Falling down hard (binge-eating) after a long period of being binge-free can be terribly discouraging. Almost suicidally full of despair for some.
You can question this thought.
You’ve just “lost” the battle, you’ve just “lost” your abstinence, you’ve just “lost” your year of supposed freedom.
Is it true?
Who would you be without the past? (Which I notice is gone, and only a memory now).
A few ideas that may help, if you’re having this experience of “on” then “off” a plan:
1) Recovering from eating begins with cultivating willingness to learn from where we stumble.
2) When we keep believing our thoughts that we should be thin, thin, thin…then no amount of time being binge-free will bring us freedom.
3) If we decide we’ve failed miserably, or that this “stumble” is a disaster, we’ll most likely eat more, eat again. Being open to learn from what happened is the easiest way. Like learning how to walk, it’s not done immediately. We fall down sometimes.
4) When you believe your thoughts about food, eating and your body…with stress, mistrust, and the urge to manage, your mind will be filled with Jibber-Jabber. Everyone talking at once, screaming.
Do you have to believe any of this jibber-jabber? Is it just noise?
What I notice is everyone’s mind has noise in it, and what a wonderful experience to look at this noise and all this thinking as white noise, or jibber-jabber. Babbling brook.
Uninteresting. Untrue.
Can I simply NOT be alarmed by what’s happened in the past?
Can I stand up again, stepping into another day?
This is a new moment, right now. This is an experience of the “Don’t Know” mind. The place of No Control.
In this place is a slowness, a feeling of the body, I don’t know what to do and I don’t have to do anything.
You lost your abstinence, you “lost” a year of freedom from binge eating…is that true? Can you absolutely know you lost it?
No.
How do you react when you believe that thought?
Listening to the jibber-jabber and screaming thoughts and freaking out and intense emotions about disaster and control.
Who would you be without the thought? Who would you be without the belief there’s a future to plan for and control is required, and something is missing?
Turning the thought around: I’m OK. I’m safe in this moment. I didn’t lose anything. Today, now, can be relaxed. Only my thinking fell over. My thoughts went off, not “me”. Not the inner me, not the inner “I.
Much love,
Grace