How to stop binge eating - Conquer Cravings for Christians

How to stop binge eating - Conquer Cravings for Christians

If you are struggling with binge eating, I’m gonna share with you some key points I’ve learned that made such a big difference in my life so that you don't have to struggle with binge eating the rest of your life. I used to be a compulsive binge eater and overeater since I was as young as I can remember. The more I tried to control my cravings the more my eating habits were out of control. By the time I was 12 years old my weight had reached a hundred and eighty pounds. I became desperate and I was willing to try just about anything to stop binge eating. 

Anything I tried to change on my own would turn out that nothing seemed to work out. How I stopped binge eating actually turned out that it was nothing at all like what other people were doing. I learned how to invite God in my heart and start staying away from my food cravings to be a better person out of my love for him. 

Today I am passionate about helping people overcome binge eating and overeating by exercising their faith. I am blessed to share that I am now close to sixty-one years old and I've gone on to help thousands of people stop binge eating all over the world.

My binge eating story of struggle

 All right so let me start from the very beginning when I started becoming aware that I was bigger than the other kids probably around the age of six or seven and by the time that I was age ten or eleven I became obsessively concerned with what I looked like because I was getting laughed at all the time. Kids in the neighborhood used to tease me constantly as well as  when I was at school. My brothers and sisters made so called “cute” comments and that made me feel really self-conscious because I was born an 11.8lbs baby. 

So I would just try to bury my feelings with food especially when I walked in the door from school because I would starve myself at school. There was no control with food on weekends after a long stressful week at school my binge eating would turn into an obsession. 
 
My Mom found me crying quite a few times and I would stay in my room a lot and she didn’t know how I would sneak into the kitchen and find any junk food whether it was cocoa puff cereal, pop tarts, peanut butter (straight from the jar) I’d eat chocolate bars, tootsie pops and ice cream. 

I always had a sweet tooth and it felt like no matter how much I ate it never felt like it was gonna fill that gap. When I felt like I needed to eat, a binge eating episode could go on for a couple hours. One thing that would end up stopping me from binge eating was because someone came home and I didn't want anyone else to know. I felt so shameful about my looks and about eating all the time. I wanted the binge eating to go away and I just kept thinking if I just try harder, if I just have more willpower,  if I'm just more strict with myself. 

I would often think thoughts like, everyone else around me had better willpower and that they could just control themselves. That must be why they didn't binge. I didn't realize that binge eating was just this natural reaction my body was having from feeling so deprived and loaded with sugar all day. I didn’t realize I was not allowing myself to eat all the foods that my body really needed to eat. 

As the day would start, binge eating wasn't so intense and perhaps I'd binge eat a little bit but the binges became more and more frequent and more intense. I’d end up getting to a point where I was binge eating multiple times a day usually in mid afternoon and every single night for years. I felt completely out of control and I felt like the only thing I wanted to do was to weigh less.  

When I was twelve years old both my parents were very busy. They became entrepreneurs and so we started to not have family dinners. Most of us in my family were overweight and so it wasn’t until my Mom found me crying several times that she began to seriously think of where I could get help. 
A friend of hers told her about Overeaters Anonymous and we ended up going there for just about one year. What I liked about the program is that it included prayer. The program was not based on the bible but it did help my relationship with God in my own way. It taught me about searching my heart and being honest about myself. 

What I did not like at all is that they want you to introduce yourself as an overeater. Labeling myself as a negative and defective person. It’s the total opposite of how God wants us to see ourselves. Labeling myself as an overeater or binge eater creates a barrier and God’s love wants to transform us and set us free. The members of Overeaters Anonymous believe an eating disorder is a “disease” and I was never comfortable believing that way, because God is a God of all possibilities. [Luke 18:27 Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.]

So I followed all 12 steps but what I did realize is that trying to lose weight was always on my mind and I started on a new path of eating and learning what was eating me. My hurts, pains and griefs were the basis of my binge eating. I was so young that the binge eating slowly crept back into my life as I grew up and I kept getting stuck in the exact same cycle. 
 

Skipping Meals Leads To Binge Eating

After I would binge eat and go to sleep that night I would think okay tomorrow I have to be better and eat everything healthy that I’ve just eaten so that I can actually lose weight. So when I’d wake up in the morning and I’d try to be good and by trying to be good what I mean is I would under eat.  I would do things like create these lists of forbidden foods and by the time I got to lunchtime I was going well but by afternoon I’d end up getting cravings. So I’d end up snacking and those snacks would turn into uncontrollable binges. 

Finally I stopped trying to obsessively think about food and if I stopped trying to lose weight. I focused on actually being at a healthy weight that my body wanted me to be. I thought about how God wanted me to have a healthy body. My body didn't want me to binge eat so all I  had to do was actually let go of the control and stop dieting and then my body would actually find its own happy healthy weight by focusing on what matters most in life. 

Soon I started to realize this is not how people are meant to live. I had to first admit I had something called a binge eating disorder and I had to go back to where I was at age twelve and bring my problems to God.  Now binge eating disorder isn't the same but does have some similarities just overeating. It's not the same as just eating an entire thing of chocolate so there's a whole bunch of different criteria that you need to be able to take in order to have binge eating disorder which entails both our negative mindset and emotions. This is what changes everything...

Include God To Stop Binge Eating

We don’t hear about it enough because no one was talking about it. I didn't have to feel ashamed for having a binge eating problem. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with me but what it turned out to be is that my approach to overcome it without God was just totally wrong. I realized that I had spent most of my life obsessing about food and I hated what my body looked like and I hated my life when I would leave God out of it.  This was not pleasing to God. So maybe if I stopped obsessing about food, if I stopped dieting and restricting foods in an extreme way and focus on the good stuff that my body and my mind would find some balance and healing. 

Beat Binge Eating By Being Grateful

Over the next few years I really invested in my relationship with God first and the food he created for me to live. I stopped living to eat, and I started eating to live. Remember this famous bible verse? Jesus answered the devil with these famous words: “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4). That’s after Jesus’ baptism, just before He began His earthly ministry, He was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. The Lord had fasted forty days and nights when Satan came to entice Him to turn stones into loaves of bread. You see Jesus wants to remind us that his words are words of life. We need to hunger for his word and apply it to our life. 

God's word and prayer started to change how I think about eating, about my looks, about my attitude. Over time I lost my desire to eat junk food and the desire to stuff myself with food when my emotions were down. I finally lost 40 pounds or more and kept it off but the best part was I lost all that emotional weight. I thought losing that much weight would make the biggest difference in my life but the best part is I found peace with food and with my shape.  To be honest it ended up just being a really nice result from no longer having binge eating controlling my life. This is when I realized, I really did beat binge eating once and for all because I put on a new attitude the closer I grew to the Lord.

Faith Brings Freedom From Binge Eating

To not feel like every thought revolved around food is so freeing and so this isn't a story about weight loss. Really this is a story about learning to stop binge eating and regaining freedom from food frustration. One of the first things I did and I can highly recommend you do it now is sit down with yourself and create a list of all the food boundaries that you have in your brain and pray about it. Get rid of the extremes and eat more healthy food to nourish your body.

You might say to yourself oh well I’m not on a diet and I know diets are bad for you but I would argue that chances are you are currently on a diet. Start by thinking you have all these food rules in your brain that are clouding your judgment when it comes to making food decisions. Until you get rid of those you're still going to be controlled by dieting culture. Diet culture is based on the all or nothing attitude and doing something different to see the numbers go down on the scale will keep you locked in a crazy up and down marry-go-round.

So here are a few food rules that you might be affected by: breakfast is the most important meal of the day and you can't have carbohydrates after a certain time. You have to eat six or more meals a day to keep your metabolism going. Right? These are just examples of nutrition rules that can seep into your life that can feel normal but actually controlling how you eat because you think about food way to often. Start by doing this...

Pay Attention To Hunger VS A Craving
The next thing you need to learn is how to eat by tuning into your hunger and eating when you're hungry not eating at an exact time but space your food out around lunch time or when it's breakfast time. Don’t wait until you're starving and don’t deprive yourself of a certain food group.  Just cook it in a healthy way and cut out the sugar. 

By eating to nourish your body and soul you are fine tuning your digestive system and the way God designed you to eat for good health. Eating healthy food will regulate your energy and stabilize your mind and emotions. You see, binge eating is linked to emotional eating. As we pay attention to our moods and practice praying to God to teach us how to deal with hardships in life his love will transform how you deal with circumstances in a healthy way. The desire to stuff ourselves with food is slip away. The more peace God gives you, the more power and the power of the Holy Spirit will stabilize your eating habits.

God bless you

Here is a great action plan:

HOW TO STOP BINGE EATING