5 Unusual Things That Ended My Binge Eating

Whenever I wanted to stop binge eating, I looked in the same place.

Food.

What I was eating.
How much I was eating.
What I should remove.
What I should replace it with.
What diet I should follow next.

It seemed completely logical.

If the problem involved food, surely food must be the thing I needed to fix. Except I tried that for decades. And the bingeing kept coming back.

Looking back, the things that eventually changed my relationship with food were almost the opposite of everything I had previously been taught.

Here are five of them.

1. I stopped trying so hard to stop bingeing

This sounds ridiculous when binge eating is the very thing you desperately want to stop. But I began to see how much pressure I was creating around it. Every binge was followed by another promise.

Tomorrow I'll be good.

Tomorrow I'll get back on track.

Tomorrow I'll have more control.

And underneath all of it was this constant message to myself:

You must not do this again.

The problem was, fighting the binge didn't make the urge disappear. It often made it louder. Eventually I became curious about what would happen if I stopped making the binge my enemy. Not because I wanted to continue binge eating. But because I wanted to understand it. That was a very different place to begin.

2. I gave myself permission to eat

After years of dieting, food had become surrounded by rules. Good foods. Bad foods. Days when I'd been good.

Days when I'd ruined everything. Meals I was allowed. Foods I shouldn't have. And when you have lived like that for long enough, permission can feel almost dangerous. Surely if I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted, I'd never stop?

But something surprising happened.

When food stopped constantly being taken away from me, I stopped feeling quite so desperate to grab it while I could. The urgency slowly began to fade

.

3. I stopped asking what was wrong with my eating

And started asking:

What is food doing for me?

That question changed my whole perspective. Because the binge wasn't simply an unwanted behaviour. It gave me something.

Sometimes relief.

Sometimes comfort.

Sometimes distraction.

Sometimes a way to quieten my own thoughts.

Sometimes just a moment where I didn't have to feel whatever I had been feeling.

Once I saw that, food began to make far more sense. My body wasn't randomly sabotaging me. It had found something that worked, even if only temporarily. And if food was providing relief, then simply taking the food away was never going to answer the deeper need.

4. I began looking at the beliefs underneath my behaviour

This was perhaps the biggest piece for me.

I had spent years trying to change my actions without really questioning the beliefs those actions were growing from.

Beliefs about my body.

Beliefs about my worth.

Beliefs about what other people thought of me.

Beliefs about who I needed to be in order to feel acceptable.

Some of them were so familiar I didn't even recognise them as beliefs.

They just felt like the truth.

But our beliefs quietly shape how we experience ourselves and our lives. And when I began noticing them, I started to understand why certain emotions, situations and relationships could create such a strong need for relief. The binge was happening much deeper.

5. I stopped making weight loss the answer to everything

Somewhere in the back of my mind, there was always the belief:

I'll feel better when I'm thinner.

More confident.

More attractive.

More comfortable.

More acceptable.

More like myself.

So much of my emotional wellbeing had become attached to a future version of my body. Eventually I began asking a different question. What if I didn't have to wait? What would happen if I began creating safety, acceptance and worthiness now?

Not when I'd lost weight.

Not when I'd finally controlled food.

Now.

And this is the strange paradox I came to understand:

The less I made my body the condition for feeling okay, the less desperately I needed food to help me feel okay.

Maybe we've been looking in the wrong place

I don't believe binge eating ended for me because I finally discovered enough discipline. I think it ended because I stopped seeing myself as somebody who needed controlling.

I stopped making food the villain.

I became curious about what was happening underneath it. And slowly, food stopped having such an enormous job to do.

If you've spent years trying to solve binge eating through food, perhaps the next question isn't:

How do I stop myself from bingeing?

Perhaps it's:

What does the binge give me that I haven't yet learnt how to give myself?

Glenys

xx