by GOLDA PORETSKY, H.H.C.

Healing from Compulsive Overeating / Binge-ing is Impossible Within This Cycle.

Does this sound familiar…

You go on a diet or meal plan and you do really well with it for a little while. You feel in control, healthier, just “better” overall…then something happens. You have a rough day at work. You have a fight with your partner. You wake up feeling too tired to work out or just hungrier than usual. And then … you binge or just generally eat past the point of comfort.  Maybe you eat something that isn’t on your plan, something forbidden. Maybe you go back to your plan or diet the next day, but these “cheat days” or binges seem to happen more and more frequently. You beat up on yourself. You feel like you failed. You feel overwhelmed with emotions. Your body feels uncomfortable and bloated.

So what do you do? The only thing you know how to do. The thing that everyone tells you to do. You go back on a diet or plan (maybe the same one, maybe a new one) and hope that overwhelming feeling, that hurricane of desire to binge, won’t happen again.  You start to feel in control, healthier, just “better” overall. And then something happens . . .

Why Portion Control,  Restricting & Dieting Don’t Work:

There are many, many reasons why portion control, restricting, dieting  do not work if you have bingeing* or overeating patterns. Portion control doesn’t help a binge. It only leads to a new one. Using portion control to deal with overeating is like putting a band-aid on a deep knife wound. Maybe it’ll stop a bit of the bleeding or seem to be taking care of the problem for a while, but eventually you’ll realize that the band-aid isn’t helping. Plus, you may find that just putting a band-aid on it causes more problems than it solves.

The main reason why portion control doesn’t work is that it only deals with the symptom of bingeing, not the root cause. If you’re eating past the point of comfort as a way to ignore your feelings, those feelings don’t go away. They just get driven deeper down, only to come up again when you’re not paying attention. If you’re eating past the point of comfort because you’re body is desperately hungry because you’ve been restricting food, restricting more will not solve the problem.
Restricting will only lead to your next binge, and the cycle will start again.

What To Do Instead:

In order to really heal, it’s important to break out of the restrict/binge cycle. That can be hard to do on your own, so getting additional support is helpful. However, here are three tips to get you started.

1) Intentionally Stop Restricting — This is different than stopping restricting because you’re bingeing. This is an intentional move out of the cycle. Decide that you are going to start a practice of listening to your body more. This process can take a while and be more complicated than it first appears, but it’s important to set this intention for yourself.

2) Respect Your Emotional Reality — Sometimes it’s hard to really acknowledge the depth and breadth of your emotions. You may have been raised to not express certain “negative” emotions, like anger or fear.  But the more you deny your emotions the more difficult they are to deal with. So it’s helpful to practice connecting with and acknowledging your emotions. Sometimes it’s helpful to just take a breath and ask yourself “What am I feeling?”  Trust that it’s okay to feel your feelings and practice finding safe ways to express them. The more you acknowledge your emotional reality, the less you’ll need to use food to handle your emotions.

3) Let Go Of Doing This Perfectly — Trying to be perfect is often a big part of what keeps you stuck in the binge/restrict cycle. We try to be perfect with food, handle our emotions perfectly, deal with friends and loved ones perfectly and the end result is that we feel massively flawed for being imperfect. There is no perfect way to eat, no perfect way to deal with your emotions and no perfect way out of the binge/restrict cycle. What is perfect is your particular journey, no matter how imperfect it may seem.

http://www.bodylovewellness.com/2012/08/13/why-portion-control-doesnt-work-and-what-to-do-instead/