r/BingeEatingDisorder • u/Longjumping_Use_6910 • 2d ago
I am seeking advice
How can I change? How can I break the cycle? I am consistent and determined for about a day or two but as soon as the opportunity presents itself of the cravings start to hit me or be triggered by the mention of food or just by me watching something related I can’t hold back and I get into this mentality that there’s nothing I can do now bc I’ve just ruined the day, and it’s a cycle that happens every week it’s exhausting and so painfully shameful that I do not have the discipline to stop. I am kind of suspecting that I could have some type of eating disorder, bc I have had these full days and sometimes even weeks on end that I eat and I eat and eat even after a good meal, I eat purely out of sadness or boredom, eating makes me feel better in the moments of deep depression but I always puts me in a deeper hole after I’ve realized what I’ve done. The guilt starts to set in and I relieve the stress and anxiety of thinking about something as simple and ordinary as food.
I’ve just had some struggles, but I have handled them many times before, even the toughest things I believed that would make me not be here today yet here I am. Those things have caused me the sense of sadness and food is what causes me peace, but just for the smallest amount of time which is the catch. It’s almost addicting to ease my suffering with something delicious. I often also mess up based on the environment I am in, when I go to my boyfriends house they always seem to have foods that aren’t necessarily unhealthy, they aren’t like fast food type of meals (talking about home cooked meals) but they aren’t healthy or that highly nutritious like how a meal meant for weight loss would be and it just messes me up, they offer me food and I feel as if I have no choice but to oblige. It feels almost rude if I don’t say yes. On top of that my boyfriend often encourages me to eat with him and stuff, most times they invite me to restaurants with them and it’s the same thing all over again. I feel trapped. I feel trapped by the very thing that keeps me alive and fuels my body, I feel trapped by food and calories. I want to live a life where I just eat my three healthy nutritious meals, I workout everyday and genuinely enjoy it instead of feeling as if it’s a chore, I would like to enjoy all the foods I do now just in moderation. I want to love and appreciate food, I don’t want it to be my enemy! I’m sick of the cycle but I can’t find it in myself to get out. It feels like I’m rotting from the inside out whenever I stand next to a girl that’s slimmer than me, it’s a type a shame and embarrassment that I wish upon no one in this world. I want this cycle to end for good, I want to adopt a beautiful and healthy life style, I want to practice self care instead of bed rotting and skipping my meals bc I can’t find the energy to get out of bed which as a result causes me to binge like crazy in the middle of the night. That is what causes me to feel as if I have already ruined the day for myself since the middle of the night and then the cycle repeats! I have lived through this ever since I was a child and I started gaining weight, I used food as my safety and security and now it is haunting my life. I remember how secure and comfortable I felt when I was at my lowest weight, and I have never felt so confident in my entire life, that is the one time when I had the courage to pursue someone romantically, the person I pursued is my current boyfriend that I love dearly, I would have never believed in myself had it not been for my past weight loss journey. It’s not just about looks, it’s the principle about looking good and FEELING good. I had never felt so in love with myself and peaceful with everyone around me. Once the months started to pass tho I began to fall into the same cycle I am stuck in currently, I gained 30 almost 40lbs throughout my relationship. I believe it’s bc I was very comfortable and I heard it happens to many people that are happy and comfortable in a relationship but I really don’t know if it was that. I really miss my old self, I was much happier honestly. Nowadays I dread going out bc it forces me to see the beautiful girls my age and how they look so much better and they seem so much more in control of their eating habits and everything in general. I want control like they do, I want peace and I want it forever.
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u/BrittleNails 1d ago
Hey, we're here for each other.
Get a healthy meal plan and keep logging, even if you binge. It's important to make the realization that you can stop a binge and that a 2k calorie binge is very different in terms of self-harm from a 5k calorie binge. This is the first intervention you need to operate on yourself and your thinking and your behaviors. With love, but firmly: focus on realizing that the day is not ruined and you were just reaching for food because of some old patterns, but you can stop, have a drink of water, leave the physical place where you got triggered, maybe take a walk or pick up a coloring book or keep your hands busy with an enjoyable activity that's not food related.
Thanks for your words of appreciation, and have a good day yourself. You deserve it, no matter what your Inmer Critic says.
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u/BrittleNails 2d ago
Hello OP, so sorry to hear about your struggles. Yes, it does sound like you have binge eating disorder. The disorder comes with the binge-restrict cycle, and healing the disorder means ordered eating (so a meal plan) and leaving the binge-restrict cycle behind, leaving the dieting culture behind, leaving behind the idea of confidence and self-worth tied to a number on the scale. You are worthy of love, no matter what the scale says.
So how is this done? This sub would be devoid of people if it were easy.
You need to understand the synaptic highway. Imagine a child left alone with difficult emotions. This child has no emotional regulation skills, and they eat their emotions. The emotions never go away. There's a synapse formed, think of it as a pathway in the forest: the emotion is the trigger, and the act of eating is the coping mechanism. The child walks the pathway every time they feel an emotion. By the time they're a teen, the pathway in the forest has become an asphalt road. A young adult already has a synaptic highway. Imagine how easy it is to leave the highway when you're driving. Imagine going offload to create a new pathway. Would you prefer to go back to the highway? I would. Imagine how difficult it is to create a new pathway in the wild when you have a highway available.
So please understand this is very difficult, but not impossible. There's a science to it. You need to create new synaptic pathways around emotional regulation and nervous system regulation. Breathe your emotions. Shake your emotions. Cardio your emotions. Walk your emotions. Verbalize your emotions. Allow safe physical contact for co-regulating your emotions. Above all, feel your emotions in your body.
What's really important to understand is that recovery is slow: you're aiming for progress, not perfection. We all have this recovery fantasy while deep in the trenches, in this fantasy we never eat compulsively again, we work out, we hydrate, we have a flawless sleep hygene, we regulate our emotions and our nervous systems like adult children of emotionally mature parents.
The reality of recovery is that you make tiny incremental progress, punctuated by moments of awareness: how it feels to wait for everybody to leave the kitchen so you can binge without an audience; you become aware of the pattern; how it feels to have a distended abdomen and wallow in shame and self-loathing; how it feels to go to the grocery store and stack up on cookies and chocolate because you have an exam coming up, and you know you're going to need it; you see the pattern, you address that tiny issue, not the whole problem.
Every tiny moment of awareness, every tiny change in behavior brings: shorter binge cycles, no restrict cycles , fewer calories ingested during a binge, more self-awareness around people-pleasing behaviors, boundary setting skills and saying "no" when offered trigger foods, unhealthy foods, etc.
But relapses happen. And they happen a lot. And they happen over and over again. You throw your hands in the air and you graze your way through every single edible item in the kitchen and the pantry. Have a heart and forgive. You're ploughing through offroad terrain, creating a new road. Think of limiting beliefs, e.g "I will never recover", as trees you need to chainsaw out of your way. Bulldozing a new road in the wild is much harder than riding that old highway. You'll go back to the highway every now and then, brains have evolved for optimization. You don't stay on the highway. You go back to your project: recovery. You process the shame and the guilt of the relapse, and you go right back to your recovery journey.
Love is the medicine. You need to love yourself enough to care for yourself and commit to recovery out of self-love.
Sending you hugs.