Why Chasing Weight Loss is Keeping You Stuck Binge Eating

Most women who come to me have already done the maths.

If a binge is a couple of thousand calories, and that's happening three or four times a week, then stopping it must mean the weight comes off. It's not a daft assumption. It's arithmetic.

And you're not wrong. Losing weight is a lot easier when you're not bingeing. There's research from the University of Pennsylvania that followed people over four years and found that those who carried on bingeing while trying to lose weight lost about half as much as those who stopped.

So yes. But the order matters more than you'd think, and getting it the wrong way round is why you're still here.

You can't do both at once

Here's what usually happens. You decide this is the week. You're going to stop the bingeing AND you're going to lose weight, so you cut right back. Smaller breakfast (maybe a smoothie), a low cal lunch, be good.

But you spend all day thinking about food until eventually you just eat everything in the cupboard just so you can stop thinking about it.

That's not a willpower failure. That's your body doing exactly what it's built to do. Restriction is what causes the food noise and sets off the binge in the first place.

Weight loss approaches that rely on restriction produce binge eating and disordered eating patterns, body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem and a whole load of shame. That's not an unfortunate side effect. That's a direct result of diets and restriction.

So the bingeing has to be dealt with first. Not because I'm being difficult about it, but because you physically cannot overcome binge eating type behaviours while dieting and restricting.

What actually works instead

Once the bingeing has stopped, the relentless negotiation in your head about what you can eat now based on what you had earlier and might have later has gone and you're actually eating enough, then you can look at your health properly.

But not with another diet. If you go back to dieting and restriction at that point you'll just restart the whole thing, and you'll have wasted the twenty weeks.

What works instead is focusing on health and wellness rather than a number.

• Sleep
• Movement you don’t hate
• Eating enough
• Managing stress
• Actually enjoying your food

And before you decide that sounds like a cop out, there's good evidence behind it. Randomised controlled trials of weight-neutral approaches show real improvements in blood pressure, blood lipids, eating habits, self-esteem and body image, and they achieve those outcomes more successfully than weight loss treatment does, without the side effects that come with focusing on weight.

One study followed women for seven months on a weight-neutral programme. Most of the ones who maintained or even gained weight still got health benefits. Not as much as those who lost weight, but real ones.

Here's what I mean. Lots of women come to me saying they're eating healthy, but what's actually happening is they're eating low calorie. Those aren't the same thing either. A low calorie diet can have very little nutritional value in it, and plenty of the food that's genuinely good for you isn't low calorie at all.

Diet culture has been putting an equals sign between thin and healthy for so long that most women never stop to question it. So you can be eating "healthy" and not be, and you can be in a bigger body and be perfectly healthy.

The same ten pounds, over and over

Now the difficult part.

If you've spent years losing and regaining the same ten or fifteen pounds, there might be a reason for that, and it isn't that you keep failing.

Your body appears to defend a weight range. When you eat less than it wants, it fights back. Appetite goes up, your metabolism drops, and it pushes you back towards where you were.

80%

of people regain the weight they lose.

Your body responds with increased appetite, altered food preferences and a slower metabolism, all of it working to get you back to where you started.

Out of every 100 people who lose weight

And the fighting back only goes one way. The mechanisms that stop you losing weight are stronger than the ones that stop you gaining it. Which is deeply unfair, and also makes evolutionary sense. For most of human history, starving was the bigger risk.

There's a famous experiment where men were semi-starved and then allowed to eat freely again. They didn't just return to their old weight.

145%

of their body fat came back.

They didn't return to where they'd started. They gained even more weight.

Sound familiar?

I should be straight with you: this is a contested area. Some researchers argue for a fixed set point, others for a "settling point" that's more influenced by your environment and habits than by any internal thermostat. Nobody's fully settled it.

But whichever model turns out to be right, the practical bit is the same. There is a weight your body wants to sit at, it's probably not the weight you've got in your head, and no amount of restricting is going to change that permanently.

So do you have to just accept your body?

Not exactly, and I'm careful with this because "just love yourself" is useless advice when you've hated your body for twenty years.

But here's the thing. Those negative thoughts about your body are what start the diet cycle off in the first place.

1. 1

   You catch sight of yourself in a photo

2. 2

   You feel awful

3. 3

   You decide Monday’s the day

4. 4

   You restrict

5. 5

   You feel deprived and resentful

6. 6

   You binge

7. 7

   You feel worse than you did in the photo

and it starts again

So the body image work isn't a nice extra. It's what stops the whole thing kicking off again.

And it isn't about deciding you love how you look. It's about getting to a point where how you look isn't running your entire life. Where you can have a bad body day without it turning into three weeks of bingeing.

What I actually see

The bingeing stops first, usually quite early, once you're eating properly.

The food noise goes next. That's the one people notice most. No more negotiating with yourself all day, no more working out what you're allowed later, no more thinking about the biscuits from eleven in the morning.

Then, slowly, over months, weight tends to come off for a lot of people. Not all. Not dramatically. And crucially, without anyone counting anything.

Some of my clients lose a decent amount. Some lose very little and feel better than they have in years.

What every single one of them gets is the bingeing stopping. That's what I'm actually offering.

If you're still here

If the only thing that would make this worth doing is a specific number on the scales by a specific date, I'm probably not your person, and I'd rather say so now.

But if you're tired enough of the cycle that just stopping it would be worth something on its own, then let's talk.

Every woman I've worked with came to me wanting to lose weight. Every single one. That's not a character flaw, that's thirty years of being told your body is the problem.

What changes isn't that you stop caring. It's that it stops being the first thing you think about when you wake up.