If you feel like you ate too much today
I won’t call them fat days, but you know what days I’m talking about. You had a lot of fatty, greasy foods that aren’t sitting well in your stomach. You drank a lot, you didn’t work out, you were full the entire day, you binged, you food coma’ed your way to the next morning. You feel like crap and you might be thinking, “I’m going to make it up tomorrow. I’m going to eat well starting tomorrow,” or “I’m only eating a salad tomorrow. I’m going to work out extra hard tomorrow,” or “I want to throw up my food” and then maybe you do it.
Out of those three thoughts, the last one is the most desperate. You feel this urgency and an overwhelming fear that everything you ate will become fat and add an extra two or three pounds to your body. So you force yourself to bring everything back up and that’ll make everything…better?
No matter how much food I eat and how awful I feel, I know that throwing up won’t solve anything. Maybe that’s something I learned from my sister’s experience, but the problem isn’t that you ate too much. The problem doesn’t have to do with the food in your stomach. The problem has to do with the reason why you binged and your response.
If you’re starving yourself or restricting yourself to a low calorie count, then why should bingeing come as a surprise? You’re going to want everything you “can’t” have and suddenly food becomes this game of self control, reward and punishment. Stop restricting yourself, limiting yourself, obsessively calorie counting, and punishing yourself for a “bad” day. Andif you ate a lot not because you’ve been starving yourself but simply because you’re always saying YES to food when you’re not even hungry, then you’re also living out the consequences of your own decisions. You’ll hear me say this a lot on this blog, but MINDLESS EATING is everything from strict food rules to eating when you’re bored or upset. Learning to eat mindfully IS the answer.
If you ate too much today, don’t beat yourself up. Don’t let it damage your self esteem or ruin your mood. There’s a lot that can go on in your head, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s to put all of that on pause and breathe. Think about why you binged, what you were thinking as you binged or if you were thinking at all. Try to understand the situation so you learn. Once you get to the bottom of it, don’t focus so much on what you ate. Go do something fun, work out if that makes you feel good, watch your favorite TV-show, anything that’ll remind you that LIFE is not about FOOD or SETBACKS. Making promises to yourself that you’ll eat less the next day and such and such doesn’t help you. The best thing to do is listen to your body. There have been times when I would wake up in the morning and feel full because I had eaten so much at night. No need to force yourself to have breakfast! There’s no reason to compensate. You didn’t gain weight from eating too much this once. Commit yourself to a healthy lifestyle and push through the setbacks. Transformation isn’t a future thing. It happens now, in the present.
