Please tell me I'm not alone!!!

Just a quick background...I was normal weight most of my life until I hit my college years when I began to yo-yo from 150 to 175 lbs. After getting pregnant with my son and gaining a whopping 80lbs...I was never the same. That's when the binge eating/extreme dieting started. I got down to a size 4 almost size 2 after giving birth. And on a 6 foot frame...that's not good! I maintained this until I conceived and miscarried 2 years later. That sent me into a downward eating spiral. Then I got pregnant 3 months later with my daughter and gained the same 80 lbs. After which I got down to a size 4 again. All the while struggling with bingeing/severe calorie restriction and extreme excercising. Well the stress finally caught up to me and I found myself approaching 200 lbs. at the end of last summer. So from July 31, 2007 to October 31, 2007 I lost 50 lbs. Fifty pounds in 3 months! So I've been maintaining that ever since. I even got certified and now work at my gym as a Spinning Instructor just to keep myself on track...and that definitely helps!


But I'm still struggling with Binge Eating!!! Like today, I had my day all planned out as far as food but I was having major anxiety over going out to dinner with friends tonight for a girlfriend's birthday. We're going to one of my favorite local restaurants known for their amazing desserts. So I thought no biggie...I'll just enjoy this one off-plan meal and then business as usual tomorrow. No such luck! I was having so much guilt and uneasiness about the whole thing that I had a major binge, eating everything in sight!

I feel like I did this because I am definitely one of those people who eats one "bad" thing and says to **** with it and continues eating bad the rest of the day. It was almost like I ate all this crap today so that I wouldn't feel guilt over eating crap tonight! Where's the logic in that?

I didn't post in the Chicks in Control area because I wanted to know if there are specifically any other maintainers that struggle with BED.

I do okay managing it but I feel like I'm tired of managing. I want to just be free.

I dont think mine was as extreme...but yeah, I struggle with binging. Often.

It has been more often as late, which is one of the reasons I am trying again to step away from calorie counting and focusing on nutrition and healthy food. Calorie counting allows me to get too complacent with my triggers and disconnects me from recognizing what is hunger, what is craving, what is self-sabotage.

I needed calorie counting to lose initially, but I dont see it lasting a life time for me. I have gotten in this rut where I am either calorie counting or binging....

I don't binge like I used to, but I occasionally eat "off plan" and then feel bad and have to struggle VERY hard not to say "well, to **** with it, the day is ruined just eat whatever."

Someone on this board once said something that stuck with me. Sorry I don't remember the poster's name, but she said "if you break a dish, do you go and break ALL the dishes?" That really resonated with me.

I learned a lot of valuable tools on this journey, and one of the most valuable was getting over the "all or nothing" "perfection or ****" mentality that I've always had. I was either "perfect" and good or binging and bad - when I ate bad, I would hate myself and when I hate myself, I don't care if I hurt myself by stuffing in more food. I realized I had to love me all the time, imperfect, human me who will occasionally eat offplan because that's just life.

So, if I eat something I didn't plan to eat, or if I eat too much of something, I don't feel GREAT about it, but I don't HATE myself either. I try to learn from it (what triggered me - was I hungry, bored, feeling entitled) and how I can do better in the future but I forgive myself and get right back on track. My rule is I MUST get back on track at the next eating opportunity, an offplan meal does not mean an offplan night or offplan day or offplan week.

I struggle with this too. In my case, it's always triggered by an off-plan meal. The problem is that if I have an off-plan meal, I usually won't bother to log it because it's often virtually impossible to figure out the nutritional content. And if I don't log the one meal, sometimes I don't bother to log the whole day. Even if I do log part of the day's food, I'll still sometimes just start eating without logging what I'm eating. And when I'm not logging my food, I feel like nothing counts calorie-wise. And that leads to eating a lot of food. I know what I need to do here to fix the problem--I need to force myself to be conscious of how many calories I am consuming in everything I eat. But I really struggle with it. Luckily, I very rarely have off-plan meals, so it doesn't happen that often.

I also think it's a product of being on a severely restrictive diet. For a long time I was restricting myself to 1200 calories, which meant no treats, ever. So when I would have an opportunity to have a treat, I felt like it would never come again and I had to eat everything I could. My hope is that as I increase my calories to a maintenance level, I'll be able to allow myself a few treats now and then and this will be less of an issue. But it's a concern too, because, up to until now, when I've allowed myself a treat, it often turns into an eating free-for-all. I'm not at all sure I can allow myself treats in moderation.

And the last problem is that these over-eating episodes happen rarely enough that they don't seem to have a big impact on my ability to maintain (and when they do happen, a lot of times I just don't have that much bad food that I can eat, so there's only so much damage I can do). Even when I was trying to lose, they just slowed me down a bit, I'd still eventually continue to lose. So, since they aren't often enough or off-plan enough to impact my weight, I'm having a hard time forcing myself to address the issue. But I really want to get to a point where I'm following Glory's rule of getting back on plan at the next eating opportunity. I need to just suck it up and do it.

Hey B - can you figure out an offplan "event" in Fitday? Do them in increments of 250 - like 250, 10 grams of fat, 500 calories, 15 grams of fat, 750 calories, 20 grams of fat - have it all set up and ready to go in Fitday. When it happens, you estimate and stick it in. Easy peasy and you can't let the "oh, I can't estimate what I ate" mentality hold you back!

At the best, all calorie counting is an estimate anyway, might as well estimate a blip and keep on trucking.

I know, I know, I need to just suck it up and do something like that. I wouldn't even have to log the off-plan event, if I would just log the rest of it. I know what I need to do, it's just the actual doing it that is the problem.

I was definitely a binge eater in the past. You simply don't get to 287 lbs without doing so.

I thought it was pretty much under control, but these past few weeks have proven otherwise. I've definitely binged. The calorie counting went out the window. I felt that horrible need to just shovel food in my mouth. No consciousness, no awareness. Just get more food in thy mouth as quickly as possible. It's a horrible feeling.

Eating one "off plan" thing seems to have triggred it for me. I'm okay with getting back on track the next day, but I need to learn or RE-learn how to get back on track THAT VERY SAME DAY. For the time being, there can be on "off plan" eating whatsoever. When I get past this current blip, I'll have to re-evaluate.

Oh yes, I struggle with this too. I have definitely fallen into the trap of going off plan on something (a treat or a meal), and then figuring I've blown it for the day, so I REALLY go off plan and stuff everything imaginable in my face. I've gone to the point of being physically uncomfortable and then beating myself up about it for "failing again" and the loss of control. It isn't fun.

I find that the exercise of writing down everything I eat helps. It forces me to stop and recognize what I am doing and make a conscious decision to go ahead. I've consciously chosen to eat 2500 and more calorie days, just because I REALLY wanted it at that point. Somehow just the act of admitting to myself that I am making a choice and accounting for it, helps me feel more in control and less guilty about the whole thing. Then, I try to adjust later to make up the difference. If I go on vacation and have no earthly idea how much I've eaten in a day, I just estimate fairly high -- like 3500-4000 calories and average that in. (I just use pencil/paper and plot on an excel worksheet, so don't have to try to fit it into some kind of system like FitDay)

I definitely have trigger foods and I don't know if I'll ever NOT struggle with the binge tendency. I find when I work out regularly, my eating tends to fall in line better. It's a day by day thing ... some days I feel on top of it, some days less so ....

Thank you all so much for this thread! I am really close to goal and this has been worrying me a lot. I have always been a binge eater. I was bulimic through my 20s and early 30s and "got better" which just meant I didn't purge anymore. I know there are trigger foods I have to stay away from - anything salty and greasy tops the list. I was pretty much binge free for 6 months but in the last month I've been falling into mini-binges. I still only eat on plan but I eat more than I need, when I'm not hungry, and more fat than I planned. The tendency worries me. It really helps to know that all of you deal with this and still are able to maintain your weight. I know it can be done!

Well I definitely went out with a bang last night at dinner....easily a 2500-3000 calories "meal"...add to that everything I ate beforehand and I'm thinking at least 6000-7000 calories for the day. I'm just so disgusted about the whole thing! So of course I was on major damage control today. I had my normal smoothie for breakfast and then for lunch I only ate 4 slices of Boar's Head chicken with 1 wedge of LC cheese and four orange slices. Then I taught a Spin class at 4:30 and came home and had a smoothie for dinner. So only about 800 calories for the day. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be in a better frame of mind and stop beating myself up about it.

For a couple weeks I got away from putting everything in Fitday so I definitely need to get back on that. I think I might also get a notebook to track my binges. Write down the date, time of day, what I was feeling, what was going on in my life....maybe I can identify a pattern here.

I know you guys have said many times that maintaining is harder that losing...truer words were never spoken. I was a pro at losing weight! Still just an amatuer at this maintaining gig.