Oh honey.
I hear you. I've been there. I have BED-- binge eating disorder. I will have some kind of trigger (to me it just feels like desire), and will purchase an entire large bag of sour cream and onion chips and sit there, chowing my way through the ENTIRE bag. It doesn't matter that I am full, that I feel a bit sick, that my stomach is starting to HURT... I still keep shovelling them in my mouth. Then afterwards... I hate myself.
I've bought boxes of ice cream bars, and shame-eaten the whole thing in the car before getting home to my man, chucking the box in the garbage can in our parking garage on the way into the apartment to hide it... only to have him confront me with a meal that I feel I HAVE to eat.
I have even, in the absence of a food that will give me that bingy-high, made weird concoctions of cookie-dough-esque mixes of butter, sugar, vanilla and flour, and binge-eaten THOSE.
For most people I've talked to with BED, "Trigger foods" is a common term. As you said, chips, cookies, hors d'oeuvres (I know, right, messed up spelling that word lol)... I'm assuming they tend to be your trigger foods? I know they're mine. The presence of these foods can tend to exacerbate the need/want to binge. I have to avoid them almost entirely... or at least if I'm going to get them, I have to get them in portion-controlled packages. (Like buying a single mini-bag of smart food popcorn, not like buying the box of six 100-calorie bags, or I will just eat all six 100-calorie bags...)
My solution tends to be the following:
1. Avoid the triggers. Bags of chips do not come into my house. Especially not sour cream and onion. If my man brings chips in, I treat them as HIS, and avoid them entirely. Thankfully he prefers flavours I don't like for the most part.
2. Find alternatives that you LIKE. In the evening when I'm at my most bored and bingy state, I have substituted in foods that are better for me, that I can eat as much as I want of (within reason) and that I genuinely enjoy. Frozen mango is one of those things. I eat it completely frozen, like a replacement for ice cream, and it is completely delish, and leaves me with zero guilt afterwards.
3. Portion that sh*t. This doesn't guarantee perfection, but pouring my cheddar rice chips into a bowl and leaving the bag in the kitchen SERIOUSLY decreases my chances of overeating. Yes, I still might go back for seconds, but I'm acutely aware of how many bowls I've eaten of them, and it makes something click in my brain that says, "Maybe you don't need a third refill, hmmm?"
Whereas if I just had the whole bag in my hand, I would've eaten it
all without thinking.
There's a book called "The End of Overeating" that I loved. It actually went through all of these REAL experiments and studies, where they did crazy things, like... hooked a bowl of soup on a restaurant table up to a giant VAT of soup, so when a person ate from it, it kept refilling. One person had the refilling bowl, and everyone else had normal bowls, all told to eat until they were full. The person with the refilling bowl ate several times the amount of soup as everyone else, without mentally feeling that they were full, and stopping. The point hammered home over the course of the book tends to be: "People feel full when their plate is empty, the bag is empty, the box is empty... people feel full when the food is GONE. If you have bigger portions, you won't feel done until the portion is done."
Hope some of my stuff helped, and feel free to ask about my coping mechanisms/experiences if you're interested! <3
Poor Life Decisions
