Emotionally Bouncing Back After a Night of Binge Eating

You move on and know that tomorrow is another day. You can't undo today's binge. You can only focus on tomorrow...one day at a time.

Nothin' you can do about it now. Forget it ever happened and move on. I do it all the time.

Tomorrow will be a new day, so start over then. And try to go to the gym tomorrow as planned. It's hard, I know. I had a binge yesterday and today...I feel so sick but I know how important it is to get back on the wagon tomorrow. Or to "claw back" on it, as MIssJanet55 so appropriately stated!

We're human. Don't worry about it. Just get yourself motivated and get back on track.

Pick yourself back up and brush yourself off. You can't undo today, but you can make better choices tomorrow

Sometimes I find I don't bounce back so much as slowly claw my way back an inch at a time.

In AA and Al Anon they talk about "act as if" - in this case, act as if everything is fine and this was a perfect day. Proceed from there rather than from a sense of shame and inadequacy. It sounds weird, but it works .

Well, for the user, yes. For everyone else around who had to deal with the consequences of the drunk's behaviour, whilst they happily pretend nothing has happened, not so much.



Something has happened. You went back to old habits that will hurt you. Why was that? Was it because the stuff was there, so it was easier to say 'I feel bad, so I have to eat this stuff'? Could it be because in some way, you were subconsciously looking for a reason to do it? Or because it's been there, permanently nagging at the back of your mind that there's loads of really good stuff sitting and waiting for a bad day? Or could it be because you've cut down too much and you were too hungry to reason with yourself that all you needed was one sweet thing, so you went for tons of it?




One positive thing to consider is that if you've eaten all the sweet food in the house, there isn't any left to grab later on with you reasoning that it's too late to make it any better, so may as well carry on. DON'T REPLACE IT.

If you don't replace it, then you aren't in the same position next time you have difficult feelings to deal with.




At the same time, using it to reinforce negative images of yourself can mean you convince yourself that you are helpless, weak, unable to do this anymore, so may as well give up, etc - so look at what contributed to the binge, whether you have bought of not disposed of the food previously because you were in some way planning all along to have this binge; whether you dealt with a difficult situation or emotion badly by using the old coping strategy of putting as much food in within as little time as possible; whether you haven't been eating regularly, so had a crash in blood sugar - any, all, some or none of those things could be what led to you doing this.

Use that knowledge to plan how you will react next time, for example, by not having the sweet stuff in the cupboard, by responding differently to difficult stuff, such as by walking away, deep breathing, saying 'No' to somebody - whatever is your strategy, it will work better than a) somebody else telling you that it doesn't matter, when it does because it's upset you and b) that there is only one way to deal with it next time.

I actually try NOT to spend too much time reflecting on an off day. If I overthink it, I can convince myself I've failed and it's over. It's just a day. Life happens, sometimes we eat too much. It's about what you do most of the time, not that one day.

This is what I remind myself - before I really got started and committed to changing my lifestyle, there were so many times I had a day of eating less and exercising. I didn't lose weight because it was ONLY a day. Or maybe I'd do it for a week or a month and lose a couple of pounds. But I didn't stick with it long-term, so didn't maintain it. So a day where I go over on calories or whatever by 1000 or more (and it's happened more than once) isn't going to do the reverse and cause me to gain back all the weight I lost. It's about what you do MOST of the time, not on any one specific day.