I am sitting here, my tummy is so full that it feels stretched out and uncomfortable, and there is STILL something inside me saying I want to keep eating.

Is it because I didn't give in and give my body the junk it wanted? I mean, I felt the urge to eat and eat big coming on. . .so instead of grabbing junk, I made myself wait and fixed a HUGE batch of stew - 4 onions, tomato sauce, hot peppers, the biggest eggplant you have ever seen (seriously!). . .and then. . .I ate the WHOLE THING.

So I am stuffed, but I don't feel like somehow I got what I "wanted," and so I still want to eat!

I am a freak.

First...you are not a freak. Overeating is so common. I use to do it. Especially when I was single. you have to figure out why you do it and how you can stop. My reason was I was lonely so I'd eat tons and go to sleep. It became a part of me so even after I met my husband and got married it continued. So I decided to get ahold of myself. I started by going to Walmart and buying 8" plates with a 6" innercircle, I use them instead of my regular plates which are 14" with a 10" innercircle. I keep all my food inside of that innercircle which keeps me from eating too much. The challenge is not to go for seconds which I do good at.

At least what you overate was veggie soup. Hope my story helped you.

NO way you're not a freak! the same thing happened to me yesterday and i had a pity party after i downed a burrito from a tasty place. But today is a new day.... i can say a bunch of things of why I did it .... mixture of that i could, pms, hubby is out of town.... but the good thing about us that we reflect and move on..... everyone does it so don't beat yourself up! : )

you are not a freak in any way. Many of us have been there many times, so you're definitely not alone in this!

Would it help if you had a small part of whatever you're craving? With myself, I found I went either "all or nothing", so I had difficulty just having a small piece. But what did help was if I only bought things that were small in quantity so if I decided to eat it, I didn't have more than one serving or piece. But I know sometimes that doesn't help and it's easier to not have any of it, we're all different

hang in there!!

Oh, I don't know if this is relevant for you, but another thing I found was that it's easier to stay away from sweet sugary foods if I stay away from sugary foods. What I mean, is that once my body adjusted to not eating junk food, the cravings practically disappeared!! I think sugar makes us crave it more, so the more we have the more we crave... I don't know if that's just a myth, but I found once I got past the first few days of not eating it (I'd eat it daily) , I had a much easier time staying away from it past that! It wasn't easy to cut it out in the first place, but it did get much easier after that! Just as a sidenote

Thanks, everybody.

Yeah, I have a REALLY hard time stopping once I start - so I have been trying to at least when I feel the urge to overeat, substitute healthy foods. I don't keep much junk in the house, but right now we do have some yummy cheeses left over from a wine & cheese party we had over the weekend, and that was definitely what was calling to me!

At any rate, I DID stop last night after the massive pot of eggplant stew. . .I am up 1/2 pound this morning, despite my overall calories yesterday being relatively low, so I am gonna call it "bloating from excess fiber" - what with all the stew, when I figured it up, my fiber consumption for yesterday was a whopping 59.25 grams!

Got up and went to the gym this morning & packed all healthy eats for today. . .but honestly, it is the evenings that get me! Every time!

Well you know what I have heard, and it makes sense, is that our body's full button only gets turned off when we eat certain healthy foods. Kind of like you go to Mc Donalds and have a double cheeseburger a coke and fries and before you know it, you're hungry again! That is because you didn't get any of the vitamins that your body was needing. It makes sense to me. i know you made healthy sioup so that is awesome. But maybe there is something you need and you are missing?

Did you have any meat or protein in the stew?

I have struggled many years with binge-eating. The situation you described -- eating LOTS and LOTS of something healthy and high-fiber -- is a situation I have been in many times as well. I have a theory... I think for those of us who are or have been binge eaters, the "stuffed full" feeling has a LOT of emotions associated with it. We associate negative emotions such as, "Oh, no! I've totally blown it! I'm going to be fat/fatter/gain weight/undo all my progress/etc! I'm out of control!" We also associate positive emotions with this feeling because it is how we felt physically when we emotionally numbed ourselves with too much food or pleasured ourselves with too much or whatever. When we feel full, especially that bloated-full, I think we have an EMOTIONAL response (both positive and negative) that causes those of us who struggle with binge-eating to contemplate eating even more! Does this make sense?

So in the face of feeling very full, I often have to remind myself that what/how much I ate is FINE and to stop. Weird, but true! Anyone else?

Geneen Roth says that if we deny ourselves the food we want, we'll binge on foods we don't want. I've found this to be true for myself.

If I tell myself I can never ever have an ice cream cone but I really want an ice cream cone, I'll eat the entire cupboard. If I'd just let myself have some ice cream, I would have only had the calories in that one ice cream cone instead of the calories in a ham sandwich, can of soup, head of lettuce, cup of salad dressing, container of cake icing...you get the point.

I'm working on not having any "thou shalt not eats" so that I never have to feel like I have to eat too much of something because I'll never get to have it again. This alone makes a huge difference in my binge behaviors.

I know what ya mean Kate. That is why with my eating if I am craving something, I will have it. Like once a month or so I get a huge urge for pie! I just go ahead and have it and be done with it.

You're not a freak. I do the same thing. A lot of us do. I think you should be very proud that you did it with an extremely low cal stew instead of a carton of ice cream.

Jasmine raised a good point about the protein. And the others who said you might do well to allow yourself a little of what you crave to stave off binges. I've had success with allowing myself sweets by buying them in already portioned individual packs. Otherwise, I keep going back for handfuls and that's dangerous for me.

Well, I tried upping the protein yesterday. . .for some reason felt like I was STARVING, even though my total calories were up. . .maybe because I didn't have that "full" feeling. . .but I did not binge. . .

I've done the stew thing actually. I found that right after I make the soup or whatnot if you feel you're going to binge then to whip out some plastic single serving containers and start portioning it off into them and right into the freezer. I can't come back for thirds when its all in the freezer then I have oodles of lunches made for myself.