Posts tagged with “bingeing”

How Toast Changed My Life and Helped Me Stop Bingeing

One day, toast changed my life.

It was many years ago, when I was working as a personal trainer and nutrition and wellness coach.

I spent my days helping people “get fit” and “eat healthy,” so of course I was always preaching about lifestyle changes, “healthy” eating, and “whole, clean, nutritious” food, while demonizing “processed” foods, as most others in those worlds do.

Toast, at the time, was a big no-no. Especially toast made with white bread.

That’s basically blasphemy in the “healthy eating” world, with two strikes against it. First, bread has carbs, which I learned, from Atkins in …

How Restrictive Diets Mess with Our Brains and Lead to Bingeing

By Roni Davis

“Your body is precious. It is your vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.” ~Buddha

When I went on my first diet in my teens (low-carb, it was back in the Atkins days), I wasn’t even overweight. I weighed less than 120 pounds, but my jeans had started to get a little tight, so I thought I needed to lose five pounds or so. At the time, I didn’t have a bad relationship with food; I just ate like a typical teenager—not the best choices.

About two hours in, I remember starting to obsess over the things I couldn’t eat …

Eating Too Much While Working from Home? How to Solve Emotional Snacking

By Laura Lloyd

“We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel.” ~Geneen Roth

Sometimes I feel like asking me, a recovering overeater, to work from home is as unreasonable as hoping a sex addict will pen a report from the lobby of a brothel.

Snarky email? Feel annoyed. Get Penguin bar from cupboard.

Meeting over? Feel relief at no longer being on camera. Eat Wagon Wheel from cupboard.

Worked hard today? Need a reward. Wait, who ate all the kids’ lunchbox treats? Never mind, people, all good: I found the cheese.

This was me when …

How to Protect Our Kids from a Lifetime of Food, Weight, and Body Image Issues

By Roni Davis

I went on my first diet when I was around fourteen or so because, as they often do in growing teens, my jeans started getting tight.

And because I grew up in the same anti-fat culture we all have, I hated myself for it.

Around the same time, an adult in my life who was always obsessed with “eating healthy” gave me a copy of the new book she was reading outlining the healthiest way to eat.

It was a book on the Atkins/low-carb diet.

The author spent the bulk of the book demonizing carbs, explaining in convincing-sounding …

How Weight and Food Obsessions Disconnect Us and Why This Is So Harmful

By Roni Davis

“We are hard-wired to connect with others, it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it, there is suffering.” ~Brené Brown

I was inducted into diet culture in my early teens and then into the health and fitness industry in my early thirties, when my “fitness journey” had finally really taken off, and I ultimately became a personal trainer and nutrition and wellness coach.

Once we’ve given enough years of our life to diet culture, many of us begin to recognize the ways that it’s harming us and all the things it’s stealing from us.

Peace of …

How I Broke My Stress Eating Habit When Nothing Else Worked

By Laura Lloyd

“The pain seems so much more difficult than the cookies. But it’s not. The pain covered in cookies becomes pain covered in fat covered in more pain.” ~Brooke Castillo

Do you ever eat when you’re stressed, sad, tired, alone?

Bag of chips after a hard day?

Ordering the take-out when your partner’s away?

I did.

Seven years ago, my newborn baby cried every evening.

I’d feed her, change her, and blow raspberries on her neck. Still, she screamed—like a smoke alarm you couldn’t stop.

I tried singing to her, burping her, begging her…

I felt useless, desperate.

In my journalism …

I Was a Bulimic Nutritionist, but I’m No Longer Ashamed or Hiding

By Heather Lillico

“Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.” ~ Brené Brown

I felt like a hypocrite. I would tell my nutrition clients to eat a salad with vegetables, then I’d go home and scarf down an entire pizza. After guilt and shame set in, I would purge and throw it up.

I think I became a nutritionist partly so I could better control my relationship with food. If I learned the secrets behind eating I could biohack my way to putting the fork down, losing weight, and finally being happy. This was back when I thought thinness equaled happiness.

It’s taken …

The Surprising Strategy I Used to Stop Bingeing (and Why It Worked)

By Roni Davis

“Sometimes the thing you’re most afraid of doing, is the very thing that will set you free.” ~Robert Tew

I recovered from binge eating and bulimia by giving myself permission to binge. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

My decades-long weight and food war started in my teens, immediately after reading my first diet book, about Atkins, to be exact. I spent the following two decades trying to lose weight (only to keep gaining) and struggling with food.

By my early thirties, I’d finally managed to lose weight, but it hadn’t end the war, it had just started a new one. The …

Freedom from Food – This Time for Good!

By Sharon Shahaf

“Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.” ~Eckhart Tolle

I cannot say that I didn’t struggle in my life. But there’s one area in which I have overcome the challenges I was facing with hardly an effort: letting go of the eating disorder I was suffering from, getting rid of the extra weight I was carrying, and maintaining the results easily for twenty-eight years.