ABC DIRECTORY: How to Get Back to Healthy Eating After Overindulging

Sep 4, 2008

How to Get Back to Healthy Eating After Overindulging

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Indulging once in a while is completely healthy and normal, but it can also cause feelings of guilt and failure. Don't fret! This is normal. One day or even a couple days of overindulgence will not set you too far back. Follow these steps to help you get back on track and closer to your goal weight.

Steps

Relax. It is likely that you are freaking out, believing that you will gain all the weight back you worked so hard to lose because you overindulged a little. At the most, you may have gained two pounds, but this could also be water weight from eating too much salt, or the added weight of food in your digestive track still waiting to be expelled.
Eat high fiber cereal with skim milk or light soy milk for breakfast. Pick a cereal with 28 grams of fiber per cup and if you choose soy, pick one with added fiber (2-3 grams). This puts around 30 grams of fiber into your belly which will help push out all the junk left in your system from the overindulgence and also help keep you full. This is important because the day after a binge, you will feel hungrier than usual due to elevated blood sugar and a stretched out stomach.
Drink lots of green tea and water during the time between breakfast and lunch to help process the fiber from breakfast and flush the bloat out of your system. Munch on celery dipped in hot sauce to fight snack cravings.
Have high protein meals for lunch and dinner. Some options are low carb protein shakes, grilled or baked fish, and grilled or baked chicken. Enjoy water or green tea with your meals.
Have a high protein 4:00pm snack. Lite cheeses, and carb control yogurt are a couple options. Keep this snack to under 100 calories.
6 Go for a walk and/or do some sit-ups and/or push-ups at home. If you feel motivated to work-out, do so, but don't over-do it as it could trigger you to binge again.
Get 8 hours of sleep. Doctors and health magazines constantly hammer this into your head because fatigue can trigger snacking in an effort to gain energy.
Follow steps One through Seven for another day, or get back on your original healthy eating plan.
Love yourself for caring enough to take care of your body. You only get one.

Tips

Accept your day of overindulgence as a concious decision. Hating yourself for it will get you nowhere. The past is behind you. Be happy you have the chance to start over fresh.
Work on giving up "Black and White Thinking." This is when you give yourself permission to completely abandon your healthy eating plan because you overindulged. If you really think about it, this is a completely irrational way of thinking that many people use regularly. Realize it is counterproductive... in every situation.
Read "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. This will help you to better realize that the only moment you have control of is the present moment. Dwelling on the fact that you ate and entire box of See's candy yesterday will only make you feel hopeless. Focus on what are doing at this very moment to correct what happened in past moments.

Warnings

Starving yourself out of guilt will not help the situation. It may lead to a cycle of binge and then starve and then binge again. As you can see, no progress can be made if you are trapped in a cycle like this. Starving after binging falls into the "Black and White Thinking" listed above. Try to avoid this.

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