This post is for all of you who are scared of the all you can eat buffet, or any event where there is an unlimited amount of food on supply, for some of us that could even be the grocery store. Trust me, I know that fear. The fear that you will start filling your plate and will literally not be able to stop. You will keep eating and eating and eating until you can’t move, until you feel physically sick, beyond physically sick even.
I have been there. That horrendous fullness and absolute self-loathing at what a “fat, greedy, disgusting pig” you are. I know it well. There is a secret to stopping these behaviours dead in their tracks though.
It’s something which confused me for an incredibly long time. It’s paradoxical, it doesn’t make sense when you have lived in diet land for so long. But the whole point is to get out of diet crazy town right? So we need to think differently.
The reason we binge, the reason we eat and eat and eat at sporadic times, seemingly for no reason is because we. are. not. allowed. to.
That’s right, we binge because we restrict
We have this story running in our head that we are not allowed to eat as much as we want in an unlimited way. We spend our whole lives restricting ourselves, telling ourselves we are not allowed to have this, we must have a smaller portion, we can’t have two helpings, we mustn’t have dessert.
We are constantly trying to control ourselves around food with our minds. We are trying to use willpower to fight our bodies, a battle between the psychological and the physical. SO when there is a message in the outside world that says ‘all you can eat’ or there is a family barbeque, party, any event with free food…suddenly psychologically we are given this green light, this free pass to literally eat as much as we can before our own minds take back the reins.
This has broader ramifications as well. Think about it…the only reason you binge is because you restrict yourself. If you didn’t restrict yourself at all around food, physically or psychologically you wouldn’t binge. By psychologically I mean to say that you might still be eating enough to meet your physical needs but if in your mind you are chastising yourself, telling yourself it is too much or not the right thing this counts as psychological restriction.