Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

If you have lost weight by removing foods from your life, you’re probably feeling pretty desperate right now. You haven’t had this binge food for a long time and the more you think about it, the less control you feel like you have over it. Your house is clean of the food and has been for a while, but the thought of a life without that food doesn’t sound like it’s worth living. If this sounds familiar, you’re in luck. I’m going to tell you how to add former binge foods back into your life.

• Bring the food back into your house: The first step is to bring the food that used to cause binges back into the house. You are not allowed to eat it, but it will live in the house, in full view. Either let other members of the family eat it until it’s gone or allow it to go bad and throw it away. Learning how to live with the food in house and not eating it is the first step.

• Separate the food into individual servings and plan them into your eating: Buy the food again and the day you bring it into the house, separate the food into individual servings. If your trigger food is potato chips, Take out as many Ziploc bags necessary to divide the entire bag into single servings. Plan the calories of these single servings into your days over the next weeks. You may even find that you only need half a serving to fulfill a craving

• Start slowly adding the food back into your diet: It is probably a treat food, so planning for the extra calories of this food should be on a treat basis. Start by adding it once or twice a week. You haven’t had this food in a long time, so it might even make you sick if you eat too much too soon.

• Don’t try to replace your former binge food with a low calorie substitute: This works for some people, but it won’t help you conquer your bingeing.

• Don’t allow yourself more than one serving of the food a day: More than that could trigger a binge or even make you feel sick if you’re not used to the fat or sugar content of the food.

What do I do if I “fall off the wagon” and binge on this food again?

If that happens, you’re the luckiest person alive because you know that you have not solved the reason you binged in the first place. It’s not the food. It’s the emotions that the bingeing is covering up that is causing the trouble.

Get real with yourself and write out why you feel like bingeing. That has been the most helpful thing for me. Of course, I’m a writer, so writing is healing to me. This is probably where the “go for a walk” advice came about. For some people taking a walk alone (or crocheting/reading) helps them think about the issue that sent them to the brink of bingeing. It’s not the walking or writing, it’s the willingness to figure out why you want to binge.

Food does not control you. You are not powerless against it. Sometimes getting to the bottom of your bingeing is a difficult task, but it has nothing to do with the taste of the food or physiological effects of it. No matter how thin you are, you are never truly healed until you conquer the bingeing in all its forms of your life. It may even require you to go to a therapist to help you work through these issues. Whatever it takes is worth it, believe me. You owe it to yourself to work through whatever is causing the bingeing. Bringing the food back into your life is the perfect catalyst to getting past this problem.