Eating out, holidays and other people
Eat your normal meals on the day of the meal out. Saving up is what turns a dinner into an episode, and the risky hour is usually after you get home.
Your body, your clothes and the mirror
Two practical steps that cut daily body checking: get the scales out of the house, and wear clothes that fit the body you have this week.
NHS treatment, Beat, and the fellowships
Treatment first, through a GP. Beat for support while you wait. And the question to ask any food fellowship before you join, because some of them prescribe the thing NICE advises against.
Restriction, and the binge that follows
Draw your own loop on one page: restrict, deprivation, binge, shame, restrict harder. Then find your version of the first link, which is rarely as obvious as skipping meals.
You binged. What now?
Eat your next meal at the normal time. That single decision is where the cycle either breaks or restarts, and everything else on this page is easier than it.
The hours when it happens
Log two columns for a week: the times you ate, and the times the urge came. The gap between them is the pattern, and it is fixable in the afternoon.
The first two weeks of regular eating
It feels like giving up, fullness feels alarming, and the binges may not stop straight away. What is ordinary in the first fortnight, and what needs a clinician.
Telling someone about binge eating
One sentence, prepared before you open your mouth, plus one specific thing to ask for. A GP counts as the one person, and so does a Beat adviser.
Eating enough is the intervention
Restriction is what drives binge eating, so the fix isn't eating less. Regular meals and snacks every 3 to 4 hours break the cycle where it starts.
Getting through the urge to binge
First question: when did you last eat a proper meal? If it has been hours, the answer is food. If you have eaten, there is a twenty minute routine for the gap.
Is this binge eating, or something else?
Overeating, binge eating disorder and the other eating disorders overlap in how they feel and differ in what they need. What separates them, and the words to take to a GP.
How to stop binge eating
Don't diet. The first step to stopping binge eating is eating regularly, then seeing a GP. What clinicians look for and what NHS treatment involves.