Easy answer, you are not eating enough during the week, OR you are not eating enough of the right things
(and I do not mean enough vegetables and protein).
Yes, we all need to be covering our bases, ensuring we are giving our bodies enough of the food they require to always feel and operate at their best. That is crucial.
But along with that,
there needs to be joy on our plates.
We should
enjoy what we are eating. You should look forward to our meals, not be completely indifferent all the time or only eating them because they will help us lose the last 20 pounds (for the 42nd time…). That shit never works.
You will never find long-term joy by beating your body into submission.
Stop trying.
If you find yourself eating like you haven’t eaten all week every Friday night or elbow deep into a bag of cookies Saturday afternoon after you promised yourself you will “be good” this weekend, it is time to call your bullshit.
There is one painfully simple solution. Eat more during the week.
The end. Eat more of the foods you enjoy eating during the week. You do not need to wait until Friday night to earn your cookie. You can have that same cookie before it becomes a stale piece of cardboard. You can have dessert on Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Even Monday, when we are all trying our best to "be good"....
Throw out the idea that eating food you enjoy is “cheating.”
What are y’all cheating on?? Yourself?!
That is a horrible thing to tell your subconscious every weekend.
I picture the conversation going something like this:
👩Hey subconscious, you know I can’t be trusted, right? If I were to eat a cookie on Wednesday, my whole week would be fucked up. I would eat all the cookies, and I wouldn’t stop until Monday morning. I am going to suffer through another week of no carbs. I am not even going to fuck with fruit this week, going to be extra good, no sugar at all.
🧙♀️OK, didn’t that end up going like shit last week, though? And the weekend before that?
👩Ya, but this is different. It will be fine.
Then Friday night comes, you tell yourself you earned just one thing because you did it, you were so good all week, so clearly it is different now, you can stop at only one cookie or one sliver of cake…
And we all know how that story goes. You don’t stop.
You can’t because your body is deprived of any pleasure.
You are trying to stop a train already in motion.
You end up doing just want you told yourself you would do all week, eat all the cookies and everything else you could find.
Why is that?
Because you told yourself that is what you do! You said it and made it come true.
Stop predicting the future.
Our mind hears everything. All the stories we tell ourselves are happening there. We can not hide from our own thoughts,
but we can choose what we pay attention to.
If you tell yourself that every time you eat a treat, you will go off the rails and eat all the treats, then exactly that will happen.
Believing that you can only eat certain foods because of that self-imposed phenomenon is telling the future.
Stop being your own worst enemy.
Food should not hold power over us. If you want a cookie on a Tuesday, eat the cookie. It will prevent you from eating ALL the cookies on Saturday. It really is that simple.
The weekend has become your weak end because we have told ourselves that is a time to cheat...
Why are we OK with cheating on ourselves? That is unacceptable behavior and thinking. Cheating implies that we are doing something wrong, which keeps us stuck in the idea that some foods are bad and only allowed to be eaten during certain magical days when no one is working, and other foods are good, we should eat those during our working week. We believe that by doing so and keeping ourselves in that little safe nutritional Monday through Friday box, we are somehow saving ourselves.
Really that is the exact behavior that is messing us all up.
Eat whatever you want at any given time. Nothing terrible will happen IF you tell yourself and fully buy into the idea that nothing wrong will happen.
Will it be weird at first, breaking all the self-imposed rules you have been abiding by for much of your life? Yes. It will be.
Will you feel like you are doing something wrong or sinful? Yes, it will.
For some of you, the ones like me who struggle with binge eating, will it make us feel like we have thrown in the towel, so might as well say fuck it, eat 10 more, and “start fresh” tomorrow? Yes. It will.
Sit with that feeling. Allow yourself to feel it.
Do not try to avoid it or hide from it. Feel it. Allow your body to sit in that momentary discomfort. Feel what it feels like to go through the full cycle.
Most of us have never allowed that. We get that hot uncomfortable feeling in our bellies, our minds run wild with the idea that we have somehow wronged ourselves, and the only way to right it is by further wronging ourselves, aka eating all the fucking cookies, and by doing that, we are making it right.
We must learn to sit with that discomfort.
Feel it.
Allow it to pass. It is such simple advice, yet we are not doing it.
I have worked with women who want to lose weight and feel better in their bodies for ten years. Because I struggled with binging, I knew I needed to give ways to ride that feeling out.
My advice was lazy, though, stuff like “go fold a load of laundry” or “clean the kitchen; it will pass.” And I was right, it will pass, and that advice works. But it works like duct tape on a leak. It will hold for so long, maybe minutes, maybe an hour, perhaps even until you wake up the next day and try again. But it will never last forever. The solution is never permanent. It is a lazy fix. A fix that keeps us from doing what we really should be doing all those years; allowing myself to feel.
What I should have been doing all those years I was at war with my body. Sitting with it. Sit with the feeling of distress, unease and anxiety that comes right before a binge.
Do not try to run from it or quiet it with activity. Simply sit and observe. Question. Ask what is happening in that moment making you feel this way. Ask what happened that day to bring you to this point.
You will notice three things, three really fucking magical items that will change your life.
First, that it is not that bad. You can allow that space to occur. And second,
it will pass.
It will pass, and you will be fine. And third; the most amazing of them all; your body is trying to tell you something. You have something you need to process, a feeling you need to FEEL. Allowing yourself to listen will change how you react in every situation, and that goes so much further then the food on our plates.
Avoiding foods as a means to prevent a binge works, but only for so long.
We wouldn’t be eating like an asshole every weekend if it worked as a long-term solution.
If avoidance were the real answer, if a 21 day or 30 day fast from sugar was the real answer to never craving it again, we would only have to do those programs one time. But it doesn’t work like that, does it?
We find ourselves running to the same diets and protocols repeatedly, thinking they will fix us, and when they don’t, we believe we are the problem.
We aren’t. We have just been looking in the wrong place for a cure.
We are the cure we have been waiting for.
All we need to do is a hard thing a few times, sit with that feeling and feel it.
Our relationship with food is not logical—our relationship with binging even more so.
The weekend is not what is fucking us up. What we do not allow during the week is.
What happens over the weekends, when we feel off the rails and out of control with our diet, is not a problem. The weekend overeating is a SYMPTOM of a problem you are working HARD to stay in. Eating CLEAN and GOOD Monday through
Thursday is not what is saving you. It is what is fucking you up.
Allow yourself any food at any time.
Ask your body what it wants, listen to its response, and honor it. It really can be that simple if you are committed to getting out of your own way and over your bullshit.