Here is a post from a 25 year old member of the Sosuave.net forum that is struggling with losing weight and controlling his binge eating, and my response.
Nicksaiz65’s Post
How can I eliminate the stress eating, while I’m on my summer shred?
This is definitely an issue I’m working on solving. Whenever times get really stressful for me(usually through work) I end up stress eating, binging, and undoing a whole week on my diet. I am absolutely a stress eater, and I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. Or even worse, if I’m at home, I start drinking too, to make myself feel better.
I’ve heard tips to exercise instead of stress eating. That’s a good idea, but it never worked for me because the stress is usually coming from work. I’m on the clock, and I can’t just take time off to hop on a bike.
The solution I came up was this: do everything in my power to minimize stress, by getting super ahead at work and so on. But even with that, some stressful situations will inevitably come up, because that’s life. At the very least, it won’t be work/deadline stress: so I can push through and deal with it without binging. 100% of the time when I’m stressed over a deadline, I end up binging. But that is under my control, I can ensure that I don’t end up in that situation to begin with whenever possible.
Then I just have to make it through that stressful situation without binging. Push through, the same way that I would push through hunger. Stress is just one of those things I have to accept, just like hunger. If I binge, then I just have to accept that I’m cheating on my diet and I’m taking myself farther away from my goals. I just need to accept that losing fat is really really really hard. Stress(and not doing the stress binging) is one of the many factors that makes weight loss so difficult, and it takes lots of willpower to look great. And if you want to look good and be successful: you just CAN’T be binging, no matter what. Because that is not what successful people do.
I’ve mastered dealing with social eating in the context of a diet. However, I’ve noticed that two triggers for binges are sadness, and the stress. The sadness is an easy one to tackle. Just play a video game or watch a funny movie. The stress, is why I’m making this thread today.
I’m thinking that’s a foolproof method. I just wanted some feedback. What other methods can I use to stop the stress eating, which drops a nuke on my diet every time?
My Response
It’s psychological. An idea I always go back to is the pleasure/pain principle that I first learned from Tony Robbins, but I don’t think Tony invented it. It goes like this. Human beings do two things in life, and that’s it. They either pursue pleasure or avoid pain. Avoiding pain is the far better motivator. To achieve something, you must utilize both of these drives to their fullest extent. You need to go through a process of assigning massive amounts of pain to being fat and out of shape. And you need to assign massive amounts of pleasure to having the body of your dreams. But remember, the pain is 1,000 times more motivating than the pleasure.
My current body is ripped and muscular, but I’ve actually struggled with binge eating most of my life. I still do it sometimes, but rarely. One of the ways I control it is by not having ANYTHING in my house that is unhealthy. Literally nothing in my house has added salt, sugar, or fat. I have no processed food in my house. So if I do end up binging, it’s on apples or strawberries, and that has no effect on my diet or body. If you stock your house ONLY with fruits and vegetables, you can go on a three-day BINGE-O-RAMA and it still won’t really matter. I also live alone, so I am in complete control of what food is in my house.
When I’m outside of my house, I don’t touch anything that is unhealthy. This is also part of a budget that I have committed to. I can maintain this because I absolutely hate the idea of being fat, out of shape, and unhealthy, and I enjoy saving money. I also despise the idea of overeating in a world that has millions of people dying of starvation every year. I HATE ALL OF THAT. I hate it so much that I despise unhealthy food and I don’t touch it. I’ve assigned so much pain to not having the body I want, that I am disgusted by unhealthy food.
I believe many people are too complacent and neutral in the modern world, which leads them to lack a mindset that would be capable of assigning massive amounts of pain to their current condition and massive amounts of pleasure to their future, desired condition. So they just stay in the same situation with the same body forever. There are forces in this society, including the Feminine Imperative, that promote mediocrity and complacency in the male population.
The person that NEEDS success the most is always going to be more successful than the person that just WANTS success. When someone NEEDS success like they need to breathe air, then they will be successful. Thus, when you NEED to lose weight like you need to breathe air, then you will lose weight. You will find a way because losing weight now equals survival to you, and failure is not an option. This is the type of mentality that wildly successful people have.
Nearly everyone tries to solve their problems through superficial tricks and easy shortcuts, but the root of our problems is usually in a flawed psychology and not rooted in the external world. Our beliefs and views of the world dictate our results far more than anything else. People can stack tricks upon tricks on top of each other in an attempt to solve the problem, but if the foundation is a flawed psychology, no trick will be effective for very long.