Food and eating behaviour

What I do work with

• Binge eating — episodes of eating far more than intended, with a sense of losing control, usually alone and usually followed by shame.
• Eating to manage feeling: stress, boredom, loneliness, anger, or as the only reliable comfort in the day.
• Night eating, and the specific pattern of eating after everyone else is in bed.
• The diet-binge cycle, where restriction reliably produces the next binge.
• Secret eating, and the hiding that goes with it.

Why restriction makes it worse

The most common story I hear runs like this. You decide to be strict. You are strict for four days. On the fifth you eat something outside the rules, decide the day is ruined, and eat everything. Then you feel disgusted, and resolve to be stricter still from Monday.

Restriction is not the antidote to bingeing. It is the most reliable trigger for it, both physiologically — your body responds to deprivation with urgency — and psychologically, because rigid rules create the all-or-nothing thinking that turns one biscuit into a whole packet.

This is why we do not start with a diet plan. Starting with a diet plan is starting the cycle again.

How we work on it

1. Map the episodes. When, where, after what, in what mood. Almost always more predictable than it feels.
2. Loosen the rules. Counter-intuitively, reducing rigidity around food usually reduces bingeing, because it removes the all-or-nothing trigger.
3. Find what the eating does. Comfort, numbing, reward, company, the one thing in the day that is yours.
4. Build urge tolerance. Riding out the compulsion rather than fighting it or surrendering to it.
5. Work on shame and body image, which are usually doing a great deal of the driving.
6. Rebuild round values — energy, health, being able to do things, rather than a number on a scale.