Ep. 13- What To Do After You Eat Too Much

May 02,2024

Help! I’ve eaten too much… now what?

First, let’s figure out if you ACTUALLY overate or just feel guilty based on past diet rules.

Natural eaters aren’t perfect eaters!

Then, we will look at your options for how to move forward so you don’t get off track and stuck in your eating habits.

In this episode, we’ll cover:

• What NOT to do after overeating

• 4 steps to recover from eating too much

• Accepting that occasional overeating is normal!

Today, we are discussing what to do when you eat too much. We've all been there. I've been there. If you're listening to this podcast, you're struggling with eating too much food, as I had for many years of my life, too.

So, what are we supposed to do when we eat too much? How do we move forward from that? How do we recover from that in a productive way?

The first distinction I want to make is what does it even mean to eat too much food? Most of us will probably think of eating too much food as eating past this level of comfortable fullness. So you might feel bloated. Having a stretched stomach, your stomach feels heavy, you feel tired, lethargic, sluggish, all of those may be signs that you're eating too much. It's past where your body wants you to go. But something interesting that I hear sometimes when people say I ate too much is sometimes eating too much can be a thought.

What I mean by this is you think you ate too much food when in reality you might have eaten a perfect amount for your body physically, but due to past diet rules and restrictions and shoulds you've placed on yourself, you start to feel like I ate too much, which leads to this response emotionally of guilt, shame, self criticism. Even if physically you're feeling fine. This would happen to me a lot after I started to recover from binge eating. And I wasn't overdoing it as far as how much food I actually needed, but I just couldn't shake this feeling of guilt that I had sometimes after eating, especially desserts for me. That was always my sweets were something I constantly felt guilty about and felt like I should never have any. And so I have this thought coming up telling me you're eating too much.

So just take a note on which one you feel like resonates with you more. Maybe it's both. Maybe you're overeating physically and you're also having these thoughts and feelings that you're overeating even if physically you're feeling fine.

No matter which one of those you resonate with more though, let's look at what you might be doing now and some mistakes you might be making when you're overeating.

The first thing you might do is beat yourself up and beating yourself up from there looks like maybe restricting and just cutting out food. Saying you need to be punished because you ate too much, so better eat less tomorrow. Now, in theory, this makes sense, right? If we overate, we might need less food and that may be true.

The next day, you may be less hungry, but it is never a good idea to intentionally try to cut back to an extreme measure, or even sometimes if we don't think we're cutting back an extreme measure, our brain will still freak out and it feels like food is disappearing from the face of the planet and it starts sending out strong urges to eat more. You want to look at where restriction has always led you, even if for a couple of days going really low calorie, cutting out all forms of sugar and carb. You could stick to it for a few days. Eventually it's going to backfire and you're probably going to keep binge eating and it's going to keep you in this cycle.

So we want to look at another productive way to do that that doesn't involve restriction. We're going to cover that in a minute.

Beating yourself also looks like telling yourself unhelpful stories such as I've ruined it. Everything is gone, my progress is gone, so I might as well just keep going, right? If I've already ruined it, who cares? What's the point? I'll never be able to do this. There's no point in trying. All of these stories that run through your mind are drama. They are not facts. They are just thoughts, meaning they don't have any truth behind them necessarily, but as you're believing them to be true, what happens is you're going to feel hopeless. And what do we do when we feel hopeless is we give up. Hopeless is a feeling where we crawl into bed with our bag of snacks and say, no more use for me. I'm done. I can't ever be a natural eater. I'm never going to figure out food I'll just keep going forever and ever. So that is something we don't want to do.

Now, maybe you're not a beat yourself up kind of girl, maybe you're the type of person who just likes to shove it under the rug and pretend it never happens. This is if you want to just avoid all those negative feelings that come with the guilt and shame. My guess is if you are a shove it under the rug type of person, you also avoid a lot of your other negative emotions, maybe with food. So if you notice that you don't like to confront your slip ups, maybe you don't like to confront your eating either you don't like to look at the hard things that are going on and the problem with this is you're never going to figure it out because you're never learning.

Every time we have a slip up it is an opportunity for you to see, where you are still getting stuck, where your brain is still thinking a thought that is not helpful, where you are still lacking skills that maybe you need to learn more about.

So if you are not reflecting on your slip ups, you have missed an opportunity to learn and to grow and to do something better next time, which is going to lead to you just repeating the same old, same old cycle of binge, shove it under the rug, forget it ever happened and then you keep doing it over and over again. So, what do we want to do instead?

The first thing you're going to do is you're going to wait for some hunger to return. No matter how full you are in that moment, hunger will return. I promise you there will be a time where you're going to feel okay again. I know sometimes when we are just really down in the dumps about how much we've eaten, we're feeling really shitty about ourselves. It feels like we're never going to feel hungry ever again. I have been there and it's like the worst feeling, but we want to wait for some hunger to return.

Now, if you have had a big binge, it might take a while for hunger to come back, but I don't want you necessarily waiting like 24 hours. And if hunger is not coming, just continuing to wait.

I would wait for hunger for four, five, six, maybe seven hours max and if you're not feeling hungry again yet, I would suggest getting something small in. A little high protein snack, some veggies, something that feels nutritious to you, but not restrictive. If you binge at night, this looks like maybe getting a small breakfast in the morning.

Again, you don't have to eat like a full American eggs, pancakes, toast, hash browns, fruit breakfast, but do have a little something because this is going to keep you out of that binge restrict cycle and get you back on track with how you want your eating to be.

Second, you are going to plan those meals to have some balance with them. So, I don't want you to just wait until you are starving. And then have a plate of pancakes or a plate of rolls or pizza. I want you to make sure that you have some protein and fiber and fat in there, especially. That is going to help your body start to regulate itself again. Maybe drink some water along with that. Do your body a favor and the reason I suggest having something planned out is because life gets busy. And you want to have something that you know you're going to enjoy and something that you know is also going to feel good.

Third, you're going to learn and move on. So we need to learn from our slip ups in order to prevent them from happening again. I do give my clients a in depth worksheet that guides you through how to recover from a slip up in my Confident Eater program. So just know you get that when you join, but three simple questions you can ask yourself right now. Are one, what went well. No matter what you did, how much you ate, there is always something that went well.

If you feel like you cannot find anything, one thing that is going well that I can show you right now is you're listening to this podcast. You're trying to figure out how to get better, how to do better. So that went well. Once you find what went well, then you can look at what didn't go so well. All the drama, you know, what, where did I miss out on an opportunity to become a natural eater? And you can get it out. Then, the third question is what would I want to do differently next time? This is the learning opportunity for you to get as specific as possible how you would go through the situation again. So I'll give you an example.

Let's say you came home after work and you were hungry, but dinner was gonna take a while to make so you went to the cabinets and you started snacking and you continued snacking, you continued snacking until you said screw it I'm just gonna keep eating and then you ate way more snacks than you needed you weren't hungry for dinner, so you ended up not making dinner and now you're overly full. You're feeling bloated unenergized, this is where we want to look at how we can do things differently next time. So maybe next time, again getting as specific as possible, you want to walk in the door, you notice that you're hungry. You decide you're going to take three deep breaths. You're going to sit with that sensation of physical hunger. Remind yourself you're not going to die. That hunger is not an emergency. And then you're going to mindfully sit down with a protein filled snack, maybe beef jerky, whatever you want. And then you're going to start preparing dinner, reminding yourself the whole time that food is coming very soon and you're going to be okay.

And then you'll sit down, you'll enjoy your food peacefully. It will be so delicious because you'll notice how hunger is the best spice. And you're able to truly enjoy the meal as you want to be eating. That is how specific I want you to be with what you'll do differently next time.

Alright, fourth and finally, you're going to box up that slip and pack it away.

This is where we need to stop beating yourself up. Stop thinking about it, stop going back to, I should have done this, I wish I would have done this. I want you to think about it as if you were cleaning up a closet, and you're boxing stuff up to put away. You want to extract the things you need from that closet, and then anything else you want to put back in the box, tape it up and shove it back in the closet. So extract your learning moment from your slip up and then shove it in the closet. That's where you can start to put it under the rug and never think about it again. Only once you've learned and grown from it.

Now, I want you to know that normal eaters overeat at times. There is never going to be a time where you are a perfect eater in person and you never have an overeating slip up. This is important to know if you are feeling that guilt of, I feel like I might have eaten too much, and I just feel like I'm never going to be the confident eater that I want to be.

I overeat sometimes, and I need you to hear that, because I am not a perfect person either. And I want you to know that you can deal with the occasional overeating, and still maintain your weight and still be healthy and still feel energized and light and ready to take on the day, even if those occasional overeating times come up.

So stay compassionate with yourself, especially as you're learning something new and trying to navigate new eating habits, new skills, just like a baby. You're gonna fall down sometimes when you're learning to walk and we need to learn how to get back up and keep going. Now, if you're realizing you need more support, I do currently have one on one private coaching spots available for my Confident Eater program.

It is a in depth, highly hand holding program where I am going to walk you through the exact process I use to stop overeating and binge eating myself. You can learn more about the program and book a free consultation to talk with in the show notes or go to theconfidenteater. org. Talk to you next week.