Everyday Systems

Day 4- so it was going great up till yesterday, when after classes I was feeling very hungry (around 4.30 pm). I ate till I was full at lunch at 12.30, btw. So i decided to have a snack (a bun) on the way home and ended up eating some unhealthy stiff instead of a good dinner Not gonna dwell on it, but just wanted to know, how did you guys deal with getting hingry between meals?

I usually drink a coffee or tea with milk and a teaspoon of sugar. You can also take natural fruit juice, light cola, even a fruit smoothie and milk. It helps a lot and after a while you will not even need it

So today I had a but of a bad binge, on cookies and crisps from the supermarket. I tried to put off the urges by telling myself I could eat whatever I wanted on the weekend but it didn’t work.

Hang in there Stormpen, it's early days yet.

I'd got over the worst of my bingeing before I joined NoS.

Some things that helped me were

taking a more relaxed attitude to the problem - part of the reason we binge is simply to relieve the tension as we try to stop thinking about it

using the substitute method as I tried not to buy my worst trigger foods - as I wandered around the supermarket, I would promise myself I could eat anything I wanted to, as long as it wasn't X. Eventually, I stopped wanting X (which I also wanted to stop eating for health reasons).

Reminding myself of just how crappy I would feel if I bought a particular food and ate it all at once.

Buying only as much of what ever food I was craving that I felt I could eat without making myself sick. This made me think a bit about what I was doing.

Quite often I would talk myself out of buying whatever I had been thinking of, and go home with just the usual meat, veg etc.

So I was practising some self-restraint as well as damage limitation. During my supermarket trips, I was also taking myself out of the present moment and visualising consequences before I made a decision on what to buy. What didn't work was swearing that I would never do it again.

Thanks guys

Soo today was another failure. I’m bad at dismissing urges to binge, even with the thought of S days. I don’t know what to do and it scares me.

Hi Stormpen - are you trying to lose weight by restricting your meals, and stopping bingeing at the same time? This is one thing that makes not bingeing much harder.

Having 3 large meals a day and not concerning myself about my short term weight made it a lot easier at first. This helped break the restrict - binge cycle.
Even after I hadn't had a binge for a while, if I started to get cravings or pre binge thoughts, I ate more at meals for a few days until the urges went away.

Don't give up, there is a way out of your present distress for you.

No I don’t, I eat until I’m full at each meal.
Yeaterday I tried to “quieten the urge†by having a snack but I ended up at the supermarked buying chocolates and stuff

ladybird30 wrote:Hi Stormpen - are you trying to lose weight by restricting your meals, and stopping bingeing at the same time? This is one thing that makes not bingeing much harder.

Having 3 large meals a day and not concerning myself about my short term weight made it a lot easier at first. This helped break the restrict - binge cycle.
Even after I hadn't had a binge for a while, if I started to get cravings or pre binge thoughts, I ate more at meals for a few days until the urges went away.

Don't give up, there is a way out of your present distress for you.

What do you mean by ate more meals?

Stormpen wrote:

ladybird30 wrote:Hi Stormpen - are you trying to lose weight by restricting your meals, and stopping bingeing at the same time? This is one thing that makes not bingeing much harder.

Having 3 large meals a day and not concerning myself about my short term weight made it a lot easier at first. This helped break the restrict - binge cycle.
Even after I hadn't had a binge for a while, if I started to get cravings or pre binge thoughts, I ate more at meals for a few days until the urges went away.

Don't give up, there is a way out of your present distress for you.

What do you mean by ate more meals?

You may have misread, she said she had more at meals

It's easier to break the binge cycle if you don't get too hungry so larger meals while you establish the three meals a day habit can ease you in to it.

You can then address plate size one meal at a time if necessary
Jx

Courage storpem!

My first month was 21 days (I started on the 7th) and I had eight red days, so keep going, I promise that over time it gets easier.

Hi Stormpen,

if mid afternoon is a vulnerable time for you, you could have a pre-planned snack or calorific drink at that time to keep you going til dinner. The snack would be one that you have with you without having to go to the shops and buying it. The idea is to substitute another behaviour for the current one of going to the shops and having unplanned snacks.

When I first got serious about No S I confess I did a lot of clock watching - only 2 hours, 1 hour, 1/2 an hour, hooray its dinner time. That would have been hard if I was really hungry.

There's nothing wrong with easing yourself into the no snacks rule, especially during your "witching hour." (I've called it that for years and just saw it on a Beck newsletter.)

I was a binger as well. Here are some of my "recovery" strategies.

1. Review my reasons for wanting to quit. A big one was "Do i want to binge for decades more? I can't wait anymore for an eating plan that would take the binge urge away so I have to put up with some tough times. It will be worth it."

2. At the start of the urge, think, "THIS is the moment I've always failed at before and it's the moment I have to accept the pain! I'll get better at it, but I have to tolerate it for now. I really don't want the pain later!"

3. Plan for some non-sweet thing at the next meal that feels indulgent. Mine would often be a big biscuit with butter, or nuts or melted cheese on something. If you already do that, shift your thoughts to how wonderful that will be.

4. MINIMIZE how hard it is to wait and how great you think the food will taste and feel. (Bingers tend to fixate on the pleasure involved.) MAXIMIZE in your mind how wonderful your last meal was and your next meal will be., and how much you want to be glad later.

5. Consider working up to three meals by having a snack about 1/4 the size of a plate for a week or two.

6. Realize what your options are. Is this more hard than the price you pay for bingeing now? As it's said, being heavy is hard. Eating less than you want is hard. Choose your hard.

See if you can get past those tough hours just a few times to see what it's like.
How can you know if it's worse to wait if you don't try it out? Resolve to give yourself that gift.