Everyday Fitness

The topic of binging is a common thread woven into the fabric of my WebMD Diet Exchange community. There’s a constant chorus of frustration and angst about the pain and shame associated with every binge. As soon as one of you posts you’ve done it again, I’m impressed by the rapid-fire responses from WebMD members who emerge with consoling support and advice.

For example, JenNS12 recently posted this story:

“Most of my life I’ve turned to food for comfort. My parents split up 10 years ago, when I was 16, and I probably gained 40 lbs that year. I have always been overweight though. Finally decided to take control and start eating healthy in June of last year. Gave up fast food, fried foods, sodas, and most sweets. I’ve lost 55 pounds, yay! Just a few pounds from being in the normal range now. Well today I was having a really bad day and feeling depressed. What did I do but start shoving junk food in my face – chocolate covered raisins, potato chips, swedish fish, a bagel, and even more. Now I feel totally disgusted and very upset that I ate all that. Did it make me feel better about life?…Absolutely not! I ate it because I was depressed now I’m even more depressed. I’ve worked so hard to lose weight and am very proud of myself. So why did I completely self sabotage today?”

Sound familiar? Well, it did to a long stream of members who immediately posted how much they related to her experience, offering up words of wisdom born of years of similar pain. Most people who’ve ever been overweight or obese know that the path to their excess fat was laid by many binges. So, let’s take a step back and look at binging and possible solutions to Jen’s dilemma, and yours as well.

A binge is associated with the rapid consumption of an excessive amount of food at one sitting, usually on average 1000-2000 calories or more. That’s pretty easy to do considering one pint of ice cream can easily contain 700 calories. Most bingers hide their behavior, engaging in secret binges which are associated with feelings of shame and guilt. Binging is highly associated with depression.

Sometimes the binging results in some kind of compensatory behavior such as excessive exercise or purging (vomiting). When people do this on a frequent and regular basis, it is then seen as the symptom of an eating disorder. In Jen’s case, she has been doing well with her weight removal, and then fell into an emotional land mine of stress. She reverted back to a familiar, knee-jerk habit, which was to anesthetize her anxiety with food. Even she realized that food was not the answer, and yet she did it anyway, feeling disappointed and depressed post binge.

There is scientific evidence that consuming large quantities of refined sugar and fat does impact your stress hormone, decreasing its overall effect in the short-term. You feel a bit calmer, numb to pain. That’s what I call medicating with food. It’s short-lived and you’ll wake up from that food coma feeling emotionally drained and depressed.

However, at the core, binging is not about food. It’s about a consistent difficulty coping with life’s stresses. As I note in Body for Life for Women, the key to nipping your binges in the bud is to learn how to adapt and adjust to the curve balls we get on a daily basis, without resorting to self-destructive behaviors. Those behaviors, like binging, are associated with negative self-esteem, body image and self-speak.

Here are some tips, tools and techniques to help you understand and manage binging:

1. Be mindful of every mouthful. Binging is not about relishing and savoring food. It is about shoving food (often bingers will grab whatever is around even if they don’t like it) into your mouth in a desperate attempt to neutralize mental angst. Instead, practice a new habit of mindful eating. I just wrote a blog on “Slow Eating, Fast Results” and I’ve provided some simple steps you can take to start integrating mindfulness into your eating habits.

2. Breathe through stress. When stress hits, you need to fight the impulse to hit the fridge. Pause. Stop. Breathe deeply. Make up a mantra to calm yourself. For instance, you can say “It is what it is.” Prayer works. It has to be something meaningful enough to snap you back into reality and halt the drive to binge. Take time to create a repertoire of phrases. Experiment and see what works.

3. Relax. As Jen’s tsunami of stress hit her, she tightened up, her whole body turning into a twisted mess of muscular strain, all of which increased the intensity of the pain she was already experiencing. There are a number of great relaxation techniques that work well to release the tension and allow you to achieve a physical calm while your mind is working to find a more peaceful place. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living is a terrific book that explains the total body relaxation technique he’s used for many years at the Univ. of Mass. Harvard’s Herbert Benson wrote The Relaxation Response which is a simple technique you can use anywhere and any time of day, to meditate and rejuvenate. Relaxation leads to a greater clarity of thought and enhances mindfulness.

4. Create a kinder self-dialogue. Bingers have a very derogatory self-dialogue. As an exercise, write down the words and phrases you tend to use to describe yourself. Say them out loud. Pretty eye-opening, right? Now, for each one of these, neutralize them with a self-loving and supportive new script. Instead of “I’m fat and a loser,” try “I’m proud of my new journey, I’m working hard to get healthier and I’m a winner.” Big difference. Sit down and start working on your new script today. It’s a lifesaver.

5. Learn how to solve problems without self-destruction. Bingers have problems coping with life’s stresses in ways that are progressive and productive. It’s time to learn new problem-solving skills. Bingers tend to feel overwhelmed. A first step is to break up problems into smaller, more doable pieces, allowing baby steps toward a resolution. Also, when obstacles do occur, it’s important to embrace them with less fear. This involves re-calibrating expectation. Expect challenges along the way. Expect tough times. Belly up to the table of life and show them you have courage and tenacity. You can do this.

6. Practice with patience. As you put your new habits into motion, be patient. Trust that you’re doing the right thing. Push ahead to achieve each milestone. Getting through just one stress without resorting to binging is terrific. Or, if you ate one half of what you normally would have eaten, that’s a triumph. Keep practicing every day.

7. Forgive yourself. Most of the people who posted replies on Jen’s discussion group were very forgiving of her binge. They encouraged her to see this as a bump in the road and not the end of a journey. Forgiveness is essential in the learning process. You’ll slip and slide as you continue the journey. Embrace every one of those instances as times when you can find the lesson and become wiser. Realize that one binge will not bring back 55 pounds, and that it’s not the beginning of a regain of all of the weight. Jen needs to realize she’s fine. Falling off the wagon here and there occurs as you continue to practice new habits.

8. Regroup. It’s critical to end the binge as soon as possible, and then to hop right back into practicing the healthy lifestyle habits as soon as possible. That means pushing aside all of the negative speak – “How could I have done this? What a loser I am. I’m such a failure” – and just resuming your normal healthy habits. Give it 24 hours of eating clean and you’ll feel so much better.

9. If you must overeat, be smart. This means that instead of having 3 quarts of ice cream, have a monster bowl of fruit. Never keep junk in your house, so that if the impulse does hit you, you’ll have 10 WASA crackers and not 10 bags of cookies. It’s all a matter of degree. Everyone goes off the wagon, but smart people keep it cleaner. One of my patients posted a witty note stating that she’s removed 20 pounds and one day she got the urge to binge when stress hit her squarely in the head. Instead of what she’d usually done in the past (eat everything in sight), she had 5 mounds of cottage cheese and fruit and felt totally stuffed. She laughed and now calls it her “cottage cheese moment.”

10. Maintain vigilance. Jen’s reversion back to her old binging habit is not surprising. You cannot expect a habit that has been so ingrained for many years to simply disappear because you’ve dropped weight in the recent past. Instead, everyone needs to stay vigilant. Be aware of your vulnerabilities. Everyone has them. Watch out for feeling helpless, hopeless and defeated about any stress in life. People who maintain their vigilance are rewarded with the strength needed to pay attention and make the right choices.

Can you relate to binging when you’re stressed? Join the conversation on the Diet Exchange.