How To Stop Binge-Eating: Flip This Switch!

“The Big Eating Therapist” Sarah Dosanjh has insights from both personal and professional experience:

No “Tough Love” Necessary

Eating certain foods is often socially shamed, and it’s easy to internalize that, and feel guilty. While often guilt is considered a pro-social emotion that helps people to avoid erring in a way that will get us excluded from the tribe (bearing in mind that for most of our evolutionary history, exile would mean near-certain death), it is not good at behavior modification when it comes to addictions or anything similar to addictions.

The reason for this is that if we indulge in a pleasure we feel we “shouldn’t” and expect we’d be shamed for, we then feel bad, and we immediately want something to make us feel better. Guess what that something will be. That’s right: the very same thing we literally just felt ashamed about.

So guilt is not helpful when it comes to (for example) avoiding binge-eating.

Instead, Dosanjh points us to a study whereby dieters ate a donut and drank water, before being given candy for taste testing. The control group proceeded without intervention, while the experimental group had a self-compassion intervention between the donut and the candy. This meant that researchers told the participants not to feel bad about eating the donut, emphasizing self-kindness, mindfulness, and common humanity. The study found that those who received the intervention, ate significantly less candy.

What we can learn from this is: we must be kind to ourselves. Allowing ourselves, consciously and mindfully, “a little treat”, secures its status as being “little”, and “a treat”. Then we smile, thinking “yes, that was a nice little thing to do for myself”, and proceed with our day.

This kind of self-compassion helps avoid the “meta-binge” process, where guilt from one thing leads to immediately reaching for another.

For more on this, plus a link to the study she mentioned, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

• Disordered Eating Beyond The Stereotypes
• Mindful Eating For Health & Happiness

Take care!