Today’s video post is addressing the issue of bingeing in recovery – specifically, the mental side of it.
Maybe you have been in recovery for quite some time and you seem to do everything right. You have stopped calorie and food restriction, you have responded to the extreme hunger and you do not compensate in any way – you do not exercise, purge, skip meals or any of that.
But you still experience bingeing. You know that extreme hunger in recovery can be very normal and you have responded to it, but, this time, something seems “off” or missing from the whole picture. Maybe there is still something you have not quite addressed yet, something that is keeping you stuck from recovering normal hunger signals? Some weird thing that keeps you bingeing on food and not feeling in tune with your body?
In this video, I talk about some other interesting insight I had in my recovery. Something that has to do with the mental side of bingeing in recovery.
When you have been through eating disorder it can be quite a traumatic experience for you mentally.
The brain link between an eating disorder and bingeing
When you have been through eating disorder it can be quite a traumatic experience for you mentally. Some of the after-effects of having experienced eating disorder have not completely gone and this might be one of the reasons why bingeing can actually be a habitual response to the past trauma – you have not completely healed your mental scars of an eating disorder and that is why it is still there.
Kathryn Hansen, the author of a bulimia recovery book Brain Over Binge, also talks about the brain link between eating disorders and bingeing. How you have to rewire your brain to stop the cycle of bingeing. You still need to eat enough food without any compensation to recover your body, but you also need to recover your brain. To heal the mental trauma of your eating disorder so your brain will also catch up with your body’s recovery. That way your brain can learn that binge signals are not needed any longer because the threat of deprivation and restriction is over.
