Aargh! I just joined this forum, and I made it one day eating just healthy food, no sweets and no binging, but then the next day I let myself have just "one" small sweet treat, and then I spent the ENTIRE rest of the day thinking about sugary snacks! WHY is that?? I ended up all out binging. I feel like a failure! Is there hope? What is up with this?

Sugar is a hard habit to break. My main vice is ice cream, but if I don't keep it in the house I won't eat it. The same goes for any other unhealthy food. Remove the temptation and you'll have no choice but to eat the healthy foods you bought. Good luck!

Dhani

Sugar is addictive.

I know for me I can't allow myself "one treat" because that just opens the door for my addiction to run wild. Now that I've cleaned that stuff out of my system I want to stay clean. I'm not craving the candy bars and cookies right now but if I treated myself I'd have another two weeks of fighting to get clean again. Sure I missed it originally but now I don't, I really really don't.

I can't do diet soda either, that sets off the same triggers as straight up sugar. I can, however, do fruit (some folks can't as it can also be a trigger).

I know there are folks out there who can treat themselves and go right on being "good" after their treat but I know I am not one of them. I suspect you aren't either....

Okay! I will eat more fruit. Healthy sugar!

Yeah, I have that same trigger problem with any processed sort of sweets.... Cookies, ice cream, etc...

Say, I just talked on the phone today with my former nutritionist from the ED place I went to last year, and when I expressed my problem, she suggested I shoot for ONE sweet treat a day. And limit it to JUST that. She said it takes a while for our bodies to adjust to this, but eventually it will and I'll stop getting all the nasty physical cravings after indulging slightly :P I guess right now, since I've been binging every day, my body is set in the mode that one treat means several more are coming, but once I adjust my habits my body will adjust too. I might try this! Maybe... we'll see. But resisting is just sooooo hard!

Thank you, gals!!

I'm doing something similar to this: allowing myself one treat a day.

A part of me doesn't want to, and thinks it is easier to just avoid the junk altogether, but this is my effort to learn how to eat "bad foods" in moderation so I can have a healthy, normal relationship with food. So one cookie doesn't lead to the box, then to a bag of chips, and so on.

Good luck! I find that if I keep my treat to the very last moment in the day, like around bed time, I am able to resist binging than if I was eating the treat earlier in the day and then have the entire day to think about what other junk I can eat because "I spoiled my diet".

Lata,
That is a good point (waiting until night time to eat it). If moderate dessert servings weren't so crazy small (like half a cup of ice cream or one small brownie, etc...), I would totally eat half at lunch and half at night, but I'll probably just have it all at night since they are :P I agree that it's important to know how to eat these things in moderation (especially since my family centers so many holidays and things around food, so they're practically offended if you don't sample their treats).

Success! I totally wanted to eat this dessert bar at lunch today, but I restrained myself and ate an orange instead, and the craving went away!! Thanks, jemappellesierra! Your trick worked!

Well, I blew it. I told myself I wouldn't do it, but then I went and ate a whole bunch of junk food. I doubt I've ever eaten this many calories in one day before in my life! :P I ate almost 3 whole bags of chocolate chips!! Why am I such an idiot?! I've spread myself out to thin in life activities and the stress is breaking me! Help!!!

Don't be too hard on yourself, Lily. We are all human and make mistakes. Important thing is to learn from this. Why did it happen and what you can do to prevent if from happening again. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start again.

Are there any other ways you can deal with stress? That seems to be a big trigger for you.

You're right. A huge part of it was stress and part of it was that (at night) I really just needed to go to bed and sleep on it and figure things out in the morning. I'm just going to learn from this and move forward (trying to think positive). Also, I went for a run today and feel slightly better from that. I think I'll make a list of better stuff to do for handling stress and keep it nearby for emergencies. My problem is that food is my #1 fallback for almost every single emotion, and I therefore turn to it effortlessly as an ingrained habit the moment I feel something more strongly than I think I can handle. Not sure how this all began, but yeah. I need to break this cycle and form HEALTY habits!!

Lily - I do something similar to you. It used to be if I ate something sweet (or a baked good) I'd go crazy and binge. That's because I restricted them for such a long time, and I also wanted to learn how to eat like a sane, normal human being again.

So I wanted to eat one, portion controlled thing a day. I bought a bag of hershey squares, which are little, individual hershey bars. I eat one a day. The last time I binged (about 3 weeks ago) I actually DIDN'T binge on the chocolate, but other things... So that's progress. To me, anything I restrict will become a binge food. So as I slowly eliminate things that I am restricting, I eradicate the desire to binge on the food. Even after I binged, and didn't feel like I "deserved it" I moved forward and kept eating a square of chocolate every day. It helps me so much, and I don't have those crazy bingeing urges for sugar anymore... My bingeing as decreased significantly.

As others have said- don't completely deprive yourself as that sets you up for disaster. I know that's where I've failed miserably.

If you set any food off limits, you'll just be thinking about it constantly and the slightest indulgence will get you saying "**** this...I already screwed up, why don't I keep going?"

Start slowly, like you said, treating yourself once a day. You'll learn to be satisfied with a smaller portion knowing that you CAN have it. And try to slowly switch to healthier options- fruit was mentioned as well as yogurt. I eat Chobani yogurt with fruit on the bottom and that's like a dessert for me!

Don't worry about making mistakes- we all do, time and time again. But eventually you'll learn to have a normal relationship with food and the cravings will go away. Just keep positive and keep going!

Edit: I too have been known to be an emotional eater- for ANY emotion. Overjoyed, depressed, anxious, bored...all of it. I've learned to do other activities to help relieve the stress and get out the emotion. Any time I've thought I needed chocolate, I've asked myself if I was truly hungry and either chosen a better option or distracted myself with something as mundane as dusting or doing laundry. Walks are great too.

It's the same for me. If I overeat, it's never on the individually wrapped snacks I bought to teach myself moderation. There's something so shameful to me about opening up wrapper after wrapper and eating its contents, whereas a large bag of chips that can be opened once doesn't seem so bad. Sick, I know.

I echo the thoughts of others, too much restriction is not good and will only set you up for binging. If you binge one day, get back on the wagon and have your treat as planned the next day. Keep working on it and one day the all or nothing thinking will disappear.

Your Nutritionist sounds a little "off". I wonder if she would suggest an alcoholic have one drink a day, and a crack addict have one hit a day? That's just human torture. You can't teach an addict moderation. Can't be done. Sad that some people don't get it.

ETA:
I was out working and started thinking about this thread a bit. I don't quite understand WHY so many people think you MUST have treats each day. In the old pioneer days...the Great West movement, no one had to have treats everyday. Sugar was VERY hard to come by. No one was deprived by not having it each day. People enjoyed it when they had it, but went on with life when they didn't. It wasn't an issue. Why is it now? Why do we HAVE to eat a treat every single day to not feel deprived? The mindset that many have that we MUST treat ourselves regularly to avoid a binge is such BS in my humble opinion.

Oh and living out on the prairie, I've heard loads of stories from the old timers. When and if the sugar cart would come, they might make ice cream, or some other goodie...and they HAD to consume it all in one day because they had no refrigeration. They didn't hate themselves because the family ate an entire batch of ice cream, they were happy to get it because they KNEW it would be a LONG time before they would get it again. They didn't treat themselves to a piece of choclate every day because they deserved it...they felt they deserved what they worked for, like a roof over their heads or meat. Why now, do we demand that we deserve sugar, why do we think it's wrong to refrain from it most of the time? What is wrong with a good serving every once in a while and not to eat daily? Back then it was a real treat. People have been binging on sugar for centuries, and then abstaining for months and months...Why now is it a disorder when it used to be life?

Okay rant over. I know the answers to my questions. People have always been addicts, but once they abstained for awhile, they forgot about the sugar beast...

We think we think we need it because we are slaves to sugar.... Why torment an addict with tiny fixes to keep the desire alive??? Torture is all it is.

Lori - I understand what you are saying. however in MY experience, when I wanted something, and told myself "No, you're not allowed to have that" or "No, you can't have that" again and again... I eventually caved. Every. Single. Time. Maybe I didn't binge for a few weeks at a time, or a few months... But it always came back around. Anything I deprived myself of was eventually binged on. So, it's not that a person HAS to treat themselves every day. It's that if a person WANTS something, they should eat it in a controlled way. Otherwise they will hyper-focus on it and go crazy on it.

Everyone has to find what works for them.