1. Don’t purge. I know it’s really hard to hold back from it, especially if you’ve done it before, but it will not benefit you in any way.
2. Don’t reduce your calorie intake for tomorrow (or any of the days following) to nothing. It might seem like a logical plan, but if you restrict tomorrow, you’ll never get into a normal cycle of eating. You’ll be constantly ricocheting between binge and purge, starve and binge, purge and starve. You’ll never be eating normally.
3. Remember that it takes 3500 EXCESS calories to gain a pound. This means 3500 calories on top of what your body already requires to function on a day-to-day basis. It’s highly unlikely your stomach can even hold this much, much less double that, so it’s very unlikely you’ll gain more than two pounds from this! Your progress is not back at zero. Your efforts so far are not null. This is just a little bump in the road.
4. Put on comfy clothes. Honestly. Tight clothes will just make you feel worse. Feeling bad = more binging. Take off those tight jeans, and put on some cozy sweats.
5. Use your binge as a learning experience. What triggered it? Did you feel out of control? Did you actually want all the food you were eating, or were you just eating for eating’s sake? Did you even like the taste of some of it? Do you think you binged because you deprived yourself of a treat you wanted earlier? Did you binge because you’ve been starving all day and just couldn’t take it anymore? Try and understand your binge, understand what your mind went through when your hands were reaching for all that food. The more you can understand the reasons behind your binge, the better you’ll be next time at preventing them—when you’re standing in the middle of a binge, it actually has nothing to do with willpower, it’s usually the result of decisions you made much earlier. For more information on how your brain can trick you into binging when its not getting enough nutrients, click here and here.
6. Remember that you are NOT a failure, bad for eating, undeserving of life, or ugly because you decided to give yourself what you really wanted.
Now for the fun part.
Tomorrow, wake up all bright and sunny. Leap right out of bed (Note: when wondering how to get out of bed, the answer is always “leap.”) Have a delicious bowl of healthy for breakfast and get really excited about feeling awesome all day because of all the healthy food you’re going to bless your body with. Take a walk, if you’d like to. Smile all day long. Drink some water.
But don’t purge and don’t restrict. Eat how you’d normally eat, cause you’re a normal eating healthy person who does not fall prey to freak eating cycles. You don’t need that shit, look at you, you’re hot as hell.
