Permission Eating Approach Helps To Banish the 'Bad Girl' Blues After A Binge

Last week I had received an email from one of the women registered in my Losing Weight Without Dieting Program.  We’ll call her Sally. As Sally faced the first challenge of the program, "Legalizing All Foods: Welcoming Back the Former Forbidden No-nos, she went shopping and bought her favorite cake. She brought it home and waited until she got hungry.

Attempting to follow the second principle of the program which is to pay attention to your hunger and eat when you are hungry, she ate and enjoyed the taste so much that she didn’t stop until she felt overfull and bloated. She was beside herself with disappointment and guilt. She wrote to me saying that she fell head first into a binge. Just to clarify, by definition a binge is characterized as eating a large quantity of food over a discrete period of time.

I explained to Sally that her experience with dieting over the years had led her to believe that certain foods were either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and that her choosing those foods made her either virtuous or weak and undisciplined. Overall, that frame of thinking was detrimental to her ultimate weight loss success since it kept her always focused on what she couldn’t have. That tension of wanting foods that she considered to be ‘bad’ created an anxiety in her that compelled her to eat the forbidden no-no. She often gave in and ate the food, feeling badly afterwards.

That is the dynamic of how typical diets work. As you focus on what you can’t or shouldn’t eat, your desire for the forbidden becomes more threatening. This is the reason that she felt guilty when she brought home the cake. She felt like she was being ‘bad’ on her diet.

When she overate the cake, her body felt a certain way. She said that she felt bloated, gassy, anxious, depressed, angry and tired. She vowed to never do that again.

I explained to her that having this experience and looking at from a learning perspective is the way that our bodies will re-learn how to eat normally. This was not a bad thing, but a very necessary and important lesson. She began to feel better knowing that there was no judgment imposed on her overeating.

Think about this. Imagine for a moment that you are in a room filled with your favorite food. There are plates and bowls filled with your heart’s desire. You can eat as much as you want for as long as you want. You decide.

Most likely at first you will eat a large quantity and get so overfull that you will get sick. You may repeat that several times. After you realize how miserable you feel after you get sick, your body unconsciously makes a decision to avoid that feeling and to move towards a feeling that is more pleasant and comfortable. That may mean choosing another food entirely or eating less of the same food. The point is this. With this program, your body determines what is right for you, not your head. Therein lies the secret to losing weight without dieting and eating like a naturally slender person. By doing that, you reclaim power over all foods. If you want to know more, snag my free article and get the big skinny.