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What to do after a binge

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Health coach confession time: I am in recovery from an eating disorder. Recovery doesn’t mean that slips don’t happen. Recovery means slips don’t become slides. Recovery – to me – means abundant self-kindness, body positivity, and getting back to my baseline habits that help me feel better.Photo of binge by fridge by Corie Howell

There are quite a few sources out there that discuss things one can do to resume self-care with healthy eating after a binge. My tips aren’t anything radical or new. What follows is simply what works for me and perhaps a general reminder of what you already know for yourself.

If you are in active disordered eating behavior please seek professional help. You deserve to feel good and this illness requires medical and psychological expertise. Meanwhile, you might do these things to begin feeling better immediately.

In the moment

Take a pause. Take a breath. Use this time to sit at your table and totally enjoy whatever it is that you’re eating. Follow the basics: chew and taste. Thank yourself for using food to manage the difficulty that led you to eating it.

Whaaat? Yup. There are benefits to your eating behavior! You get something out of it – relief! However temporary that relief may be. This is the tool you know. This is the tool that works. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you for making this choice. No guilt. No shame.

IMHO binges are a form of self-care although they’re not great long-term or done often. Right now the benefit of relief outweighs all the cons.

If you want to stop yourself, perhaps use physical rewards that are also pleasurable like food. I like to smell sandalwood and remember how much my grandfather loved that scent and happy times at his house. Lavender works for me too.  Ditto ginger and peppermint.

Immediately after

Take care of your body. Drink water and stay hydrated. Have an over the counter medication to help with any gastrointestinal discomfort. Or use that ginger and peppermint in tea or lozenge form – both are helpful for nausea. Fennel tea is great for gas and has a lovely licorice taste.  Have a warm soothing bath or self-massage with an aromatic oil.

If you can, try to consider the things that led to the binge.  What happened? Who were you interacting with? What were your emotions? What was the physical sensation of those emotions in your body? There is a chain of events that got you into the kitchen. Recognizing context and feelings can help you break the chain another time. Do not worry if you had no bodily sensation or can’t name the emotions. This is really difficult stuff, especially if you have past trauma or co-morbid conditions. This is one reason why working with pros is helpful.

Next day and beyond

Notice any lingering effects. For example, my body is impacted when I over do sugar. I have a hard time getting out of bed next morning. I am super groggy and the feeling lasts almost an hour. Sugar will also will give me an anxiety attack within 24-48 hours of consumption. It took me decades to match this type of anxiety with food since the impact is not immediate. And, if I consume too much sugar over a period of days, my joints and tendons will begin to ache worse than usual. Now that I know I get side effects, I can sometimes break the chain of events leading to the binge by weighing the consequences. Do I want to feel better now if it means I’ll feel even worse later?

You may feel like compensating with some sort of rigid rule or restriction. Compensate with your regular routine. Restricting food the next day doesn’t erase the past and is the beginning of the next disordered cycle. Exercising more won’t burn the amount of calories you ate unless you exercise for a looooong time. Doing your daily routine is a compensation. Congratulate yourself for doing a little bit every day.

Treat yourself with healthy food that you love. I love scrambled eggs and spinach for breakfast. I’ll treat myself by adding some feta. I might go out and get a little fresh salmon for dinner – I usually don’t get it due to cost. But, that money is less than what I will pay in health care later on down the line. And, I tell myself if I’m using food as love that I am totally worth the expense.

Eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re comfortably full.

Use those CBT phrases. Your brain may be looping on beating itself up for binging. Let it. But, respond to it. Are those thoughts true? Phrases that work for me, “that happened but I can’t change the past. I am changing right now.” “That tasted really good yesterday and I can have more of x at some future point.” “I deserve excellent nutrition.”

Create a non-food rewards/comfort list. You might be able to use those tools instead of a binge in the future. If you have a list already, review it.

Create a “reasons why” you want to eat nutritious food. For me? Managing my risk of cardiovascular disease, avoiding anxiety, avoiding inflammation that increases my pain levels. Write them a small card you can carry around with you. Refer to it often, even when you’re not in the binge cycle.

Most of all remind yourself that you deserve love just for being you. Binging is not “bad.” It’s simply that other ways of coping work better long term. Taking the time and energy to practice self-care post-binge might help and certainly won’t hurt.

 

Decision fatigue

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I have been procrastinating big time on choosing and configuring business systems. So many choices. So many variables. So much complexity in designing integrations between different tools. I grind to a stand-still.

It’s decision fatigue. I finally realized the reason why I’ve been avoiding the task(s) besides the fact that administration is not always fun.

Decision fatigue happens when your ability to make quality decisions declines because you’ve been making too many decisions. It’s the psychology behind cash register displays of impulse buys. You’ve made so many shopping choices by the time you reach the cashier that you’re more prone to grabbing that Snickers.

Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. wear the same thing every day to conserve their decision-making energy.

It works the same way with choosing what food to eat. It’s helpful to have ‘go-to’ meals in mind for those hectic times. Humans tend to repeat the same favorite foods. That’s not a bad thing. Sticking to a group of faves makes it easier to stick eating nutritiously.

Today I picked the platform that seemed the best. Everything I reviewed had the basic features. I was mired in the details when they.just.don’t.matter.  An imperfect system that runs is better than the “best” system that you never implement.

I managed to get unstuck. Good thing I’m not at the register because I would totally be picking up that Snickers.

 

 

 

Things I love: soothing yourself without food

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The safer-at-home self-isolating physical distancing continues as the pandemic worsens. I’m seeing many of my friends post on social media that they find themselves eating more out of boredom, stress, etc. It’s understandable. I mentioned this when I talked about staying the course when staying home.  There are many different ways one can self-soothe if one wishes to avoid leaning towards disordered eating patterns.

My personal favorites are: journaling, exercising, talking to a friend, doing something with my hands (tidying, playing solitaire, coloring, etc.), and losing myself in a book or movie.

I like Susan Albers, “50 ways to soothe yourself without food” if you looking for ideas for things you can do instead of eating.

She puts techniques into categories: meditative, cognitive behavioral (hey! there’s my favorite thing again), sensation-based, distractions, and social.

I have had this book for years and it really inspired with some new-to-me ideas. I haven’t yet done them all since my stand-bys work well.

The future is uncertain. It always has been. The pandemic shatters our complacency and our self-illusion of consistency and predictability in life. We like to think we have control.

We can only control our actions and not our outcomes. That said, there is direct cause and effect with any action (I eat too much then my stomach hurts).

I think it’s ok to get through stress and challenge however you can. If that means stress eating then honor that and carry on. You might find that having other options, however, will provide you with more succor.

Stay at home and flatten the curve!

Review: How to Eat

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Mark Bittman, the former New York times celebrated columnist renowned for his books on “How to cook everything,” “How to cook everything vegetarian,” and his much publicized weight loss and promotion of eating vegan till dinner for health, has authored a new book with David L. Katz. Katz is an expert on nutrition and the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center.

I give “How to eat: All your food and diet questions answered” an 9.5 /10. It’s short (222 pages of content), well researched with proper citations and a bibliography, and written in an informal engaging style. It’s accessible to newbies without a background in science, incorporating discussion of the research within a question and answer format.

The authors have scientific credibility so the content is trustworthy.  It covers popular diets and eating styles as well as giving no-nonsense advice on how to eat, as promised by the title. It also provides an overview of macros, the basic building blocks of nutrition. Best of all, IMHO, it gives advice on how to evaluate nutrition research. There’s a lot of hype and commercial proselytizing in nutrition.

Dieting is big business. “How to Eat” advocates for a balanced approach to food consumption with “dietary patterns” vs. strict eating rules. I give it kudos because it fulfills its purpose as a basic myth-busting overview of diet. It’s reassuring to know that we all already know what to do by applying common sense to our food intake. Keep it real, keep it whole and unprocessed, focus on plants regardless of whether or not you include meat or animal products in your diet.

My one – very minor – quibble is that I would have liked some pointers — beyond the bibliography — of where to go for more in-depth yet written for the lay person information or a link to a web site which provides up to the minute information on some of the topics covered. This wasn’t the point of the book, so it’s not really fair of me to expect that. There are plenty of good resources available for that type of nutrition news coverage. Why reinvent the wheel?

This is a very good start for anybody wanting a good overview of nutrition, a review of diet(s) you’re likely to choose, and solid advice on how to eat that applies across the board whatever type of diet you decide to implement.

A rant on U.S. health care

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I have to buy my own health insurance as a business owner. My COBRA coverage from my last employer ends soon and I’m shopping for coverage. Obamacare means I’m going to be subsidized. Thanks Obama for the Affordable Care Act!

Getting coverage is only a small relief from fear of bankruptcy due to medical bills. I was tens of thousands in debt after my spouse died.

ACA has constantly been under attack so one can’t rely on help from the government.

Healthcare is a human right. Full stop. Lately I’ve been seeing push back on media reporting “feel-good” stories on crowd-funding for medical treatments.

They’re not feel-good. They show the tragedy of the lack of universal health care in the United States of America. We shouldn’t have to fund-raise for people to receive care.

I’m Canadian-American. Grew up in Canada. Spent half my life there. Took ease of health care for granted.

I moved to the U.S. 24 years ago and had to buy my own health insurance while I was unemployed. Confused the fuck out of me.

I was baffled about so many things. What’s  the difference between co-pay and co-insurance. How come doctors don’t take every type of coverage? What is it about some insurers that is better than others.

And seriously fuck the actuaries who figure out the odds for you getting a certain health condition, what treatments are covered, and just where the insurance company profits. Why isn’t every health condition covered? What the hell?

Finally – what is this thing where I still owe 40% of what’s covered until I hit an out-of-pocket max that’s extremely high so one can keep monthly insurance payment lower? My max is not something I’m going to hit most years (and they know it).

I’m lucky to be very healthy and needing only preventative care. The only years I hit my max spend were due to trauma care post-accidents , cancer, or a serious episode of bipolar.

Lucky for me, I got  a job within three months of arriving in California. Health care (mostly) solved. With bitterness at the amount of money deducted from my paycheck to pay the portion my employers didn’t cover. Another WTF moment – why do I need to share the cost? Employer covered should mean employer covered.

The U.S. is driven by oligarchs and a corpratocracy – health insurance is another way to stick it to the little man and transfer more wealth the the wealthy.

Health insurance is the second biggest expense in my budget after the mortgage. Imagine the boost the economy would get if we had health care. I’d have more money to put into my business, more money to spend and support other businesses. I wouldn’t have to be ranting.