I hate myself every time I binge – how do I stop?
All people who feel they fail repeatedly lose their self-confidence. Everyone else seems to be able to control their food intake, so every binge-eating episode seems like a personal failure. Therefore, you shall now start a new way of living without binge eating. The first thing to realize is that you have to be satiated all the time so that you are never very hungry. That means that you have to eat small meals four to six times a day and without vomiting. It also means that your diet must be varied, otherwise you start longing for what you think you shouldn’t eat and you cannot stop eating, even though you would like to. These feelings are difficult to control and therefore they create anxiety about food because you think that you will become fat because you binged. However, you must dismiss these thoughts, because you will eventually be able to eat any food while remaining slim when your normal feelings of hunger and satiety are restored. A good start in that direction is directing your attention towards anything other than eating and your body. Any activity you can initiate to distract you from these thoughts will help to eliminate the binge eating. You also must decide that from this day forward you will not regurgitate any food, even if you have been binge eating, instead of saying that “today is my last binge”. Every time you go to bed in the evening, you will try to rid yourself of all of your thoughts about food and self criticism as you undress.