I often see people offering up techniques to battle binge urges.
I’d like to pose a new question: “How can we eliminate binge urges *without* a battle?”
Even well-meaning coaches and other professionals perpetuate this idea that ending binge eating needs to be some kind of fight. I see it in the language people use about “beating binge eating” or “winning the war against food” or “fighting your cravings.”
Binge urges can be eliminated peacefully. I’ve been proving this every day, and it’s my mission to show how peaceful and simple this process can be.
In this post, I’d like to teach you how to bring more peace into dealing with your binge urges.
First it’s important to understand where to place your focus.
Most people focus on:
a. Trying to avoid the urges from coming up
b. Fighting the urges when they do come up
The first one, “avoiding urges,” is problematic because when you try to avoid the urges all together, you have to avoid triggers. And from my own experience, anything can be a trigger, so it forces you to avoid key parts of your life: eating out, parties, social networking events, barbecues, aisles of the supermarket … [insert what you avoid here.] It’s not a sustainable technique if you want to enjoy your life without feeling you need to plan for every scenario, as if a single trigger could make everything fall apart.
The second one, “fighting urges” is also problematic because of the simple truth, “What you resist, persists.” The more attention you give the urges by fighting them, the more power you give to them. Then they feel stronger each time you fight them. That’s why a lot of people end up bingeing at night ― because after a long day of fighting, the willpower finally runs out. Using willpower isn’t a sustainable technique, yet I’ve noticed that most people still try to use it as their main strategy (often for decades), and eventually become frustrated, like something is wrong with them.
I’d like to propose an alternative to avoidance and willpower, because I’ve learned that even when a person is successful in avoiding a binge using willpower, it’s still incomplete healing. In other words, maybe a person might successfully stop a binge from happening by using willpower, but that still doesn’t fix the problem of constantly thinking about it.
