As you go through the process of eliminating binge eating from your life, you’re going to make mistakes.
I have yet to work with someone who hasn’t and when I was doing this work myself, I made mistakes along the way.
I never expect my clients to not binge during our time working together. You don’t just learn a couple tools and stop binge eating right away, or at least most people don’t.
You have to practice those using those tools. You’re not going to be an expert right away. You’re going to forget to use them or not use them the right way, and that’s okay.
What I want you to know though, is that when you are working on yourself and you make a mistake there’s something really important you must do.
Forgive yourself.
Right away you might want to scold yourself or make it mean you’re a bad person or a weak person or something else that’s negative.
But when it comes to binge eating, negative reinforcement isn’t a great method. Like I talked about last week, being mean to yourself if you binge isn’t useful.
When you consider how you should treat yourself if you end up binge eating, I find it best to think about how you would treat your best friend if they did it. Would you scold them or punish them? Most likely you wouldn’t because you know that’s not going to help them.
So stop doing that to yourself.
You’re just a person who made a mistake.
Release the self-resentment. Let go of the anger.
You don’t have to forget about what you did or condone it and I don’t recommend that you do.
But make peace with it. It happened. You made a mistake. Now what?
Forgive yourself and take some time to learn from it.
“I binged. I’m okay. Now what happened and what can I do better the next time I feel a binge coming on?”
Once you start putting yourself in a negative place and think about how you can punish yourself for what you did (talk badly about yourself, restrict your food tomorrow) then you’re not going to take any positive actions.
There is no need to keep yourself in a bad place where you just keep on self-sabotaging.
Pull yourself out by being kind to yourself and forgiving yourself.
