Do you swing both ways?

Do you swing between weight gain and weight loss?

Bingeing and Restricting?

I saw a post yesterday online of a guy posting about bingeing on junk, therefore falling “off the wagon” with his diet and in order to get “back on track” he was embarking on a restrictive five day egg fast.

Which is exactly as it sounds,

5 days, eggs and fat. That’s it.

Nothing else.

3lbs down from day one apparently.

No wonder really.
Now, it’s not my place to judge anyone and that’s not what I’m doing here.

If it works for you then it works, right?

Having said that, if you are thinking of extreme methods to lose weight, and you’re interested in what I have to say, pause for a second and read on.

I get it,

For whatever reason you go off plan and fall head first into bingeing on your junk food of choice

and for whatever reason it takes you a while to pull yourself back to reality.

You see the damage

on the scale

with the tape measure

maybe even in your skin or

how you feel

and you decide that in order to fix this, you must swing the other way and go head first into restriction.

You feel guilty now and you NEED to feel better immediately.

and feeling better comes from losing weight.

I can understand why you might think that it’s necessary to go from bingeing to restriction but I wonder how often it actually works.

In terms of weight loss, sure it works.

But what about the long term, is it healthy?

Ainzlie, who cares if it’s HEALTHY, I just want to lose weight!!!!!!

You SHOULD care if it’s healthy or not. Because swapping from one kind of unhealthy to a more socially accepted unhealthy is not useful.

Health isn’t just what you can see on the outside,

Health is giving your body the NUTRIENTS that it needs
Health is giving your body the ENERGY that it needs
Health is feeling GREAT every day
Health is being HAPPY in your mind and in your body

Can you lose weight without being healthy?

Of course.

Can you be truly happy without being healthy?

Personally, I don’t believe so.

And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get fat eating loads of junk food because I was happy.

How to stop bingeing and restricting?

This is a very complex subject with many aspects, but

if you want to try and make sense of this in your head

If you want to have a good relationship with your body and with food

Go deep and get honest.

Why did you feel the need to go off the deep end with the junk food?
Why do you feel the need to punish your body in order to get back to where you were?

Is there a pattern to this?

How can you learn from this?

Before you swing the other way and go from one extreme to the other, be patient with yourself,

be honest and find out what the cause for this binge was

then work around how to fix that

because you can’t expect to change anything long term if you don’t.

Ainzlie

Xx

P.s – finding a happy place with food isn’t easy, but it is manageable. For help on calming the stress and finding a better way, get in touch.

p.p.s – I’m not a doctor, this information is based on techniques that have worked for me and for clients. If you think you have an eating disorder, please seek personalised help from a medical professional – not from a blog.