others will not know how much was eaten
6) feel manic or frenzied about bingeing - may feel like bingeing is triggered by emotional pressure but have no idea why
7) feel bad after a binge - usually disgusted with themselves, and often depressed or guilty about the lack of self control.
feel sick after the binge and often lethargic - almost in a daze of numbness
Now some of those 8 symptoms listed above may not seem that much different from an overeater.
Bingeing is way different than overeating.
Overeating is usually an occasional occurrence of going overboard with food - like people tend to do on a special occasion or holiday meal.
Binge Eating Disorder is more about a person having little control over what, when and how much food she puts into her body at one sitting.
When I began to deal for the first time with my binge eating I did not even realize that my out of control behavior with food was an actual eating disorder. I just thought it was lack of self control and I beat myself up mentally every day for not having it together when it came to food.
Now since recovering from binge eating disorder I can tell you it is a legitimate disorder. It is not just a lack of self discipline. In fact many binge eaters are some of the most disciplined people in the world. They usually get good grades, are dependable, loyal, have good jobs and are upstanding members of society.
There is hope and recovery from binge eating. I have been free from binge eating for many years and my life is no longer centered on food. I am at a slim healthy weight and my life and health are growing in a positive direction.
Learn what I did to stop binge eating and become happy, healthy and slim. http://RawFoodDietWeightLoss.com
Get free tips on how to stop binge eating http://HowCanIStopBingeEating.com/
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