How to Recover from a Binge Eating Without Ruining Your Diet

Some people, while dieting, experience a moment of weakness that leads to binge eating. Overwhelmed by guilt, they then starve themselves the next day.

Binge-eating often occurs when someone is dieting and restricts their intake of bread, snacks, and greasy food, then suddenly loses control and eats until they feel like they’re going to burst. Naturally, almost nobody binges on healthy foods like chicken breast or vegetables.

After stuffing themselves with fatty foods and becoming enveloped in anxiety, they step on the scale to find that the weight they struggled to lose over several weeks has returned. In response to this major setback, some partake in extreme fasting.

Ironically, this response is the worst for dieting, despite the initial appearance of rapid weight loss when first fasting, as this is not fat loss but water loss. Furthermore, if fasting continues, the body adapts to low energy intake, eventually resulting in no weight loss even with less food intake and even making weight gain easier.

In the end, starving oneself or adopting an extreme diet after binge eating not only sabotages the current diet but also all future diets.

So, can we still salvage our weight loss journey and make a diet successful even after a binge-eating episode? The following two weeks become critical.

Just because you’ve binged and your weight has increased doesn’t mean you’ve immediately gained fat. The weight of the food before it’s broken down into nutrients, or the weight of the water in the food, remains in the body, contributing to weight gain.

Food must be digested in the stomach, broken down into fat, and entered into fat cells to become body fat. Not all food is converted into body fat.

It typically takes about two weeks for food to be broken down and become body fat. Therefore, one episode of binge eating doesn’t ruin a diet. You can reverse the mistake by preventing the food from being stored as body fat within two weeks.

The method is simple: continue with your usual diet and maintain an active lifestyle. If you still feel uncomfortable, it’s recommended to slightly limit your food intake by reducing your usual portion by about one spoonful.