The experience of binge eating is one of discomfort, disorientation and loads of shame. Not only this, you tend to feel completely out of control and then immediately feel like it’s your fault for not having more “willpower” to stop yourself from binge eating.

This cycle of binge eating can continue on for days, weeks, months or even years, feeling like you cannot escape the cycle you’ve been stuck in for as long as you can remember. Each diet or lifestyle plan that you go on promises you relief from binge eating, and sometimes it does “work”, but then as soon as the diet ends you end up right back where you started. It’s confusing and for many leads to weight cycling (gaining and losing weight often), anxiety, sadness and missing out on life.

What is binge eating?

Binge eating is defined as the experience of eating large amounts of food in a short amount of time to the point of discomfort and well beyond any cues of fullness. Binge eating is not eating five cookies or having multiple slices of pizza, but rather it tends to be the consumption of much larger quantities of food. Many who binge eat also describe the experience as having an emotional quality to it, meaning even if they eat the same amount in a different setting that it would feel different.

Binge eating is often a result of restrictive food behaviors. It can be a stand alone disordered behavior or it can be more pathological in the case of binge eating disorder, anorexia, and bulimia. But the experience of binge eating can also stem from childhood experiences of food insecurity, not having had access to food such as having parents who restricted the food in the home, and from poverty. This can also apply to early adulthood experiences of food insecurity and poverty.

What is intuitive eating?

Intuitive Eating is a mindfulness based approach with over 100 scientific studies that seeks to challenge challenge diet culture’s rules by practicing attuned eating, rejecting diets and food rules, honoring your hunger, discovering satisfaction with food, feeling your fullness, coping with your emotions with kindness, finding pleasure in movement and honoring your health. It’s not a method for weight loss, it’s not a diet, it doesn’t have rules and it’s also not a miracle. It helps people to move away from external cues for knowing what, when and how much to eat and instead seeks to increase one’s internal awareness of these same things.

Becoming an intuitive eater takes time to do and is not always a linear path. After all, it can take time to reconnect with your body’s signals after years of being cut off from them and driven by diet culture. Not only this, many who are in eating disorder or disordered eating recovery need to focus on consistent, regular and adequate nourishment before using hunger and fullness cues to guide all of their eating experience. Intuitive eating is often introduced once individuals are in a more stable place and are eating enough.

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Can Intuitive Eating Help With Binge Eating?

Binge eating doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so it’s safe to say that the answer is complex. More specifically, here are some things that can cause binge eating:

History of trauma
Stress
Not sleeping enough
Getting in a fight with someone you love
Food insecurity or family history of food insecurity
Inconsistent food intake
Dieting/fasting
Going long periods of time without eating
Body dissatisfaction
Overwhelm at work, home, state of the world, etc.

As you can see while this list is not exhaustive, the reasons why someone binges are multi-factorial. So, I want to focus on three of the most common reasons why many binge eat, which are: inconsistent food intake, going long periods of time without eating, and going on diets/fasts/lifestyle plans. These are the areas in which becoming an intuitive eater can help most with binge eating.

Inconsistent eating, restricting food, and going long periods of time without eating leads to binge eating.

Human bodies benefit and prefer most consistent eating and nourishment throughout the day. It assures that your digestive system is steadily working (a good thing), that your brain and body are assured that you are going to get food again after your meal or snack, and that it doesn’t need to tap into your body’s internal resources or slow things down (your metabolism) in order to get its needs met.

For most people, this tends to look like eating 3 meals and 2-3 snacks per day. This assures that you are not going longer than 4 hours without eating which generally accounts for the maximum amount of time that it takes for you to digest food, absorb it, use the energy and then need to be refueled again.

When your body doesn’t receive enough food, in the form of not eating enough or going long periods without eating, it makes adjustments. What this means is that if you skip meals and restrict your food intake, the next time you eat, you’re going to eat more than you intended and will most likely have a hard time feeling a sense of satiety. These are common times for many to binge eat as well. A very common example of this is people who try to “control” their food intake all day by restricting and sometimes skipping meals only to find themselves bingeing in the evening.

The reality is that you cannot trick your body into under eating despite all the diets that encourage you to do so. All this does is make you feel out of control with food, think about food all the time and feel very dissatisfied with the food experience. Creating peace with food will not be found in a quick fix or a diet, but rather in consistent and regular nourishment.

So how then does intuitive eating help with binge eating and to reduce the frequency of binge eating?

It does this by helping you to cultivate an internal sense of awareness or what some call interoception as a way to relearn how to nourish yourself. This means getting to know the ins and out of hunger and fullness, and how to trust your body entirely with these signals.

Intuitive eating also helps to reduce binge eating because it invites you to challenge all the food rules that you have been following and carrying around for some time. Having food rules can not only get in the way of you having a more peaceful relationship with food, but it also can lead to binge eating.

For example, if you’re restricting carbohydrates because you’ve been told that they’re “bad” for you, odds are that you are not getting enough carbs. You either exist on one side of the spectrum or the other. You’re either restricting them or bingeing on them. You likely feel proud of yourself when you’re not eating them and then feel a lot of shame when you do finally eat them.

You know either restriction or eating more than you would like. There is very little connection to the body and very little feeling of true permission.

In this case, intuitive eating encourages you to first challenge the beliefs that you have about carbs and then slowly over time give yourself permission to have them by eating carbs consistently and regularly. Consistent nourishment, in this case with carbs, assures that there is no threat to your brain or body that you won’t have access to carbs again, and over time makes carbs neutral and less exciting.

But challenging food beliefs is also no small feat. While it sounds easy on paper to let go of diets and rules, the reality is that there is often a lot of fear around giving up food rules even if they’re no longer serving you. Additionally because of weight stigma and anti-fatness, many fear they will gain weight if they embrace intuitive eating and stop restricting their food intake even if they desire to stop binge eating.

Consistent and rhythmic eating, as well as getting enough food and a variety of foods are all ways that reducing binge eating is first addressed. While there are often many drivers to the experience of binge eating, starting with the elements that have to do with food restriction, dieting, going long periods of time without eating and inconsistent eating are all really great places to help you to decrease binge eating. And intuitive eating can help you to decrease the frequency of binge eating overtime!

Ways for you to practice intuitive eating to help you reduce binge eating:

Make a list of the foods that you find yourself bingeing on. Then go back through them and rate your fear of those foods from 1-10. Notice if there are any commonalities with the foods and where you fears come from, you may want to journal about this. Are they all carbs? Fats? Sweets? Things you liked when you were a kid? Foods you’ve been told are “bad” for you? Food you find pleasure in?
Take the fear food list above and choose one food from the list that you would like to start with (usually choosing the one you feel the least fear is a good place to start). Now, go to the store to buy it or plan to go buy it out/order it. You can do this with a buddy too. Create a list of why you are having that food and why it’s not bad for you so that you can counteract the disordered eating voice when it shows up. Then, keep practicing eating this food, over and over, until it becomes normal and not scary.
After you have experienced a binge, ask yourself the following questions:
1. Did I have enough food in the past 24 hours?
2. Have I been restricting any foods or food groups?
3. Did I tell myself that I was not allowed to have that food that I ate or that I could only have a little?
No matter how much you have binged, you will need to eat the next day. One of the worst things you can do after a binge is to start to restrict your food intake the next day as it gets you stuck in the same vicious cycles. Be sure to plan for breakfast the next day and start eating regularly. This will be hard and you may not want to, but your body needs food the next day no matter how much food you had the day before.
Don’t go long periods of time without eating. Don’t restrict food or food groups unless medically necessary. This only will leave you more vulnerable to binge eating.
Stopping binge eating often means rejecting a lot of food rules, and not everyone will be supportive of this in your life. Find online intuitive eating groups and/or a dietitian that can help support you in healing your relationship with food and help you to reduce the binge eating by practicing intuitive eating.

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Do you want to stop binge eating for good and become an intuitive eater?

Creating an intuitive relationship with food takes time especially when you have dieting and binge eating for many years. The caring dietitians from our Seattle, WA-based nutrition counseling practice would be honored to help you heal your relationship to food. We offer a variety of services including support for eating disorders, body image, intuitive eating, Bulimia treatment, Anorexia treatment, and chronic dieting. We also offer a body image support group. For more information, please feel free to visit our blog, FAQ, resources page, or contact us now!