Binge eating

globalc00 wrote: »

So not sure why replies weren't, No, I don't plan binge eats, Yes it is an unhealthy relationship with food.

I don't see me asking if it was healthy for my body. I didn't ask if I should go get professional help. I didn't ask for help to break this habit. I didn't ask for people's opinion if this is a good diet strategy.

Most people say something when they see someone engaging in unhealthy, potentially self-harming behavior.

If someone posted “does anyone else plan on getting blackout drunk on a regular basis? I don’t drink much on other days.” The responses would probably be concerned about alcoholism and liver function. It is the same thing.

Your behavior is unhealthy even if you aren’t trying to lose weight. I think down deep you know this, which is why you asked the question to begin with. I think you were hoping we all would reply “Yes, I binge eat on a regular basis, usually around 5,000 calories. It is totally normal, don’t worry!”

We didn’t respond how you expected and now you are justifying your eating and doing all kinds of mental gymnastics trying to convince us this is normal, or at least not as bad as we think.

globalc00 wrote: »

Ok let’s say it’s not a diet. If someone tells you they are at 5’8 140 lbs with 14% body fat would you tell them they need to diet or keep doing what they are doing?

Do you think bulimia is healthy? This is what you've described reminds me of, although your purges are not immediate, but over time, as you cut calories drastically to make up for your excesses.

Humor me here please-

What do you gain out of cramming in as much food as possible as quickly as possible? It’s certainly not to taste the food, or to enjoy a reward for being strict the rest of the week. Maybe if we can get the answer to that question we can figure out why you do what you do and what a better coping mechanism might be.

I'm a binger by nature. I can control it while dieting; but as soon as I stop trying to control it, I start binging. I know exactly what binging is and have done it hundreds of times during my life. There is nothing about stuffing yourself in a restaurant to the point where you can barely get to the car to get home, that I don't understand or haven't done scores of times. OP, everything you've described in your binges could easily fit into the category of "appetizer" for one of my binges. I've eaten twice or thrice what you've described and then headed over to the next restaurant for another full meal as though I hadn't eaten in a day, and then gone to 7-11 for snacks. I've had more than my share of splitting up my binges between two restaurants so as not to be humiliated in front of the wait staff due to how much food I was ordering and eating.

I have been on diets with planned binges. Or "off days". Or cheat days. Or whatever you want to call them. Rather than split semantic hairs over the definitions, I'll just put it like this: I've been on diets where I would have a day per week (or per two weeks) where it was understood in advance that I was going to eat as much food as I wanted to with no remorse on that scheduled day -- all the junky Chinese buffet glop and chocolate and ice cream and chips I love dearly that I'd denied myself during the week. That would be my "reward" for dieting the rest of the time. I've even lost weight that way - for a time. Of course, all the weight came back later, which is the real moral of the story.

I still have a psychological predisposition for unhealthy binging even though I've gotten much better at controlling it. Recognition of having that disorder is a key component of getting it under control. It is no different than any other addiction: step one is being honest with yourself. OP, are you being honest with yourself?

At the beginning of covid, in January, I had already been on a diet for 6 months and lost 50 pounds. I've lost another 30 since then, 80 total. I'm still on the diet. 40 more pounds to go and I will be in a normal BMI range. All good. But here's what happened to me one day in February. My wife and I were stockpiling foods in preparation for the great plague that would end up with the world looking like the set of Omega Man. Nowadays it seems silly to be that dramatic about it, but back in February it seemed sensible. We stockpiled years worth of pasta, rice, cans of tomato sauce, etc. And one more thing. 7 boxes of Pepperidge Farm cookies. Like, a box of milano's, and a box of double chocolate milanos, and a box of chessmen, and so on. Because if you're going to die in the apocalypse, you should have cookies.

One night, right when I was in the middle of my very successful, very disciplined 1700 calorie per day diet, I went to the storeroom and ate every single cookie. 7 packages of Pepperidge Farm. 8.400 calories. All gone. For no reason. Wasn't hungry. Didn't plan on eating any cookies until I was literally standing in front of the boxes. It just happened. Each cookie, I thought, one more cookie. And then all 7 boxes of cookies, 100+ cookies, were gone. Then, knowing the day was completely shot, I declared it an off day and put 7 or 8 slices of cheddar cheese on an open faced bagel and toasted it in the oven. So we're talking about a 10,000+ calorie binge.

In an hour.

Ima give you one piece of advice. Don't schedule binge days or meals. Those planned binge/cheat/off meals/days/hours contain the seeds of total systemic diet failure. It is not a question of "if" but "when". The ONLY reason Pepperidge Farm day didn't lead to Pepperidge Farm Day # 2 for me in February is because I've had a year to develop a new mind set and was able to pull back from the brink. In previous diet efforts, I did not pull back from the brink and everything fell apart.

The only reason binging is working for you is because it hasn't not worked yet. One of these days it will stop working and you will gain weight incredibly fast - so fast your head will spin and you won't even know what hit you. You'll skip your weigh-in on the scale, and then you'll give yourself another day to get it all out of your system, and then a week to really enjoy stuff before going back to granola or the other bland crap, and then you'll decide to regroup the following Monday, and when that doesn't work it'll be the first of the next month, and then the first of the next year, and 5 or 7 years from now you'll rejoin MFP and ask what people think about binging.

It's going to happen. No binger is immune from that. Hitting a new weight high is the inexorable outcome of uncontrolled binge behavior, whether it happens next week or in 2024.

Give yourself one meal every week or preferably every two weeks where you get a few hundred extra calories (as in 300 or 400) and learn to live with that. Get into good habits, mentally, with food. Count every calorie and don't ever give yourself permission to not do so. There is no reason not to have treats, but if you have any disposition to being overweight and binging, there is no reason to have total free-for-all off-days.

As I said, cheat days work until they don't, and eventually, they don't.

If you can't operationalize that - if you say to yourself "yeah, that seems sensible, I'll do that" and then next week you experience a gorge-fest - then address it as an eating disorder and stop telling yourself you've got it all under control, because you don't, or eventually won't.