Overeating - It Happens To The Best Of Us!

Sometimes we eat too much or end up eating the whole cake, but how we respond to situations like this determines out progress!

Many of us and me included have done this and then planned the course of action to immediately undo what we did. But I am here to tell you that taking this approach and planning gruelling workouts and restrictive days of eating are not the best approach.

If your search the internet for ‘diet damage control’ you get an endless list of great ways to help you with your ‘cheat days.’ Ways to help you include binge eating and even ‘special supplements’ that will mitigate the extra calories. This is all utter BS and this so called approach of damage control after over indulging is not the way to go and here are the reasons why:

1) Associating over eating with gruelling workouts.

If you start doing extra honking and horrible workouts with the aim of punishing yourself until you puke because you over ate, you are training for the wrong reason. Food and training should not be linked like this and we should be eating and training exclusively for goals and enjoyment. 

This is constantly all over social media. Individuals, fitness professionals included, publishing doing X,Y and Z workout due to the food they ate or are about to eat. This leads me onto my next point.

2) Training like this makes us think that some foods are “bad”.

We shouldn't fall into the trap of labelling foods as good or bad as this can create restrictions and cause guilt. Permission is not needed to eat any type of food within a calorie controlled diet, I used to do this, I admit it, but try not to label food as good/bad or clean/unclean because it leads to linking emotion with food.

The ultimate outcome of labelling food will result in you seeing yourself as a failure (next point) if you do eat these foods, which will not allow long term success. We should look to eat mostly minimally processed foods whole foods the majority of the time, but there’s nothing wrong with enjoying your favourite junk foods here and there.

3) Lead to negative self-image.

Labelling food as bad will lead to you looking at your self negatively if you have eaten so called ‘bad food’

4) All of these points can lead to spontaneous binges.

Taking on a damage control approach and conducting gruelling workouts or restricting food intake following over indulgent can lead to a restrict-crave-binge-guilt cycle, over and over again.

So what should you do if you over eat?

Forget about it!

Realise we do make mistakes!

Keep a positive mindset!

Move on and get straight back on track!