Recovering From A Binge Eating Setback

Hey Girlie! Let me tell you about a pretty big setback I had recently. It was an absolutely amazing weekend thus far and my family and I were having a blast at our lake house. Everything was going just perfectly until Sunday right after lunch. You see, I woke up excited and eager for the day as our new boat was going to be delivered! I was so happy for my husband and son as they were both ecstatic about getting this cool ski boat. I could also see the joy in my daughter’s eyes as she watched her dad get ready for the big delivery. Everyone who was present waited in jubilant anticipation.

As the guys were tinkering around with electrical stuff the girls were chatting it up in the house while watching my grandbaby, Violet, scoot around the floor. I fixed a yummy breakfast and made lunch for all of us. Things were going great until the moment I noticed “it”…that weird inability to stop eating. You know how it just hits you completely out of the blue? It’s that crazy feeling that you are a bottomless pit and you know you have put more than enough food into your body. The reality didn’t hit me until around 3:00pm, right before the boat was scheduled to arrive.

The binge began when I started picking at the leftover biscuits from breakfast--let’s not pretend that I hadn’t already had one earlier in the morning, plus my morning superfood shake, plus lunch... yikes. So while I was not physically hungry at this time I felt an extreme sense of hunger or need to stuff my face. You see normally, after eating breakfast and lunch, I would be completely satisfied and really wouldn’t need to eat until dinner time... but not on this lovely Sunday.

This day was particularly weird because although I’d had a sensible lunch with everyone else, I felt like I wasn’t full… so I had another biscuit. At that point my daughter decided she wanted to make a s’more since we had forgotten to make them the night before while the firepit was lit. So what did I do? I decided to join her and eat three of them! I kept telling myself that they weren’t all that bad as I was using dark chocolate with almonds. I mean come on! The things we tell ourselves in the moment to give us permission to eat haphazardly. I justified it by saying it was my 15% of fun eating that I was enjoying, but I had gone way over 15% and the reality was that I wasn’t even tasting the food! I kept telling myself that it wasn’t stress eating because, “hello”, I had nothing to be stressed about in my life as I looked out on the water, reflecting on the fact that we were getting a brand new boat within the hour. The boat came and we went out on the lake, but even after the amazing boat ride I couldn’t let it go.

Later, at dinner, I ate even more but by this time I was starting to relax and not feel as empty. It was the perfect opportunity (or excuse) to allow myself to indulge in these amazing fried oysters, fried shrimp, fried catfish, fried pickles and, OK, I even had a small salad and a plain baked sweet potato to try and make it “healthy”. LOL, I know right, cray cray thinking?! It happens to all of us.

It wasn’t until the next day when I looked at my period tracker after my daily weigh in (to see the damage I had caused) that I realized that I was 6 days out from starting my period. So there it was, the answer. Though I had an explanation, I was still not settled with my soul because I kept thinking about previous struggles with PMS symptoms. Bingeing like that, and for that long, had never really happened before to that extreme.

It wasn’t until I went live in my VIP Facebook Fitness and Accountability Boot Camp that I finally realized what had ACTUALLY taken place. You see, emotional binge eating can sneak up on us not only in the bad times of life when we are stressed out or trying to numb out what is going on around us with food, but it can happen on some pretty surreal days as well. You see the whole experience of receiving the boat and watching the anticipation of the boat and seeing the joy on my husband’s face as he was once again able to give this to our kids must have really touched something intensely deep inside of me that Sunday.

I remember holding my grandbaby, Violet, and telling her that she was worth it and that I was so happy for everything and every experience that I had to go through in order to get to there. At the time I didn’t realize how deep that went but from someone who has always just done what “had to be done” and not really felt the losses through and through that we endured back then, this was a emotionally charged day for me. So therefore, I ate... and I ate a lot you guys.

Now I could have beaten myself up about this and totally whined and cried about it but if you know me at all that’s just not how I roll. I knew this slip up did not define me, nor did it foreshadow future eating habits. The binge would end with the day and I wasn’t going to validate throwing away any future health choices because of a bad day.

So I did what I am constantly encouraging my “tribe” and other people who follow my journey to do: I picked myself up, dusted off the metaphorical mess, and came up with a plan of action to conquer this defeat so that I’d learn from, and not repeat the experience.

I want you to know that I am here to serve you and give you as many tools that I have found useful in my life that have helped me succeed on my journey. I want to share the steps that I took to get myself to the other side of this binge-eating emotional slip up.

I hope that you find these 7 steps useful and that you feel the freedom that comes from letting “it” go. Emotional eating is hard, my friend, and I completely understand how you feel when it happens. You are not alone but you can take back the power that is yours and be OK with yourself for the slip up that just happened. Next time, I bet you will draw on this experience and that 5 hour binge will more than likely only be for an hour or so... then next time even less. Remember YOU GOT THIS and in order to overcome hard things you have to become willing to get uncomfortable and dig yourself out of them. No one is going to do the work for you so you better get to digging my friend. Trust me, the sooner you pick up the shovel and get to work the quicker you will see yourself transform into becoming the best version of yourself.

With Love and Extreme Blessings,

Missy Meaux

Live. Love. Light.