Keep two columns for seven days. Left column, the times you ate a meal or a snack. Right column, the times an urge arrived. No amounts, no foods, no calories. Within a week the gap between the last real meal and the first urge will be sitting there in your handwriting, and that gap is the thing you can actually change.
Most people already know they binge in the evening. What they do not know is what the afternoon looked like, and that is where the answer lives.
Why times and not food
Because a food diary becomes a diet within about three days.
The moment you start writing down what and how much, the notebook turns into a scorecard, and a scorecard produces rules. Rules are restriction, and restriction is what Beat names as a driver of the whole cycle: food rules "can also lead to them binge eat due to hunger and feelings of deprivation".
Times do not do that. A time cannot be good or bad. It is just information, and it is the information that turns out to matter.
The log
Two columns and one optional third.
| Ate | Urge | |---|---| | 07:40 | | | 13:10 | | | | 16:20 | | 19:00 | | | | 21:35 |
The optional third column is two or three words on what was happening just before the urge. Not feelings analysis, just the scene: "got in from work", "after phone call", "kids in bed", "after weighing myself", "row with mum". Two words is enough.
Do it for seven days including a weekend, on paper or on your phone. Log while things are still bad. You are collecting evidence, not performing recovery. Renovyn logs the times quietly in the background if you would rather not carry a notebook.
What you are looking for when you read it back
Four patterns come up again and again. Most people have two of them.
**The long gap.** Last proper food at one, urge at six. Sometimes a nine hour hole in the middle of the day that nobody had noticed, because it was a busy afternoon and it felt like discipline at the time.
**The empty hour.** Nothing to do with hunger. It sits at a specific point, usually the first unstructured hour after something ends. Getting in from work, the children asleep, the end of a shift.
**The aftermath.** The urge follows an event rather than a gap. A row, a rejection, a bad appointment, a comment about your body, or the scales.
**The good day.** This one surprises people. The urge follows the day you ate least and were most pleased with yourself, arriving that night or the next. That is the restriction link doing exactly what it does, and it is set out in [restriction and the binge that follows](/guides/food/restriction-and-the-binge-that-follows).
What each pattern needs
They need different things, which is the entire reason for doing this rather than applying one rule to everything.
**A long gap needs food in it.** Not willpower at nine, food at four. The structure is three meals and two snacks, no more than about three to four hours apart in daylight. NICE tells clinicians to "advise people to eat regular meals and snacks to avoid feeling hungry", and the detail is in [eating enough is the intervention](/guides/food/eating-enough-is-the-intervention).
**An empty hour needs a plan, not a prohibition.** Decide beforehand what that hour is: a walk, a phone call, a bath, a task with a clear end. Undecided hours get filled by the old routine.
**An aftermath needs the person told.** If your urges follow rows or bad news, the useful move is having one person to contact at that moment. [Telling someone about binge eating](/guides/food/telling-someone-about-binge-eating) has the words and the specific thing to ask for.
**A good day needs to be taken seriously as a warning.** If your log shows the pattern of a very controlled day followed by a binge, then a very controlled day is not a success and should stop being treated as one.
The things a log will tempt you into
Three, and they all undo it.
**Turning it into calories.** It is one small step from times to amounts and the whole point is lost. If you find yourself writing what you ate, stop and go back to times only.
**Weighing yourself to correlate it.** This adds a variable that produces rules and tells you nothing about your pattern. Leave the scales out of it, and see [your body, your clothes and the mirror](/guides/food/your-body-your-clothes-and-the-mirror).
**Grading the days.** Ticks, crosses, streaks. A week with three binges in it and a clear pattern is a more useful week than a week with one binge and no idea why.
What to do at the end of the week
- Read the two columns side by side and find the longest gap.
- Put food in the middle of it, starting tomorrow.
- Name your single highest-risk hour, and decide in advance what happens in it.
- Keep logging for a second week, to see whether the gap moved.
- Take the page to a GP.
That last one is worth doing even if the pattern seems obvious to you. A ten minute appointment goes very differently when you can hand over a fortnight of times instead of reconstructing it from memory, and the NHS names guided self-help and cognitive behavioural therapy as the main treatments a GP can put you towards.
Common questions
**Should I write down what I eat as well?** No. Times only. Recording amounts and foods turns the log into a diet within days, and dieting is what the national guideline tells clinicians to advise against during treatment for binge eating.
**What if I cannot remember the time afterwards?** Write it in the next morning, roughly. An approximate time is worth a lot and a missing day is worth nothing. Rounding to the nearest half hour is fine.
**What if there is no pattern?** There usually is one, but it can take two weeks rather than one to show up, particularly if your days are irregular. If a fortnight of times genuinely shows nothing, take it to a GP rather than concluding that you are the exception.
**My urges follow arguments, not hunger. Does regular eating still matter?** Yes, because eating regularly removes one of the two drivers rather than none. The other one needs something else, usually a person to contact and a plan for the hour, and often the treatment itself.
**Is this the same as a food diary my GP might give me?** Related, but this version deliberately leaves out amounts. If a clinician asks you to record something different as part of a guided self-help programme, follow theirs. This is for finding your own pattern before you get there. [How to stop binge eating](/guides/food/how-to-stop-binge-eating) has the words for the appointment.
Sources
- [NICE guideline NG69, Recommendations](https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng69/chapter/Recommendations). Regular meals and snacks, the advice against dieting during treatment, and guided self-help.
- [Beat, Binge eating disorder](https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/get-information-and-support/about-eating-disorders/types/binge-eating-disorder/). Restriction and food rules driving bingeing through hunger and deprivation.
- [NHS, Binge eating disorder overview](https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/binge-eating/overview/). The main treatments and what a GP appointment involves.
