I’ve helped hundreds of women overcome binge eating disorder, and almost all of them have one key thing in common: they feel like they’ve already tried everything to stop bingeing…and it’s only made things worse.
As a binge-eating coach and dietitian, this doesn’t surprise me. There is so much information online and on social media about overcoming binge eating disorder.
Unfortunately, not all of it is helpful. In fact, some of the so-called “binge eating cures” out there can actually make binge eating disorder worse.
Today, I want to break down why many of these strategies make things worse instead of helping you feel better – and what you can do instead.
Do I have binge eating disorder?
Before we get into the top 5 binge eating causes, it’s important to be clear about what binge eating actually is. Binge eating is a true eating disorder that goes beyond emotional eating or occasional overeating.
Binge eating is defined as:
- Eating an amount of food, typically within a 2-hour window, that is definitely larger than most people would eat in a similar period of time under similar circumstances (so holidays don’t count because that’s what everyone is doing!).
- Feeling a loss of control over eating during the episode. (E.g. a feeling that one cannot stop eating or control what or how much one is eating)
Individuals with binge eating disorder experience these symptoms frequently. The minimum threshold for an official binge eating disorder diagnosis is that the binge eating needs to happen at least 1 day a week for 3 months.
5 Binge Eating Fixes That Are Actually Making Things Worse
Now that we’re clear on what binge eating really is, let’s explore some of the so-called “cures” that can actually make it worse.
1. Fasting to Stop Binge Eating
Because binge eating is an issue of overeating in a short period of time, there comes a point where a lot of people will say: “well… what if I just limit the window of time that I can eat? I typically binge at 9pm so if I just require myself to stop eating at 7pm. Problem solved!”
Uh, no. problem not solved. Problem now worse.
Intermittent fasting doesn’t work for most bingers because their binge eating was never about the time of day.
Binge eating is more about an issue of unmet needs, including psychological or mental needs AND biological or physical needs.
Biological Needs
Let’s say someone’s struggle with bingeing is largely to do with not having all of their physical FOOD needs met, whether that be calories, carbohydrates, fiber, or something else. If they now limit the window of time they are ‘allowed’ to eat, that’s now making it even harder to get all of their nutrition needs met, making that desire to binge potentially stronger.
A lot of women I work with have plenty of calories and carbohydrates, but they don’t have a lot of protein and healthy fats. When there are key components missing from your diet or not being provided enough, your body continues to drive you to food.
Being intentional about the composition of your meals and snacks is so crucial to prevent bingeing that’s brought on by nutrition deficiencies because it ensures we aren’t deficient to begin with.
I’ll also say that many women just aren’t getting enough calories during the day and that’s why they feel this magnetic pull towards food at night. The time on the clock doesn’t make that magnetic pull magically disappear if you haven’t properly adjusted what’s being eaten during the day to meet your caloric needs.
You can have all the best intentions in the world to stop eating at whatever o’clock, but at some point biology DOES kick in and those survival instincts are impossible to override.
Need help figuring out how to plan out your meals to prevent bingeing? Check out my eBook here where I’ll walk you through the specifics.
Psychological Needs
There may also be psychological needs at play in a struggle with binge eating. Let’s say someone is struggling with bingeing every night as a way to wind down from a stressful day or finally have some ‘me’ time.
Changing the “allowed” eating window with intermittent fasting doesn’t solve the problem of helping that individual wind down or get the ‘me’ time they’re after. It might actually make it worse because now they feel this stress of how they’re not supposed to eat even though they really want to.
It’s only a matter of time before something snaps and they eat outside of that window anyway because they’re desperate for the relief that bingeing used to provide.
But now, they’ve added on the distress of breaking a promise they had made to themselves to NOT eat at night. Cue the guilt, shame, and potentially even more bingeing to cope with those feelings.
Bottom line? Intermittent fasting for binge eating doesn’t help.
2. Eating Low-Carb to Stop Binge Eating
For ages and ages, there’s been this belief that eliminating carbs is “healthier” and will help someone finally lose the weight they’ve been dying to get off. Unfortunately, many people who struggle with binge eating also turn to low-carb diets to help.
Now, I’m not saying that people never lose weight as a result of eating low carb – they do. They can drop water weight pretty fast on a low-carb diet (which will only return as soon as the carbs do). Other than that, any weight besides water weight didn’t come off because they eliminated CARBS, it’s because now they’re just naturally eating fewer calories.
Fat loss comes from a calorie deficit – end of story. It has nothing to do with what those calories are made up of.
There was a fascinating study done in 1997 that tested the effects of a diet that was low enough in calories to induce weight loss but made up of just over 70% of total calories coming from carbohydrates.
The study actually compared two diets against each other: the calories, carbs, fat, and protein were all controlled for and within the same range. The only difference was that one diet had half of their carbohydrates coming from table sugar, and the other had barely any coming from table sugar (but still had just as many carbohydrates in their diet)
The study found that BOTH groups lost weight AND improved biomarkers like blood pressure, body fat percentage, LDL, and more. This study shows that even with a high intake of carbohydrates, as long as someone is in a calorie deficit then they will lose weight.
The Relationship Between Eating Carbs and Binge Eating
So, what does this have to do with binge eating? Many people who struggle with binge eating also struggle with constant dieting. In fact, many of the women I work with consider going on a diet and following strict food rules (such as a low-carb diet) a way to fix their binge eating.
The problem is, carbs are the body’s favorite fuel source. Eating carbs is like putting gas in your car. You wouldn’t fill your gas tank with anything other than gasoline, right? Well, when we try to give our body energy without giving it carbs, that’s essentially what we’re doing.
This is why many dieters feel exhausted when they start a diet – especially a low-carb one. It’s hard for them to exercise, to engage meaningfully in the things they enjoy, and they ultimately end up pretty hangry.
At some point, this can wear them down enough that they throw in the towel and say “F it. I’m having ALL the carbs now.” You can see how this could lead directly to a binge.
3. Calorie counting or macro tracking to stop binge eating
Before I talk about why tracking your food could make binge eating worse, I want to make it clear that I am not anti-calorie counting, macro-tracking, or even anti-fasting or low-carb for that matter…. in the right contexts.
BUT, the context is what matters here. And if you’re someone who has struggled with binge eating, then calorie counting and/or macro tracking might be making things worse. These practices might even have been a key player in what developed the binge eating in the first place.
Some individuals are fine with tracking their food intake and monitoring the data. Some even find it to be a very helpful tool in their health journey. However, there are plenty of people who also don’t and it ultimately ends up causing more harm than good.
Why Calorie Tracking Could Make Binge Eating Worse
If someone is more inclined to have an all-or-nothing, perfectionist, or black-and-white way of thinking, calorie counting and macro tracking is almost certain to go badly.
When you have a specific goal or limit that’s being recommended, the perfectionist and/or black-and-white thinker will take that and run with it. It becomes a hyper fixation to keep that goal as the ultimate ceiling.
The problem is, it’s really easy to crash into that ceiling. You might find yourself thinking, “Well, I’ve already screwed it up so I might as well eat more now.”
Calorie counting or macro tracking can turn into a rule that just causes stress. When we are experiencing this kind of discomfort, it’s our nature to try and run from it.
Therefore it can trigger this response where we need to cope and find a way to feel better, and for some that automatic choice is food.
Now, I’m not saying tracking your calories or macros will always trigger binge eating. Some may find it to work with their lifestyle really well and help them in a big way.
However, in some cases, it may be making things worse. Perhaps you’ve experienced the overwhelm of having to follow more rules, weigh food out, track, and micromanage everything you eat when you track macros or calories. It can be a huge mental load, one that not everyone is best suited to take on.
4. Hiring a coach or therapist who isn’t trained in eating disorders
Many people struggling with binge eating reach out to a coach, therapist or nutritionist. While this is a great idea in theory, if you work with someone without experience AND training in working with eating disorders, it can actually make binge eating worse.
Some coaches are born out of the “I healed myself so I can heal you, too” mentality. While that personal experience can be helpful for relating to clients, it doesn’t make someone an expert on how to treat something for an entirely different person with a different life, needs, background, etc.
A lot of self-proclaimed ‘coaches’ out there also have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to nutrition in general. This can exacerbate disordered eating symptoms.
I recently chatted with someone who shared that she had recovered from binge eating disorder, lost over 150 lbs and maintained it for over 5 years. An amazing accomplishment! It all changed, however, when she spoke with someone she knew who was a certified macro coach, not a registered dietitian.
This coach told her things like, “You can control yourself, you just don’t want to,” and “the food didn’t just leap into your mouth.” When she started listening to this advice, her binge eating disorder came back.
I’ve also heard many stories about therapists who completely inappropriately recommended their clients try out a diet.
Why Working With a Professional Could Make Binge Eating Worse
The problem is that your average coach, nutritionist, therapist, and even dietitian don’t understand the intricacies of disordered eating, which is what binge eating is.
When you get trained in the field of eating disorders, you realize how much the recommendations change. What works for the general population no longer works for folks with an ED.
You have to pivot, and most of these coaches just simply don’t know what they don’t know. It’s not their fault that they don’t know better, but it is their fault if they choose to not acknowledge that and proceed to advise on things they shouldn’t.
I honestly wish everyone had some degree of training on eating disorders because it is a concern for nearly 1 out of every 10 people we come into contact with in the U.S.. Not everyone needs to know how to treat and care for someone struggling with an ED, but at the very least they should know what to NOT say so that they don’t directly cause an ED.
5. Trying to lose weight or change your body
This last one might surprise you, but I think it’s probably the most important one of all.
What I feel is the BIGGEST reason I see binge eating get worse is when someone is actively trying to lose weight.
Now let me be clear: it’s not necessarily the weight loss in itself that worsens binge eating (although that can play a role). Rather, what I’m talking about in particular is the way we try to lose weight as well as the psychological distress dieting can cause.
You can probably already gauge what I mean by the ways we try to lose weight from my earlier points. Calorie counting, tracking macros, fasting, and eating low-carb all fit into the category of things we do to lose weight… and we’ve seen how those can all worsen binge eating.
But more than that, researchers think that the societal pressure to be thin is a big exacerbator for bingeing, maybe even causing it to begin with in some cases.
When we feel this pressure to look a certain way and then we don’t, that can cause a lot of distress. That distress is uncomfortable and we want to make it go away, so we try to ‘fix’ our bodies.
This naturally leads to a heightened emotional state. This impacts the function of our prefrontal cortex: the part of the brain responsible for planning, considering long-term goals, reasoning, logic, etc.
With this part of our brain not working as well and our main frame of mind being about weight loss, we can turn to anything and everything to fix the discomfort we are feeling about our bodies.
What ends up happening in the end is this interesting negative feedback loop: the more weight you try to lose, the more lose control around food and you gain weight instead.
This is one of the biggest hurdles I see women have when to comes to overcoming bingeing: letting go of all the rules, regulations, and judgments they have about their weight. Of course, we want our clients to be healthy, which is exactly why we recognize when that pursuit of weight loss is ultimately making them unhealthy.
Why Working With a Binge Eating Dietitian Is Different
While working with a coach or nutritionist who isn’t skilled in eating disorders can make binge eating worse, working with a binge-eating dietitian – like me! – can have the exact opposite effect.
Something I’m really proud of is that our clients continuously tell us how different we are than anyone else they’ve ever worked with. I truly feel like this is because we are a team of highly trained professionals who know the needs of our clients.
We’ve undergone the education needed to be wise in this field, and our years of experience working with clients only continue to strengthen that.
Our team includes:
- Me, a registered dietitian who’s trained in both eating disorders and health psychology and is a certified health mindset coach
- A body image therapist who knows her ISH when it comes to body image distress and disordered eating.
As a result, our clients are supported by professionals who aren’t making guesses about what their clients need.
My clients not only learn the tools to help them stay binge-free for good, but they practice them on their own during our time working together and they get feedback about it.
Working with us is a serious investment, not a low-commitment quick fix that doesn’t last. We don’t want you to have to keep coming back to us and pay us for the rest of your life just to maintain what we accomplished together.
You work with us for 4 months, then you’re done. We believe the women we work with should be able to maintain things on their own and not have to worry about a recurring expense to Yates Nutrition just to keep up with the results they got with us. We believe that they should be free from the recurring heartaches, challenges, and expenses associated with binge eating for the rest of their lives.
Interested in working with a binge-eating dietitian? Learn more about the Nourished & Free program and contact Yates Nutrition with any questions you have.
