What to Do After A Binge

So you binged. You just went through your cupboards, your refrigerator and the burger shop down the block and just about obliterated every food morsel in sight. Your pants feel tight, your stomach (and every other part of your body) feels huge, and you feel like dying. What to do now?

1. Don’t purge. I know it’s really hard to hold back from it, especially if you’ve done it before, but it will not benefit you in any way.

2. Don’t reduce your calorie intake for tomorrow (or any of the days following) to nothing.It might seem like a logical plan, but if you restrict tomorrow, you’ll never get into a normal cycle of eating. You’ll be constantly ricocheting between binge and purge, starve and binge, purge and starve. You’ll never be eating normally.

3. Remember that it takes 3500 EXCESS calories to gain a pound. It’s highly unlikely your stomach can even hold this much, much less double that, so it’s very unlikely you’ll gain more than two pounds from this! Your progress is not back at zero. Your efforts so far are not null. This is just a little bump in the road.

4. Put on comfy clothes. Honestly. Tight clothes will just make you feel worse. Feeling bad = more binging. Take off those tight jeans, and put on some cozy sweats.

5. Use your binge as a learning experience. What triggered it? Did you feel out of control? Did you actually want all the food you were eating, or were you just eating for eating’s sake? Did you even like the taste of some of it? Do you think you binged because you deprived yourself of a treat you wanted earlier? Did you binge because you’ve been starving all day and just couldn’t take it anymore? Try and understand your binge, understand what your mind went through when your hands were reaching for all that food. The more you can understand the reasons behind your binge, the better you’ll be next time at preventing them. For more information on how your brain can trick you into binging when its not getting enough nutrients, click here and here.

6. Remember that you are NOT a failure, bad for eating, undeserving of life, or ugly because you decided to give yourself what you really wanted.

Now for the fun part.

Tomorrow, wake up all bright and sunny. Leap right out of bed (Note: when wondering how to get out of bed, the answer is always “leap.”) Have a delicious bowl of healthy for breakfast and get really excited about feeling awesome all day because of all the healthy food you’re going to bless your body with. Take a walk, if you’d like to. Smile all day long. Drink some water. 

But don’t purge and don’t restrict. Eat how you’d normally eat, cause you’re a normal eating healthy person who does not fall prey to freak eating cycles. You don’t need that shit, look at you, you’re hot as hell. Click here for the finale.

How Bulimia Affects Your Body

Why Starving Seems to Work

It’s hard to explain to someone who has nearly or fully starved themselves for a few days that what they’re doing isn’t effective. The proof is right there on the scale, right? Two pounds, five pounds, ten pounds flushed from their bodies like that, simply from not eating.

Wrong. Losing real weight from starving is physically impossible. Your body absolutely can not lose that much weight in a week. It’s not because you weren’t working hard enough, or didn’t starve for long enough. It’s because you can’t do it, just like you can’t grow gills and live underwater like a fish.

Here’s what happens when your body is starved of nutrients:

Your body realizes that it needs energy to continue to function, to blink and breathe and scratch your forehead. All of this requires power source, and it has to get it from somewhere. When you don’t give your body the energy it needs from food, it cannibalizes itself as an energy source. The prime directive of the body is that it must have energy at any cost.

The protein in your muscles is the only energy source a starving person has, and since you aren’t eating, it’s the only choice you are left with. Your body will begin to destroy muscle cells to release that protein so it can convert it into energy. Muscles are about 70% water, so when a muscle cell is destroyed, that water is released and eventually excreted. That’s your weight loss.

Your body didn’t convert any lumpy fat into lean muscle. It didn’t begin to use fat as an energy source. It didn’t just magically get rid of three or four pounds of pure fat. It’s going to keep you alive at any cost, and that means burning up the muscle and using that to power you. Guess what? You’ve just increased your body fat percentage. Fat weighs less than muscle and takes up more space, so you might even look bigger than before.

You’ve also lowered your metabolism. Muscle is metabolically active tissue, so the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate. The next bite of food you take, your body will use less efficiently and will hold on to much longer, converting it into fat and storing it for the long famine ahead.

Starving is not an effective weight loss tool. Not just because you shouldn’t starve yourself, not just because of the incredibly dangerous effects it has on your brain, not just because it can ruin your body forever. It really doesn’t work.

If you continue to starve yourself, your body will never got over that period of starvation.Your brain is programmed for survival, not for skinny, and you’ll become permanently hardwired to think that there is never enough, that you are constantly starving, even when you’re not.

Anorexia and Bulimia are extreme psychological diseases. and the above is your body’s evolutionarily hardwired response to trying desperately to survive on so very little nutrients. It is not your fault. If you’re struggling with starving, please consider getting help.

Before-And-After Workout Snack Ideas

BEFORE your workout, have something small, but high-carb, for energy.
-A banana
-An apple
-Oatmeal
-Healthy cereal
-Whole wheat english muffin with jam

AFTER your workout, have something with protein to rebuild those tired muscles!
-Apples with peanut butter or low-fat cheese
-Bananas with peanut butter
-Carrot and celery sticks with [1-2 tbsp.] of dressing
-Berries and ricotta cheese
-High-protein, high-fiber cereal [like Kashi]
-Yogurt with granola or fruit
-Protein and fruit smoothie [click here for ideas]
-Peanut butter & banana on rice cakes
-Chicken/tuna/turkey on a slice or two of whole wheat bread
-A handful of nuts and raisins
-Cereal bar [Try these or these]
-Cottage cheese

Why You Aren't Losing Weight

So you’ve been counting calories like a madwoman, eating every celery stalk in sight, running mile after mile—but the scale won’t move! Here’s a few reasons that might be happening.

1. Make sure you have a good idea of what’s going into your body. This doesn’t mean you have to measure and portion everything to death, but it’s important to understand that little extras can add a lot to your total intake at the end of the day, whether or not you counted it, things like: dressing, cheese or croutons on your salad, milk on your cereal, cream in your coffee, peanut butter on your toast, butter with your mashed potatoes, etc. All of these foods can be high in sugar and fat and don’t hold much nutritional value. While it’s okay to eat these things in moderation, eating them in excess without really paying attention to it can make you gain weight.2. Remember that losing weight is 70% meal choices and 30% exercise. Your body responds the fastest to changes in diet. Exercise is still essential to any healthy-living plan, but running every day doesn’t mean you can ignore making good food choices.

3. That being said, starving is never an effective means of losing weight. Unless you’re obese, a zero or very low calorie intake will cause you to lose a much higher percentage of lean muscle (the good stuff) than fat (which you’ll hold on to.) You might need to up your intake and docardio to lower your body fat percentage. 
One pound of fat is significantly larger than a pound of muscle, so if you work on toning your body, you’ll definitely see a difference. This picture is a fantastic example of that difference (and a fantastic example of a gorgeous girl doing it the healthy way.) Click here to see exactly why starving initially looks like weight loss, why it might even seem like it’s working for you.4. You might not really have much to lose. If so, your body might do anything it can to prevent weight loss because it knows you’re at your ideal weight. 11-13% of your body is essential fat—you could eat the healthiest food and run 800 miles every day but weigh the same because your body needs to weigh that much for optimal immune system strength and general health.

5. You may have reached a weight-loss plateau. This can happen if you lose a lot of weight at one time, or if you’re not eating enough to keep your body out of starvation mode. Click here for tips on breaking a plateau.

6. Permanent weight loss takes time, it’s a process. You aren’t going to see results in a day or a week, you might not even see them in a month. All bodies are different, and just because your best friend lost four pounds in a week doesn’t mean your body will respond the same way. Patience (however hard) is absolutely necessary when making changes in your lifestyle. Although it varies, there is a threshold for the amount of weight a single person can lose in a week, and any drastic drop in weight is the effects of water weight—not permanent weight loss. If the scale is moving slowly, you can be assured that that’s REAL weight loss, and feel free to give yourself a pat on the back. Pay attention to how your clothes fit, your measurements, how you feel, rather than the numbers on the scale.

Shameless Promotion of an Incredible Book

I cannot recommend this book (and concept) highly enough. It’s the book I would write if I grew up, became a nutritionist, worked specifically with anorexic and binge-eating disordered patients for a few years, and then wrote a book.

It talks about rejecting the entire diet philosophy and completely cutting dieting out of your life. (95% of diets fail.) It’s against counting calories and diets because one of the major causes of binge eating is the feeling of failure associated with having “too much” food.

It talks in-depth about a lot of the psychological reasons behind binging, things I never even considered, like the “last supper” before starting a diet (eating a huge amount of foods you won’t be ‘allowed’ to eat again) or binging because a tiny part of your mind is saying “screw you” to a world that’s trying to tell it that you’re too fat.

It just generally encourages to stop thinking about any food as “bad,” stop dieting, stop restricting calories and just listen, listen, listen to what your body is asking for. It helps you identify what type of eater you are (there are 3 types) and then teaches you step by step how to eventually become an “intuitive eater,” or a person who is naturally at their ideal weight because that’s what your body was made to do, naturally be as healthy as possible.

If you have ever dieted and failed, fasted all day to make up for a binge, found yourself shoveling food in even when you weren’t hungry, obsessed over every fat gram and every single calorie, gotten frustrated, desperate, upset, and crushed over your lack of will-power, Intuitive Eating is absolutely the answer.

It completely lays out the psychological path that leads to binging for a lot of people (There are a million reasons why you could be doing it.) When you figure out exactly what’s causing your binges, you’ll be much better equipped in avoiding them and won’t be a slave to your eating habits. Intuitive Eating’s goal is to have you eating as healthfully and normally as possible, and it’s had an incredible effect on me. It’s not a diet at all, it’s just tapping into the signals your body is giving you and learning how to respond as nature intended you to, with nutrition and fuel for your body, that’s it :)

This is the Amazon link for the book that I read, and this is the website that explains the concept more in depth. It’s the most comprehensive response to undereating, overeating, diet obsession, eating disorders and abnormal eating patterns that I’ve ever seen and it’s had a tremendous effect on me.