Five Steps to Overcome Overeating
Bingeing episodes can be terrifying. They are like the out-of-body experience as you watch yourself in a frenzied diet, seeking every bite of flavor you can find. Here’s how to stop them.
When overeating comes to me for help, I’m willing to bet on one or more of the following:
- They do a lot of cardio. This is probably something like 3+ hours a week. This could include preparing for a marathon, triathlon, or similar event.
- They have been in a calorie deficit for several months now. There is a good chance that overeating has lost a lot of weight since you started exercising.
- Their diet is extremely strict. They follow a diet that labeled foods as “good” or “bad,” such as the paleo diet or “clean food.”
- They aim to be low in calories on a daily basis. Overeating eaters tend to burn fat aggressively by drastically limiting their calorie intake.
The following steps will allow you to address these issues in a smart way and ultimately prevent overeating when the urge arises.
Step one: consider reducing or temporarily stopping cardio
The first thing drinkers do is reduce their cardio workouts. From the beginning, I noticed that a disproportionate number of overeating people rely on a lot of cardio for weight loss.
It’s worth noting that cardio doesn’t always lead to excessive hunger or overeating. The link between hunger and cardio is very complex. Factors such as gender or the type and duration of exercise determine how he feels about hunger. These relationships are very different. For example, a study by the American Society for Clinical Nutrition found that high-intensity exercise increased food intake in women but decreased it in men.
In practice, some people are more sensitive to high amounts of cardio and more prone to overeating than others. Reducing the amount of cardio reduces the urge to overeat or makes it disappear completely. If that sounds like you, ditch your cardio a bit and then slowly add again.
Step two: increase your total calories and protein
Those who overeat tend to aggressively cut their calorie intake while relying on willpower to cope with hunger and lack of energy. This will inevitably backfire. Willpower is finite, and your body continually tries to maintain homeostasis while dieting , increasing hunger and decreasing energy expenditure. In the battle between nature and self-control, nature always wins.
Instead, use a sensible calorie deficit and increase protein to one gram per pound of your target weight. This means that if you are a 200 pound woman who wants to weigh 130 pounds, consume 130 grams of protein. In fact, you may find yourself incredibly full , but still in a calorie deficit. This may seem like a lot of calories if you are used to an aggressive deficit, but keep in mind that you are likely to eat fewer calories overall when you stop overeating.
Step three: switch to a more flexible diet
Many diets use specific rules to label foods as “good” or “bad.” Some examples are low-carb diets and “clean eating “. Nutritionist Lyle MacDonald summarizes the pitfalls of this:
You can find examples of this all over the place where people assume that healthy / good food can be eaten in uncontrolled amounts, whereas the slightest amount of unhealthy / bad food means the diet has failed, the dieter , is immoral and weak, and health will simply be destroyed (this is manifested to an extreme degree in a psychological state called orthorexia, when people view food as a moral choice, judging not only themselves, but also others by the food they prefer to eat) …
How does this lead to overeating? Let’s take a low-carb diet as an example. They may work for some people as they naturally increase their intake of hearty foods while lowering their total calories . But at some point, unless you move to Alaska and become an Inuit, you will be eating something with carbohydrates. This is often followed by the thought, “Well, I’ve already ruined my diet … it’s time to eat it all .”
Instead, stick to a flexible diet that allows you to include just about anything in your diet. You cannot beat yourself up for eating something of the “evil” category unless you create it in the first place.
Step four: plan for failure ahead of time
When you know that an upsetting event is approaching, you can prevent overeating by planning for failure. From our article on this very topic:
… When obesity researchers at Brown School of Medicine advisedparticipants to take a short break from their diet , they were surprised. Dieters not only did not gain weight during the break (compared to the control group), but they returned to the diet without problems. The simple instruction to dieters to take a break caused them to react in a very different way than usual.
…
The exact mechanism is beyond the scope of this study, but MacDonald has a viable explanation, which I have confirmed after many interviews with clients: dieters maintain a sense of control during deliberate breaks.
If you plan to fail, you are creating a controlled day off that is psychologically different from an uncontrolled binge.
Step five: practice mindfulness while creating the totem
Consider the fact that you rarely know when you are dreaming. You can see pink elephants walking and pigs flying, but chances are you still don’t know that you are asleep.
Now let’s look at overeating. Every overeating is preceded by a psychological trigger. Think of it as a little voice in your head saying something like:
“It’s okay to eat another pistachio, Dick. Just another one. “
“You’ve had a great diet week, Dick. Time to gorge on cake. “
“I know you’re very hungry right now, so go ahead and overeat. You can always fast the next day. “
If you notice the thoughts that precede each overeating, you will notice that they all have several things in common – they are called thought patterns. If you examine your thinking patterns, you will find that their rationale is completely false; objectively, you’ve probably never benefited from succumbing to these thoughts.
As in a dream, these ways of thinking seem completely rational at that time, and you do not know that they arise. They seem as rational as stopping at a red light or taking out the trash when it’s full.
You cannot stop thought patterns from arising, but you can break them. One way to do this is to create what I have called a “totem exercise.”
In Inception, the characters have a “totem,” a personal object such as a spinning top or Rubik’s cube that they are familiar with. They then use these totems to determine if they are sleeping.
Likewise, you can create a “totem” around your overeating mental images. Instead of an object, your totem will be a list of the characteristics of your way of thinking.
For example, I often feel the urge to grab a bite when I accidentally go over my daily calorie intake a little. This motivation pattern has the following characteristics, which I will use as my “totem”.
Here’s an example of a totem:
- It works when I’m getting close to maintaining calories on a day when I should be in a calorie deficit.
- This is justified by the fact that the next day I simply cannot eat anything.
- I can feel this way of thinking starting to “knock me over.” This will tell me that I could benefit from overeating, because if I have a mini overeating and then fast the next day, I will consume fewer calories.
- This is usually accompanied by feelings of anxiety, loss of control.
- Usually I’m with someone else.
- I have drunk over six glasses.
Let’s say I feel that this urge is growing. I will mentally go through this list and see if it matches my totem.
I then examine my history of succumbing to this pattern of thinking. I’m always worse on the whole. This process disrupts my way of thinking, which makes it less likely to overeat.
I used to think that overcoming overeating meant that I no longer felt the urge to overeat. On the contrary, I am now quite confident that due to the fact that I am programmed, I will always feel the urge to eat. Fortunately, the steps above are enough to scare away the demons.