20/07/2020
I have been really struggling with disordered eating lately. This was all triggered by a stint of keto dieting in December 2019, I had faithfully stuck to the diet for a full 3 weeks just before Christmas, carefully weighing my food and diligently counting every single gram of carbs, ensuring I never ate more than 20g. I lost 3kg’s on the Keto diet and felt like I was finally making progress. I weighed 67kg and was excited to see the number on the scale decreasing.
Then, our work Christmas break up party happened. I resolved that day to not touch a single carb; easy enough, I thought. I managed to make it until dessert, when my inner voice convinced me to try the christmas pudding. “After all, it’s Christmas!” I convinced myself. I broke my diet and binged on all the desserts the buffet had to offer, not caring a single bit about what my colleagues would think of me.
I haven’t been able to stop binging since and am now a solid 73kg. The heaviest I reached was 75kg a couple of months ago. I am disappointed in myself and am saddened by my fuller figure. I no longer see myself as a healthy weight, I feel like a pudding.
The binging was out of control, eating in excess of 5000 calories per binge and feeling absolutely disgusting afterwards. My compensatory behaviours started, I didn’t get to the point of purging this time but I did starve myself the following day. It was never enough to offset the damage such an immense consumption of calories did to my waistline, so my weight has been trending upwards overall.
Over the past week, the binging has subsided greatly and I can only attribute this to reading a book ‘Brain Over Binge’ by Kathryn Hansen. In this book, Hansen relays her journey through overcoming bulimia over years of therapy, only to discover that thinking about binging as a habit was all it took to end the binging. The therapy was not helpful for Kathryn, thinking of herself as damaged and trying to meet a need through binge eating did nothing to end the binging and only made Kathryn frustrated by her lack of improvement.
The message behind Kathryn’s success of ending binge eating was simple; Not binge eating is what stopped Kathryn from not binge eating. Viewing binge eating as a bad habit that Kathryn had developed over years, beginning with her first forays into the dieting world, was what helped her overcome her eating disorder. Kathryn managed to overcome her binge eating habits by first understanding that it was her animal brain, responsible for key drives in life but terrible for rational decisions, that was driving her to seek food. Massive quantities of food.
Kathryn acknowledged the urge to binge came from this part of her brain, her primitive animal brain, but chose not to act on those impulses. She noticed that thinking in this way, viewing her urges as if she were a spectator of her own self, helped her to overcome the desire to binge eat. She could just stop listening to this part of her brain and continue on with her day.
Since reading this book, I’ve also been viewing my eating as simply a bad habit that formed long ago after my first attempt at dieting. I will receive some sort of cue to eat whether it be boredom, hunger, something totally unconscious; I begin craving a binge. I am so uncomfortable when I am having an urge to binge, and I feel the only way to satisfy this is to eat. After the binge, I’m rewarded with a warm calm and satisfaction that nothing but having an overstuffed belly can bring.
This habit first formed when I was a teenager and dieted, I was always an overweight kid and truth be told I did need to lose weight. I took it too far, I lost more weight than I needed and I became unwell. Binge eating solves a problem, it solves a problem of periods of time with food scarcity. My animal brain doesn’t know that I never truly experience these moments in time, but it doesn’t know any better.
28/07/2021
It has been a full year since I wrote the above post that I never finished, I remember how obsessed I was at solving my binge eating problem. The problem didn’t resolve itself until around October 2020, when lockdown was ending in Melbourne and I had other things to think about other than what my body looked like. Over eating became (and still is) a form of coping for me. When I feel lonely, bored or stressed I reach for food. If I feel like feeling warm and comfortable, I reach for food. It’s no wonder that I continued to binge well beyond this blog post and that the Brain Over Binge book didn’t stop me from binge eating, although it did provide some useful insights.
I’ve been in an on again off again relationship with Intuitive Eating for the past 11 months now, I ended up gaining perhaps another 10+kg? Who knows, I haven’t weighed myself in a while. In August last year I first read Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch book Intuitive Eating, with full permission to eat whatever I wanted, I binged like you wouldn’t believe, ballooning my weight up to about 80kg in a short space of time. After seeing the “damage” I had done to myself, I freaked out and spent the next 8 months attempting to control my weight again. I went on diets that lasted perhaps a week at most, I saw a dietician and wasted hundreds of dollars, I fretted about what I looked like and became consumed with the thoughts of looking better than I did. What a waste of my life.
I’m now at a place in my life where I can start to accept what I look like and make peace with my food. I’m angry at how much of my life I’ve wasted obsessing over my weight and diet. My goal is to have food be neutral and I spend my brain power thinking about more interesting and meaningful topics. I have to admit, this is very difficult for me. I know that I’ve gained a lot of fat, although I haven’t weighed myself since I was about 85kg, and I can tell I’ve gained more because my clothes are tight once again. This hurts, it’s hard to move away from. I’m still refusing to weigh myself and instead I’m trying to focus on how I feel. I’ve allowed myself to eat whatever I want for a couple of months now, I can say that my craving for particular foods has decreased and I find myself wanting more vegetables and fruit, but I do still find myself overeating a lot, I suppose I’m still worried I’m going to restrict my intake again.
My mindset has really shifted since I re-attempted eating intuitively, I’m now trying to be as kind to myself as possible. Harsh punishment and violence against myself hasn’t made my life any more full and enjoyable, it’s only detracted from my life greatly, so instead I’m treating myself with kindness and compassion. Since taking this route in life, I have managed to do more activities that I love, and I’m slowly coming to enjoy the life that I’m living. I’m truly grateful for finding intuitive eating and restoring my relationship with food, its a slow process and I still struggle often, but I love that food doesnt have the same power it once did over me. The half eaten block of chocolate in the cupboard is a testament to how far I’ve come, chocolate could never exist in my house previously, I had an all or nothing relationship with it, now it sits and waits happily for me in the cupboard. I will eat you when I want, chocolate.