binged? Here's what to do next

Binges happen.

It’s not the end of the world, it’s something that is bound to occur sometimes during your weight loss journey and that’s completely normal. Binges are just something that occurs when we restrict ourselves too much or for too long.

It happens.

There’s no need to beat yourself up or punish yourself when it occurs.

Depending on how often you’re binging, what to do next is slightly different.

If you binged once in a blue moon, there’s nothing to do after it just move on. Next day just hop back into your regular diet and routine and keep going. No need to eat less, no need restrict more food, no need to overthink anything. It happens. It’s like tripping on your own foot sometimes. Sometimes you just trip, there’s no need to over-analyze it, get up and keep going.

Now if you’re binging like every couple of days now you got a different problem to deal with. Binging so often is likely caused by your diet being too restrictive so you have trouble keeping up to it. In this case the answer isn’t to “move on”, but to adjust your diet so it’s less restrictive so you can at least keep up with it for 3-4 weeks without fail.

Being on an ultra restrictive diet might get you temporary fast results, but those results also disappear pretty fast when you end up binging and needing to start over again & again & again.

Here’s what not to do after a binge…

… do not punish yourself and make yourself eat less the next day to make up for your binge. That’s the worst thing you can do for a binge.

Why?

Cos the binge was likely caused by some from of restriction. By restricting yourself even more you’re just building yourself up for another binge in the near future. If your solution to binges is to keep “making up for it”, all that’s doing is putting you in a miserable cycle or binge, restrict, binge, restrict until finally your only way out is to quit. 

Binges are normal, they happen. They cannot ‘ruin’ all your progress.

Progress is built through time and consistency. What you can’t build in one day also can’t be destroyed in one day.

So you binged? Cool. No worries.

Identify why you binged, and either move on and make some adjustments to your diet and then move on.

It’s not the end of the world.

— Po