Let’s Quickly Recover From an Eating Binge

Struggling with binge eating—and I’m using this term loosely—can present a big obstacle to getting a body and life you love.

Here’s what usually happens (tell me if I’m wrong)…

You have these great intentions for healthy eating, movement, and other lifestyle adjustments, but you can’t seem to align those intentions with your behavior on a consistent basis.

Every so often you binge and feel that all progress is lost.

You flood yourself with shame and guilt and fear and you spend the next few days or weeks (and sometimes months and years) saying, “Screw it!”

Does this sound like you? There’s a good chance it does. This is a cycle that a great deal of men and women are stuck in.

So what’s the next step? What do you do when this happens?

I’m going to tell you a secret about recovering from these types of eating binges. It’s quite simple (though not always easy). It just requires a small perspective shift.

See, the eating binge is not the challenge. There *are* challenges, of course, but the binge itself is not one of them. Here are the two real challenges:

1. The underlying reason you binge.
2. Your response to a binge.

Behind door #1 is the key to minimizing and reducing future binges.

Behind door #2 is the key to quickly recovering from a binge.

There is no way that I can help you solve challenge #1 in an article. That’s the kind of challenge that our Total Body Reboot program is for. But I can help you solve challenge #2 right now…

The key to recovering from an eating binge is to refuse to allow the guilt, shame, and fear to take hold after the binge.

Guilt: “I shouldn’t have done that.”
Shame: “I hate/disapprove-of myself for doing that.”
Fear: “See, I will never be able to succeed. I am doomed to failure.”

Everyone thinks that the binge is a deal breaker. That somehow, it erases all your work up to that point. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Listen to me very carefully: The only damage that comes from an eating binge is damage brought on by how you respond to the eating binge. The food you eat during a binge has zero bearing on your success in getting a body and life you love.

If you binge and allow shame, guilt, and fear to rule you—this is the common outcome—then you’ll eventually experience failure.

If you binge and take a deep breath, understand the context of the binge, and disallow fear, shame, and guilt from entering the situation, you will be able to recover immediately. This is especially true if you start the process of introspection around this latest binge.

Please try to allow this perspective shift the next time you find yourself out of control around food. And let me know how it goes!