About Binges

Binges don't just happen...they stem from something. The key to stopping the bingeing behavior (for me at least) is to dig down to the root cause. The digging may not all happen in one day...and the relief from the desire to binge may not happen all in one day either but I have noticed that the urgency to binge lessons once I stop and think...okay...something is going on here...what is it? A good place to start digging into the root cause of the current desire to binge is to look at what are you feeling right now.

Start with the current feeling then dig. I use some combination of the following questions to help me get at the feeling. Here are some of the questions that I ask myself. Sometimes if the feeling is really strong I will write or journal the answers...letting myself vent all of my thoughts with no internal censoring.

So...what am I feeling right now? What do I feel physically? Emotionally?
Is this a new feeling I haven't felt before? If not, when was the first time that I can remember feeling this feeling?
What was going on at the time I felt this feeling for the first time?
How did I react to the emotion the first time I felt it?
How did others around me react to the same feeling, the situation, or my reaction to the feeling?
What positive and negative messages did I receive about the feeling?
Are any of those messages playing into what I feel now?
Are any of those messages playing into how I am coping with the feeling now?
Are any of those messages playing into my desire to binge in any way?
What triggered this feeling on this occasion?
Is it reasonable for me to feel this emotional reaction in this situation or am I reacting based on old tapes?
Is there something constructive that I can do to help myself cope with this emotion in a healthy, centered, balanced fashion?
Is there something besides food that will help me deal with this feeling?

As I have said before, there are two parts to intuitive eating...there is the part you must do to manage weight within the intuitive eating appraoch...that is the eat when hungry, stop when satisfied part. The reason why I say that this is the part you must do to manage weight is that there is no way around the fact that weight gain and weight loss are a refelction of the balance between calories consumed and calories expended through activity. The theory behind intuitive eating is that our bodies instinctively know how much, and which types of fuel it needs at any given time and we will know what to eat and when to eat it if we listen to our bodies.

The problem is that we have spent years, and years, and years NOT listening to our bodies and using food for things other than nutrition. This has tangled the intuitive knowledge of our bodies with other physical and emotional cues which we now interpret as a signal to eat. This makes eating intuitively, eating when hungry, stopping when satisfied, very difficult. And brings us to the hard fact that once was automatic is no longer automatic. Many of us have not felt hunger in a good long time, and many of us have almost entirely lost the ability to know when we are satisfied because we are so used to ignoring the satisfaction messages of our bodies.

So...we have to go back...often to where things began to go haywire...which is often in our childhoods. We have to patiently and diligently begin to untangle all of our emotions and the emotional cues to eat which go with them so that we can gradually, through compassion, understanding, and knowledge begin building a positive relationship with our bodies, which many of us have secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) hated because of their inability to remain slim, trim, and healthy in spite of the years of abuse we have dealt them.

Much of the work of intuitive eating is about rebuilding the relationships we have with all of the parts of ourselves so that we can honor both the emotional parts of ourselves (in healthy ways that don’t rely on too much food) and our bodies (by listening to and heeding the signals it gives us about when it needs fuel and when it has received enough fuel).