No one chooses to be a binge eater. I just want to clear that up right away. This is not about choosing to have this destructive habit be a part of your life. This is about choosing to engage in the behavior each time you do it.
You feel a sense of urgency, a compulsion, a strong urge, and you think you need to eat a lot of food to relieve yourself from that feeling.
Relief is the key word here. That’s what you want.
It’s uncomfortable to sit with that urge to binge eat and not eat. Very uncomfortable. So what do you do to feel better? Eat of course.
Binge eating is your solution.
It’s a solution that doesn’t really solve the problem though. It actually makes it into a bigger problem.
You don’t want to be uncomfortable so to relieve yourself from discomfort, you trade it for worse discomfort – the physical and emotional feelings you get after a binge.
There’s a bit of the relief you’re looking for sandwiched between a lot of discomfort and the relief doesn’t last long…not long enough to make it worth it.
Yet you keep binge eating time and time again expecting to feel it.
You know what the end result is going to be. You’ve experienced it too many times. But in that moment when you’re feeling that sense of urgency, that compulsion, that strong urge, it doesn’t matter what comes later.
All you want is relief right now.
Only thinking about what you will get right now is going to lead to binge eating. It makes it sound like a good idea. Who doesn’t want relief from a urge to binge eat?
But you need to remind yourself of the end result – the guilt, regret, shame, embarrassment, and the physical pain of being stuffed to capacity. You can’t just decide to not care now and then care later when it’s actually happening. That’s not going to help you.
You choose to binge each time because you want relief from the urge. When you decide whether you’re going to eat to feel relief or allow the urge to be there until it relieves itself, remember what the consequences are.
It’s up to you which discomfort you want to feel. I’ll tell you right now, the discomfort of the after-binge is much more difficult to find any relief from. Choose wisely.
