I've binged....now what?!

Someone recently explained to me that she had been through a few days of eating a lot and didn't know what to do next. Of course she wanted to restrict to make up for it but she also wants to recover.

This is a situation I faced many, many times. When you're trying to learn how to eat more again it is very easy to feel unbalanced at first or doubt yourself. Sometime you may not even be overeating but you feel like you are. On the other hand it is very easy to overeat. The binge part of your brain might be tempted to give in or you might find yourself experiencing days where your calorie intake is a lot higher than you would like which can be overwhelming.

I'll admit to begin with all I wanted to do was to restrict to make up for it. It avoided me purging but allowed me still to have some control so it seemed like a great idea but it isn't....at all! By doing that you're just asking for your eating disorder to continue!!
Here's why it's a bad idea:

- When you restrict your body goes into starvation mode and slows the metabolism down....this makes your body a lot more likely to store what you've eaten over the past few days.
- When you restrict your body tries to protect you. It thinks you are starving so it causes the urge to binge. So you will be more likely to binge again and once again you will want to restrict, then binge, then restrict, then binge, you get the idea.
- You will feel depressed, energy less and miserable.
- You are preventing yourself from getting better.

The best thing to do would be to continue as if it hadn't happened. WHAT?! I hear you say...that's impossible? That's what I thought and you have to take lots of small steps to get to that point but you can get there. If you go back to eating a regular amount of calories your body will use what you have eaten over the past few days as it doesn't need it all and fairly fast as your metabolism will have been given a boost from eating more.
At first you may want to just try to eat regularly even if its just small amounts. Then next time you can see if you can try to eat a bit more following a binge. If I have a weekend that involves quite a bit of eating now I usually continue to eat as often as I usually would but for a few days after I'll go for slightly healthier options. I think that's a healthy way of dealing with it. I don't restrict and I don't obsess over it. I can also safely say that since using that technique my weight has stayed a lot more stable compared to when I binged...restricted...binged...restricted which often caused my weight to go up.

Hope that's helpful.
Love Jasmin