I do feel for you. On the whole I am finding eating at TDEE is controlling my binging. I guess I had about 20 years of binging and all the mental trash that goes with that. Since March this year I have started logging every morsel. It does help keep me accountable although I do have too much sugar but mainly still within tdee! I have found that trying to eat completely clean does not work for me, I just cant sustain it and it would end in a binge. I now figure in some sweet treats. A small one after my mid day meal and average size choccie bar after evening meal. Knowing that I am having these really helps me not feel deprived. I still have the occasional binge but nothing like before. I eat loads of veg and try to keep the protein up but I need more work on that. It really is trial and error. For me EM2WL works, as long as I am prepared to take it extremely slowly and not consider I have failed with a little slip. Have you calculated your TDEE accurately is it possible you are under eating, resulting in binging, could you be burning more in exercise or work than you think?. Just try to explore every avenue!

I think you are absolutely on the right track by tracking and keeping yourself accountable. Be proud of that fact! I wish I had some wonderful, sage words of advice for you. I've never been a binger, more of a constant grazer. Something that was helpful to me was writing it down when I had one of those grazing nights where I was constantly putting something in my mouth, from 4 pm until I went to bed. I found out my triggers - i can't have mini chocolate bars around, I put them in the freezer and think "oh, one, isn't that bad" Well, one every 20 minutes for 5 hours is!! And my emotional triggers, I'd get ticked off at my husband, mother in law, or stepson and head for the kitchen. Now I log onto MFP and vent instead. LOL Maybe a note book? Or even a blog post? It might help you find out if it's emotional eating. With all the cardio you do, though . . . it could just be that you are legitimately hungry? You'll figure it out. That's what reset is for . . . it's a time of discovery and learning new things about yourself and your eating habits.

Second thought is it might be worth posting here to get your activity level reviewed. Perhaps you are trying still to eat too little / underestimating your burns and your body is protesting? A doctor once explained the binge cycle to me saying that each day you are at deficit it's like squashing a spring... So over the course of a week the spring gets more and more compressed until what's holding it in place ( your mind) just can no longer cope with the pressure and let's go... The spring pings back out with all the tension it's built up leading to a binge... And the more deficit and so tension you've put the spring under over the week the more the
Power of the 'ping' and the bigger the binge! Hope that makes sense!!

Totm plus stressful day moving sound like an understandable trigger.

My feeling and personal experience is that setting yourself goals of 'never going to binge again' is actually setting yourself up for failure. I think managing binges and practicing forgiving yourself when they happen might be more effective. Recovery n changing habits like binging are not unfortunately going to happen over night... for me I guess it was a way my body had learnt to deal with stress, mental (fatigue) emotional ( upset) or physical ( hunger / deficit). Now as you can see from my post on this forum im still struggling to cut but my weight and generally my intske is static ... here is what I learned about curbing my binges:

Don't rule out treats... Plan and enjoy them when you are out daily but restrict the amount you have at home. My big thing is that id much much much rather actively choose to relax and eat say a mars bar and enjoy it mentally and physically than binging 10 soggy bourbon biscuits from the work biscuit tin in a fury cos I'm stressed. Often choosing to plan daily treats leads me to feel more able to resist other unplanned stress eats.

Resist the urge to 'binge then start again tomorrow' or other black and white thinking. This was and still is a biggy for me. Often a few extras got me stressed... My kcal count was no longer perfect so i paniced and then i binged but comforted myself with the idea/ promise this was the last time I'd ever do it so I might as well go out big!! If id accepted the few extras as human and forgiven myself i would have saved eating an awful lot more out of guilt and then feeling terrible. Maybe try and visualise this as a monthly not daily goal/ process. So if you go a over it's not a failure and does not lead to a tail spin just a little spike day.


Now this is an idea but ive not used it recently but did before....And now writing it think I might ho back to. set aside a box of food almost like a packed lunch , maybe 800-1000 kcal worth ( if your typical binge is 1700) which are moderately healthy but still satisfying (dark choc, nuts, protien bars, nice yogurts, fruit) If you feel the urge to start binging go to this box and allow yourself what you want, just concentrate on eating slowly and mindfully and track it. This might help you take charge of the binge. You would then be choosing the foods you enjoy but still have some goodness, removing the panic eating of the binge and can slowly perhaps reduce the amount from the box you choose to eat too. Although it might sound odd planning to binge history has showed me that they were unfortunately going to happen if I liked it or not. And my rational brain could see that eating 1000 of nutritious filling food than 2000kcal of junk was ultimately a win.


This is just my experience but hope it helps xx

Some great advice given here and quite varied. Different things work for different people! CleanandLean3 ^^^ makes many good points re the stress. You must have burned a lot of calories, moving AND working out, no wonder you were hungry! Do what you can, no one is perfect!

I'm just finishing week 5 of resetting at the strenuous activity level and it is so hard for me to be okay with eating 2655 daily. I don't think I could handle it if I had to jump up to the next level (which is about 2900, I'm 5'10").

This jumped out at me. If you are struggling to eat this much, and are turning to binges to get in your cals (which then mean you go way overboard).. then My suggestion would be to cut back on the exercise, and take yourself down to the moderate level, which will in turn drop your calorie intake. That way, you can concentrate more on getting the eating down, rather than working your butt off in the gym for 6 hours a week, which is not helping you if you are bingeing so badly.

Might be something to consider for a bit.. cut back on the exercise, then once you get the food part down, and can control your eating again, then work on adding back in more gym time if you like..


Also, STOP beating yourself up over it. It happens. It happens to all of us in varying amounts. We always feel like total crap, failures, horrible people afterwards.. Why??? We arent horrible people.. We didnt fail in life, or in the day just because we ate more than we should have.. We have to learn to accept there are days when crap like this happens. ALLOW yourself to forgive yourself. Learn from your past indiscretions in the fridge. Why did it happen? What can you do to stop it from happening again?.. How can you lessen the amount of binge you end up having?? We arent perfect. We have to be able to learn, and move on in order to get past it. Give yourself the opportunity to forgive. Put a smile on your face and start anew.

HTH