Note: I am not a dietitian or medical professional. This is simply what worked well for me in recovery after working with a registered dietitian and therapist!

In the summer of 2010 I thought I could exert all the willpower in the world. I could restrict, could hold back on my deepest food desires. It was not easy, but at least I felt like I could control it.

When I began binge eating, I still wanted the control. I hungered for it. But there was something about food that suddenly took control over me now. Suddenly I couldn’t tell my body what to do.

This isn’t to say that I was like a zombie stumbling around the kitchen. I was aware of what was happening. But the cravings had never felt so strong, so constant, so life-consuming that I “needed” to get rid of them to function–just to get on with my day. 

Hitting the Books

Being the passionate (obsessive?) learner that I am, over the years I tried to figure out where the binge eating came from, why I was suddenly doing it, and of course, how I could stop. It turns out that trying to take fat, protein and carbs out of the diet will leave you feeling very hungry. Can you believe you can’t function on green veggies alone?!

Yeah, I thought I could do it. I have all the discipline in the world, I thought.

For those of you who still suffer from an eating disorder and have not yet sought help, I encourage you to see a registered dietitian (especially one who helps those with eating disorders). An eating disorder therapist was another important part of the equation.

But at first, I thought seeing a dietitian would be a waste of time. After all, hadn’t I learned enough about nutrition over the years to know what I should eat? Wasn’t I Rachael, the health-nut guru, seeker of ultimate nutrition?

No. Believe it or not, I had to humbly trudge into the dietitian’s office and get a swift kick in the butt if I wanted to see improvement in my daily eating. I had to tell myself that yes, I did not know absolutely everything, especially when it came to bingeing and how to eat “right.” After all these years of absorbing different advice from different health-seekers, I felt lost and confused, struggling to find balance again.

It was as if I were a child who reverted back to crawling and had to learn how to walk again.

Dietitian Wisdom

My dietitian was the key to me understanding the intense cravings I had, as well as teaching me how to eat again. Looking back at many of my old posts where I write in despair about the binge eating, I want to shake that poor, scared girl and explain why all of this was happening.

There can be a variety of reasons for binge eating–emotional issues, not eating enough throughout the day or over the period of a few days or months, or not getting in the right macronutrients that your body needs.

For me, bingeing was partly an emotional response to a knee injury I had developed. However, I wouldn’t have had such an emotional response with food if I had just been eating ENOUGH before then (or simply had a solid relationship with food, like I did in high school). At the time of my knee injury in 2011 I figured, what the heck, I’m just going to eat everything that I would never let myself eat before. I would shove it into my body even though I wasn’t hungry. And I know it wasn’t hunger, because I felt sick to my stomach as I was eating it.

But the emotional part of binge eating really started when I struggled with anorexia, because by emotionally not eating sufficiently, I ended up bingeing later. Thus I often believe that the physical aspect of all of this is one of the biggest problems that many people who struggle with this deny. I had to start addressing why I started restricting in the first place, figure out how to avoid continually doing that to help lessen the bingeing, and eat more to recover.

Carbs Craze

In terms of addressing carbs, when I told my dietitian about all the sugary foods I had been bingeing on, she told me I’d need to eat more carbs. This seemed to defeat the purpose of me trying to eliminate carbs (I was researching about how taking out carbs supposedly reduced sugar cravings. If you ever read anything like this, it is untrue).

Over time I decided to try out my dietitian’s suggestion to eat more bread and oatmeal again. I did this, and lo and behold, I found myself barely bingeing on sugary cereal bars and peanut butter or whole jars of jelly anymore.

I started to gain control of the bingeing–for the most part. Sure, I had a ways to go in learning to eat more carbs again, but once I got the hang of it (i.e., finally in the past few months) it has helped immensely. Including protein and fat goes without question, but eating more carbs was a huge part of my shift away from bingeing.