I literally cannot believe it.
For ~3 years I’ve been dealing with an ever-worsening binge eating problem, sometimes binging 5000+ calories multiple days in a row. For 100 days, I have not binged even once. Not only that, but I have managed to lose 9.5lbs in that time.
I feel a bit silly celebrating this kind of tiny milestone, but 100 days ago I literally didn’t think this was possible.
Things that helped me get here:
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Therapy. TBH the therapist I had was not particularly insightful, but having someone that I could talk through my binges with openly, honestly, and without judgement gave me the mental space to see the patterns and learn from them. 6 months of trying and failing, and I was finally able to stop making the same mistakes over and over again and actually make progress.
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I got rid of all exercise for a few months. I have been a runner for many years, but when the binging started, I unwittingly started using running as a kind of purge. Additionally, high-impact exercise makes me insanely ravenous, and I am/was not in the mental space to healthily deal with that. So, instead I gave up all exercise (in part to prove to myself I didn’t need it to lose weight, which turned out to be true), and after a few months of literally nothing, I started experimenting with adding in some very low-impact exercise. So far, some yoga, 6k steps a day, and 1x a week weightlifting are all ok. I still run infrequently when the urge calls me, but a true running routine will have to wait until I am in maintenance.
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I don’t eat less than 1800 calories. I know I could lose faster if I did. There’s a lot of pressure online to eat 1500 or less, and to not count exercise calories. But I also know that the second I get even 100 calories below 1800 suddenly I’m on edge and constantly staving off binges. I don’t lose every week, but I know the weight loss is happening. Anything is better than nothing (or, as was happening, gaining).
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I eat normal food. I eat a very healthy diet, with all the macros and micros, whole grains and veg and all that, but I also eat pizza and candy and restaurant food. Seems simple, but for a long time I had this idea that if I even entertained the idea of eating junk food, it would become out of control and wouldn’t be able to stop. In the past, I tried to avoid it by all means possible, which only made things worse. In an attempt to stop repeating unhelpful patterns, I instead started planning these foods into my day. It took some practice, but I am pretty good now at just having one serving of something and then stopping. This has allowed me a fairly normal relationship around “fun” food, and has in turn made me truly unstoppable in real-life, uncontrollable scenarios (read: junk-food-queen MIL stayed at our house for 2 weeks, packed it with junk food, took us out for a lot of dinners, I partook in every treat and outing and still managed to not just not binge, but lose weight those weeks 💅).
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I plan ALL my food the night before. The space between hunger and eating is where the devil lives, so planning all my meals/snacks out the day before means that all I have to do is look at MFP and make that thing, and I know it’s balanced and healthy and filling. No staring at the cupboards or fridge and ending up just shoving a bunch of random stuff into my mouth until I stop being hungry, only to discover it was 900 calories, 80% carbs and sugar, and starving again in an hour. The level up of this would be actual meal prepping, but I am unfortunately not that girl.
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Intermittent fasting. This one is bottom list because it is risky business for binging, but I started when I started seeing my therapist because, instead of the usual advice of eating basically all the time to try and mask hunger, I instead wanted to go head first into it and learn to work through it (with the help of therapist) without food, because I knew that’s where my problem was. And you know what? It actually did help. I was deadly strict about my eating and fasting windows, and that meant that few the hours just before eating when I would be reliably hungry, I was forced to use other techniques that weren’t food to get through it, and I equally noticed that a lot of the time my desire for food was less about hunger, and more about masking emotions. Fasting forced me to learn to sit in the emotions and feel them, and that allowed me to learn to actually better address them. At this point I’m not that strict about it, because I’m pretty good at telling now whether an urge to eat is emotional or physiological, but strict 16/8 IF was integral to that.
Anyways that was super long, but when I was at the height of my binge eating I would go through every single post I could find on this subreddit about overcoming binge eating, and I always found it hopeful to know that other people had been through it and lived to see the other side, and i loved reading all their advice, so maybe someone else here does too. Especially since so much of binge eating advice is to basically just keep binge eating because it’s healthy and natural (re: the literal advice of my first therapist 4 years ago), I wanted to offer an alternative.
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