Do you:
There is a part of you that exists only to feast. It doesn’t care about your well being and about your life goals. It defeats you at every opportunity and wants you to fail so it can have food orgies.
Call this the “Pig.” The Pig is your fat-thinking self. It hijacks your survival drive toward food behaviors that do NOT serve your best interests. It’s an out-of-control eating machine that will destroy everything if you love it. It sabotages your plans and exists only to satiate itself. The Pig is responsible for a lot of misery in your life—eating the wrong foods, in the wrong portions, downgrading your health and quality of life.
The Pig is a bully that deserves no patience or tolerance. It’s held you back for years, possibly decades, talking you out of every reasonable weight-loss plan, robbed you of the body and energy you want, made you feel hopeless after years of effort. It’s time you put it in its cage.
The Pig arose as a survival tool, to make sure you ate enough to survive. This was important when prehistoric humans went through periods of intermittent famine. This behavior is common to pretty much all animals—call this your Lizard Brain, which cares only about eating, reproduction, and survival.
But in today’s environment, when survival is much easier and food is aplenty, the Lizard Brain is counterproductive. Food developers hijack this survival drive with addictive foods that give you Food Highs that deceive you about their nutritional value. The Lizard Brain makes you overeat well beyond what’s necessary to survive.
Over time, your Pig was strengthened by external influences like addictively delicious foods, cultural institutions around eating, and social pressure to avoid giving into your cravings.
If you’ve tried to lose weight before, you’ve almost certainly felt urges to break your food vows. First you say, “You’ve been eating well for a week, so let’s just have one cheat day.”
Then you say, “Well since you’ve had one cheat day, that proves you’re weak. You should feel bad about yourself. So let’s go back to our binge eating!”
In the past, you would have thought of these as a natural, rational part of yourself that needed to be listened to.
Now that you’ve isolated the fat-thinking self to a separate entity, the Pig, you can recognize all such urges as Pig Squeals. These are complaints, feelings, and impulses to get you to binge again. Squeals are all attempts to destroy your goals so the Pig can get what it wants (this is why the Pig cannot be tolerated and is owed nothing but contempt).
Since you’ve committed NEVER to binge again, any thought or impulse to binge again must be coming from the Pig.
A Food Plan defines rules that you want to follow for the rest of your life. They should be 100% explicit, such that if you showed the plan to 10 people, all 10 would unanimously say whether you violated the plan or not.
The plan consists of foods, drinks, and behaviors of these types:
After you have a Food Plan, you need to follow it 100%. Any violation of the Plan by even 1% counts as a Binge. Any doubt or impulse to deviate from the Plan comes entirely from the Pig.
Before you binge, consciously weigh the benefits and the costs of indulging. Make a list of what you gain from indulging and violating your Food Plan, and what you gain by following it.
Weigh yourself everyday. This gives continuous feedback and lets you make fast corrections before you go off track.
Keep a list of Pig Squeals, or justifications from the Pig to violate your plan. For each one that deserves a response, write your justification for why the Squeal is a terrible reason to violate your plan.
If you make a mistake, don’t be ashamed. Forgive yourself. Treat yourself like a child who’s genuinely trying to accomplish something important. If your 5 year old daughter wants to learn to ride a bike but falls off, would you say, “OK, this is a sign that it’ll never work. You should never even try again, it’s just hopeless.“
Do you:
There is a part of you that exists only to feast. It doesn’t care about your well being and about your life goals. It defeats you at every opportunity and wants you to fail so it can have food orgies.
Call this the “Pig.” The Pig is your fat-thinking self. It hijacks your survival drive toward food behaviors that do NOT serve your best interests. It’s an out-of-control eating machine that will destroy everything if you love it. It sabotages your plans and exists only to satiate itself. The Pig is responsible for a lot of misery in your life—eating the wrong foods, in the wrong portions, downgrading your health and quality of life.
(If the term “Pig” is offensive to you, or on the other hand too cute to be repulsive, pick any other term that works for you—“the inner food demon,” “the slob,” “the junkyard dog,” your “lizard brain.” It has to evoke the idea of an aggressive, manipulative bully instead of a cutesy animal to take care of.)
To build out the idea: the Pig that only wants to binge on Pig Slop, which is exactly what you want to stop eating. It eats from the Pig Trough. It emits Pig Squeals to get you to listen to it and let it do what it wants.
Importantly, the Pig is NOT you! Separate the Pig out from the rest of you. You may want to love ALL parts of yourself, like self-help gurus tell you to. But certain impulses are too strong to restrain when they’re given even a tiny opening.
The Pig is a bully that deserves no patience or tolerance. It’s held you back for years, possibly decades, talking you out of every reasonable weight-loss plan, robbed you of the body and energy you want, made you feel hopeless after years of effort. It’s time you put it in its cage.
The Pig is worthy of permanent rejection. It’s repeatedly caused you to act against your best judgment. It deserves NO love and NO compassion. It will dominate you if you show it any mercy.
Dealing with the Pig isn’t like nurturing a wounded animal back to health. It’s not your inner child, or a cute little pet. It’s more like caging an aggressive pit bull. The dog must respect and obey you. This is not a game of mercy—it’s a game of unbreakable control and domination.
It’s almost impossible to “love yourself thin”—certain impulses are too strong to restrain when they’re given even a tiny opening. You’ve tried to indulge yourself in the past, but it hasn’t worked to meet your weight goals—isn’t it worth trying something different?
Here’s how you can separate out the Pig from the rest of you:
(Note that the Pig doesn’t literally exist as a portion of your brain—it’s just a conceptual framework to separate your primal feelings that have derailed your most rational self. The closest analogue to the Pig is a primitive part of your brain called the Brain Stem. But thinking of it as a real separate entity makes controlling it easier.)
The Pig arose as a survival tool, to make sure you ate enough to survive. This was important when prehistoric humans went through periods of intermittent famine. This behavior is common to pretty much all animals—call this your Lizard Brain, which cares only about eating, reproduction, and survival.
But in today’s environment, when survival is much easier and food is aplenty, the Lizard Brain is counterproductive. Food developers hijack this survival drive with addictive foods that give you Food Highs that deceive you about their nutritional value. The Lizard Brain makes you overeat well beyond what’s necessary to survive.
Unlike quitting other bad habits, quitting bad food habits is hard because you have to keep eating something. You can’t just quit food cold turkey. This is why quitting food might be harder than quitting cigarettes or drugs.
Plus, some of us are more susceptible to overeating than others. Some people were born never having a problem with overeating. Others have a biochemical setup that makes it extremely difficult to resist (in prehistoric times, you might have better endured famine—nowadays, you just get fat).
Over time, the Pig was strengthened by outside influences:
Internally, the Pig is strengthened by your psychology. When you doubt about whether you can successfully cage the Pig, you give the Pig strength. If you have low self-esteem, the Pig can overpower you.
If you’ve tried to lose weight before, you’ve almost certainly felt urges to break your food vows. First you say, “You’ve been eating well for a week, so let’s just have one cheat day.”
Then you say, “Well since you’ve had one cheat day, that proves you’re weak. You should feel bad about yourself. So let’s go back to our binge eating.”
In the past, you would have thought of these as a natural, rational part of yourself that needed to be listened to.
Now that you’ve isolated the fat-thinking self to a separate entity, the Pig, you can recognize all such urges as Pig Squeals. These are complaints, feelings, and impulses to get you to binge again. Squeals are all attempts to destroy your goals so the Pig can get what it wants (this is why the Pig cannot be tolerated and is owed nothing but contempt).
Pig Squeals can sound like pretty rational arguments, especially when you’re vulnerable. When you’re hungry and crave something, a lot of things make sense when they shouldn’t.
The Pig doesn’t care about rationality or about your higher goals. Don’t argue with the Pig. Just recognize the Squeal for what it is—a sabotaging of your smarter self—and ignore it. Don’t give in to it or reason with it.
Since you’ve committed NEVER to binge again, any thought or impulse to binge again must be coming from the Pig.
Confront your inner Pig to know what you need to defeat.
What does your Pig want to do that you disagree with?
What is a Pig Squeal that tries to convince you to fall back into bad habits?
The Pig is a part of you that deserves no patience or tolerance. It needs to be caged. Do you think you can view the Pig this way? If not, what’s preventing you?
How do you distinguish Pig Squeals from your own rational hunger? By constructing a concrete Food Plan with your personal Food Rules. The Food Plan gets you to take control over your eating and over your Pig.
Here are the categories that make up your Food Plan:
The Food Plan is what you want to follow with 100% accuracy, for the rest of your life. Violating it even by 1% is going to be Bingeing.
These lines need to be 100% clear, or else the Pig will use fuzzy lines to attack your confidence. Write down every single food rule so that it will be 100% clear if you violated the plan or not (if you showed it to 10 people, all 10 would clearly say that you Binged or not). Make it SIMPLE.
Don’t go from 0 to 100 right away. Start with the LEAST severe food plan that protects you from troublesome behaviors. You might even just start with the one food that gives you the most trouble, follow it for a few weeks, then add more food rules.
Let’s break down each category.
What foods, drinks, and behaviors will you never indulge in again as long as you live?
Pig Squeal: OK, OK, I know you’re serious. But let’s not take it too far. How about we just quit Bingeing one day at a time?
Response: Enough is enough. You’ve done something 100 times and you know you never want to do it again. If you give it any leeway, the Pig will open up the gap and the Never will become a Sometimes and then an Always.
Nevers aren’t as hard as you think. You walk by a bank and you never think about robbing it. You know never to put your hand into a fire. You know never to get into a police car and drive away. Over time, you will get to think this way about your Never foods.
What will you always do regarding food and drink?
Pig Squeal: You can’t always do anything! There are always exceptions! So it’s better to just not plan for them!
Just like Nevers, there are plenty of things we Always do. We Always brush our teeth before sleeping. We always show up to work when we can. We Always pee in the toilet (when there’s one available).
What food and drink will you permit without restriction?
These are usually healthy goto foods you feel good about eating, like leafy greens, fruits, water. (Shortform note: You might be concerned about the idea of not having restriction on certain items. Even when these things are unrestricted, you would likely get tired of eating it before it becomes anywhere near harmful to you.)
What food and drink will you permit only at certain times or under certain conditions?
Be very explicit about these so there’s no ambiguity about when the light is red vs green. Avoid yellow, because the Pig sees yellow as bright green.
Don’t let this get too complex. It’s hard to remember complex rules when you’re hungry.
Examples:
If you’ve been struggling to find the right condition for a particular food, drink, or behavior, odds are you’d be better putting it into the Never section.
You need to set your own diet and be 100% responsible for it. Not 99.9% responsible. 100%
Set your food plan so you’ll have enough to eat.
Consider just starting with ONE Food Rule. Keep it simple and make sure you can follow it. This will develop confidence that you can add on more Food Rules.
If you’ve been diagnosed with an eating disorder like anorexia or bulimia, be very careful about eating rules so that you don’t avoid eating altogether or avoid eating nutritionally important foods. Consult a psychiatrist and a dietician.
Pig Slop is anything that violates your Food Plan even 0.001%. Bingeing = putting the tiniest bit of Pig Slop in your mouth.
The Pig Trough is where Pig Slop belongs. You never eat out of a Pig’s Trough, so you’ll never eat Pig Slop again.
Only Pigs eat Slop and you are not a Pig. There’s never any reason to engage the Pig about the idea.
In this way, you may defeat the Pig forever.
The idea of giving up certain foods forever might be daunting. But let’s approach this rationally and note what you get by indulging in the food, and what you get by not indulging in it.
Picture a food in your Never or Conditional list. Then think about what you get from Binging on it. Most likely the best you came up with was “it tastes good” and “it’s convenient.”
Now think about what you gain by following your rule—or, what you lose by repeatedly violating it. Here your more fulfilling goals will appear—having the body you’ve always wanted; having more energy throughout the day; not being debilitated by disease at the end of life; obliterating your insecurity about being fat; feeling that you have control over your life.
When pictured this way, you have a lot to gain by never binging again—and a lot to lose by letting your Pig out!
Many people have never made this conscious choice, and they’ve focused only on the taste or convenience of the food, while ignoring all the other less obvious costs of indulging.
Pig Squeal: Life should be free! You’re shackling yourself and restricting your freedom with a Food Plan!
Response: It’s the opposite—by having discipline on one part of my life, I’m giving myself the freedom to eat without guilt, live in the body I want, have the energy to pursue my goals, and keep accomplishing things. It’s my eating that’s restricting me.
Create a Food Plan that works for you.
What are your Never foods or behaviors? These are things you never, ever want to do again, for the rest of your life.
What are your Always foods or behaviors? These are things you want to commit to doing.
Think about one of the items on your Never list. What do you gain by following your Never rule?
Weighing yourself everyday gives you continuous feedback on how you’re doing. It allows you to make fast corrections before you spend weeks going off track.
Think about how you drive. Do you open your eyes for a second, adjust the wheel, then close your eyes for 5 seconds hoping for the best? Obviously not. You make tiny corrections in fractions of a second.
Weighing yourself is the same. Ideally, weigh yourself at the beginning of every day, so you can adjust your eating plan for the rest of the day.
Any decision NOT to weigh yourself is the Pig convincing you not to because you’ll feel bad. But without knowing you’re going off course, it’ll be much easier to Binge.
Pig Squeal: So much can change day to day! How salty was your meal last night? Did you poo this morning yet? Did you exercise? Maybe you should spend some more time to empty yourself first, and meanwhile let’s binge!
Response: What matters isn’t my literal weight today, it’s the overall trend. Even if I gained a pound compared to yesterday, I shouldn’t feel bad for the whole day—I should follow my food plan like any other day.
Pig Squeal: The scale is just a number. Are you going to let it define you? Better not to worry about it.
Response: Your heart rate is also a number, and it matters if that number is 0. These important numbers exist whether you look at them or not. By looking at them, you take control and can make better decisions.
Pig Squeal: Congratulations! You’re 5 pounds down! Take it easy—it’s time to binge!
Response: I committed to following my food plan 100%. It doesn’t matter how much progress I’ve made, I’m following the plan. Also, if I haven’t reached my goal yet, I can’t take it easy.
Pig Squeal: You gained weight! You’re pathetic! Just give up and be content with being fat. You’re obviously never going to make progress.
Response: First, recent factors might have caused my weight to change [it can vary by up to 5 pounds based on your diet.] Next, even if I’ve had a setback, the strong thing to do is to get back on course.
Here’s the attitude to adopt: You will NEVER binge again. Remove the possibility of failure from your mind. Do not think, “I’ll try”—think “I will.” This is the only attitude that succeeds with impulse control.
Stick to the food plan to perfection. Don’t give yourself 90% leeway—multiplied over days, this exponentially decreases the effectiveness until you’re back to 0. Just like a drop of sewage ruins a bottle of champagne, don’t eat even one spoonful off your food plan. This counts as binging. The only way to maintain 100% is to stay at 100% every day.
Consider marriage vows. Does anyone say, “There’s a 90% chance I’ll stay committed to you, but there are a lot of attractive people out there, so no guarantees!” No—the only good commitment is a 100% commitment.
But—if you fail, don’t be ashamed. Forgive yourself.
Treat yourself like a child who’s genuinely trying to accomplish something important. If your 5 year old daughter wants to learn to ride a bike but falls off, would you say, “OK, this is a sign that it’ll never work. You should never even try again, it’s just hopeless.“
Don’t make yourself feel weak for making a mistake. It takes strength to get back up again. The weak give up entirely after a mistake, and that’s what the Pig wants you to do.
Picking yourself back up again is exercising your strength. Pause and reflect on what went wrong.
The simple way to never binge again is to never binge again.
How do you resolve the paradox of believing in perfection before a binge, while recognizing after a binge that you’re fallible and can make mistakes?
Binges occur most often because you failed to hear the Pig’s Squeal, not a problem with the food plan. So reflect carefully before thinking about changing the plan.
Pig Squeal: Well, you’ve violated one food rule, so what’s the point of following the others? It’s either 100% or 0%. Give in now, and you’ll do better tomorrow.
Response: If you fail by 1%, don’t take it as an excuse to fail by 100%. If you take a bite of a Never food, does it make sense to go out and buy a box of donuts and a pound of chocolate bars, and go to town?
If you jaywalk and violate a law, does it make sense for you to then steal a car, because if you’ve broken one law you might as well break them all? Of course not.
If an Olympic archer misses the bullseye once, this is no excuse to shoot the rest of her arrows off-target.
Catching Binges earlier and doing a lot less damage has material benefits.
Pig Squeal: Dwell on your guilt! You should feel terrible about yourself for days, weeks! This will make up for your binge. This way you know that if you binge in the future, you’ll be able to make up for it by feeling guilty!
Response: The only purpose of feeling guilt is to recognize the mistake and improve for the future. There’s no use dwelling on guilt after that point.
If you burn yourself on a hot stove, do you walk around for a month beating yourself up afterward?
Do not use feeling extra guilty as an excuse to binge the next time, as though you’ve “paid off your debt.”
Do not make guilt feel like the payment for a binge. This will make it easier to binge next time, knowing you’ll make up for it with guilt.
Pig Squeal: Don’t feel any guilt! Don’t even think about your mistake. Just forget your food plan, because you’ll always fail at some point, and then you’ll just feel guilty again!
Response: Guilt is a natural healthy response to bad behavior, so you can correct it. You should not eradicate it entirely. Treat your vow to follow your food plan as serious. Breaking it is serious and requires reflection.
Pig Squeal: Look at your failure. You’re weak! How many times are you going to do this before you accept it’s impossible? 100% perfection is lunacy. It’s only a matter of time before I get out again.
Response: A weak person gives in and gives up, but I will keep renewing my vow to forever lock the Pig in its cage.
As long as I stay 100% committed to dominating the Pig, I will make steady progress until I beat it into submission.
I have full control over my behavior. Therefore I always have 100% ability to keep the Pig caged. If I can Never Binge Now, I will Never Binge Again at any point in the future.
Pig Squeal: Just taking one spoonful off isn’t a Binge. This is too strict! One spoonful never hurt anyone.
Response: A Food Plan is 100% clear on what’s allowable and not. Deviating from this invites fuzziness, and fuzziness invites the Pig to take a mile.
Here’s when adjusting the Food Plan makes sense:
But changing the Food Plan requires a series of thoughtful steps, much like amending the US Constitution requires a drawn-out process, for good reason. Don’t change your plan day to day without major thought and commitment—otherwise the Pig might be writing your plan.
Here are steps to take:
The Pig complains a lot to get you to binge again. It provokes thoughts, feelings, or impulses to revert to your bad habits.
Since you’ve committed NEVER to binge again, any squeal must be coming from the Pig.
Hard squeals to recognize, and how to deal with them:
Just a Little Bit Pig Squeals
Response:
Pig Squeal: You should be grateful for what you have. Wanting things is the enemy of happiness!
Response: It’s true that I should be grateful to be content. But this doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have any goals. Otherwise, there would be no learning or growth whatsoever. I can balance gratitude with ambition.
Pig Squeal: You can exercise it off later today. Or maybe you already exercised, and so you deserve a little binge.
Response: It doesn’t matter how much exercise you did. The plan is the plan, a binge is a binge. Nothing justifies breaking the food plan.
Pig Squeal: I’m not an idiot. I’m in your brain, so I’m just as smart as you are. You need to listen to my intelligent arguments for Binging!
Response: You must treat the Pig like an idiot. It uses your intelligence for destructive purposes only. It is NOT thinking for the best of you.
(Shortform note: consider treating the Pig like it’s a sociopath whose only goal is to manipulate you to do what it wants. You don’t want to be made the better of, do you?)
Pig Squeal: I might not get you now, but I’ll get you later! You’ll slip up at some time, like Thanksgiving, or Tom’s birthday party, or when your boss yells at you!
Response: The easy way to never binge again is to never binge now—at all times.
The difference between that attitude and the “one day at a time” attitude is that the latter implies powerlessness—“all I can control is today.” The former is power: “I Never Binge Now therefore I will Never Binge Again.”
Because your Pig doesn’t need to be rationalized with, you don’t have to keep a Pig Squeal Journal. If you recognize the Squeal, you can just ignore it.
But writing down Pig Squeals might make you better at detecting them. A simple way to do this is to let the Pig take control of your fingers and type its reasons for eating in the morning, or when you crave something.
Eventually you’ll realize all Pig Squeals boil down to “it tastes good” or “I want the Food High”—at this point, the Pig Squeals will become less frequent.
Finally, Never Binge Again addresses a number of common setbacks that weaken your resolve and make you listen to the Pig.
Once you set your Food Plan, your response to cravings is simple:
Eat according to your Food Plan, and your cravings will subside.
Your only job is to kill the craving. It is NOT to get high on what you crave. You only want to eliminate the craving to get on with your day—your Pig wants to get high with food.
Killing a craving is like pouring water on a fire in your backyard so you don’t burn down the house. Getting high with food is like throwing gasoline on the fire and inhaling the fumes.
Also consider contentment vs mania. Contentment is a gentle state of mind that is repeatable, sustainable, and responsible. Mania is unstable—it’s a temporary pleasure that becomes more difficult to repeat, like drug addicts “chasing the dragon.”
Remember the exercise about what you deprive yourself of by not indulging your craving, and what you deprive yourself of by indulging.
Some may think that any plan that is going to work should be easy and comfortable at all times. Thus, any food plan that causes discomfort is probably wrong, and Binging is the way to alleviate discomfort.
This is insane. Does any good thing come with zero discomfort? Does your favorite athlete get to where he or she is with complete comfort? Is building a billion dollar company easy the entire way?
You do NOT need to be comfortable to stick to your food plan. There will be times where you feel uncomfortable. Your Pig must know it will NEVER consider this time to be Binging opportunities.
Just because you’re uncomfortable does NOT mean you will die. Your body is used to binging, and if you suddenly take away its Food High food, it’ll think you’re starving. You are not starving. Even if you ate zero calories, it would take weeks for you to starve to death.
You have greater ability to tolerate discomfort than you think. You need to want it enough.
That said, humans seek sustenance when 1) nutrients are depleted, 2) they’re cold, 3) when blood sugar drops low. To counter this, stay warm and hydrated, and eat regular, consistent healthy meals.
The social environment around you has most likely developed to encourage you to Binge. Friends and family will continue indulging in your new Never foods; you’ll be invited to break your Conditionals; your Always foods might be joked at.
First, don’t deal with other people’s problems.
Recognize that you don’t need validation of your plan. Don’t go seeking approval for what you’re doing. You own 100% responsibility for your health and goals—other people aren’t going to be feeling your weight or diabetes—so why should they have a say in what you eat?
You will never get 100% acceptance from all the important people in your life for everything in your food plan. Someone will always have some nitpick. So waiting for unconditional acceptance is foolish.
If someone invites you to Binge (violating your food plan), then simply think to yourself, “I don’t eat Pig Slop.” (Don’t say this out loud as it’s judging other people’s behavior—covered next). Politely refuse the invitation. You don’t have to justify yourself. No person in your life should ever be able to convince you to eat Pig Slop.
If they ask why, simply say, “it’s for medical reasons.” If they dig further, say, “It’s nothing serious, I’m not dying or anything, but I kind of hate talking about it” and change the subject.
Next, deal with other people’s pigs. Each person’s plan is their own private affair—you have no right to comment on their eating behaviors. Don’t call their food Pig Slop since this will threaten your relationships. Don’t tell them they have a Pig part of their thinking, because without the right context, they’ll take it as an attack on their personhood.
Don’t force-feed the Never Binge Again philosophy to them, even if you think it’ll help. People must be willing to change and open-minded before they’ll be receptive. Wait until the person is actively concerned about their weight or eating (often this will be at the end of their own personal mistake). They must be willing to seek help before they accept help. When you succeed, you will be all the convincing they need to seek your help.
You should have 100% confidence about your ability to follow your Food Plan for life.
Any doubt comes from two sources:
For the first, write down every Pig Squeal that comes to mind in a journal. This means anything other than 100% commitment to your plan.
Some say willpower is depletable, so it’s hopeless to rely on willpower to never binge again.
The author concedes that willpower really does exist, but willpower is only necessary when there’s actually a choice to be made. When there are clear, hard constraints, deciding takes no effort at all. When something is a core part of your character or identity, no willpower is needed.
Does it take you any willpower to walk by a bank without itching to rob it?
Creating a 100% clear Food Plan makes it easy to deal with willpower. You don’t need much!
Some people may Binge absent-mindedly, before coming back to reality in a cloud of Cheetos dust. This apparent loss of memory is really just “psychological anesthesia”—you protect yourself from the guilt that you would feel with every bite if you had remained aware. You don’t actually have amnesia—if you tried to piece together everything you ate, you’d be able to.
The key is to consciously remain completely aware of what you’re eating at every time. The Pig should know you’re always watching.
Because you’re proud of progress, it’s tempting to shout your accomplishments from the rooftops. It’s been 50 days since you last Binged!
Avoid doing this. It doesn’t make sense when you’re trying to adopt a permanent change for the rest of your life. Counting days implies that the streak should end at some point, and it sets you up for humiliation when you stop proclaiming your streak publicly.
Do you proclaim the number of days since you last got a speeding ticket or robbed a bank? You don’t boast about things you’re supposed to be doing.
Feeling like you need to boast signals insecurity about your commitment. It reorients your social identity around food problems, rather than your goals and abilities.
Yes, there is a connection between one’s psychology and one’s eating habits. It’s possible that trauma from the past causes eating problems today. And figuring this out, diving deep into your thinking, might help you understand yourself better to better change your outlook on life.
But—soul searching has nothing to do with your ability to quit Binging. You DO NOT need to know why you binge. You just need to stop.
To believe otherwise is to leave an opening for the Pig—“you need to unearth ALL the tragic events of your life to figure out what’s wrong with you. Until then, keep on binging!”
Similarly: when you get stressed, you might be tempted to binge. Do not let one issue in life cause a cascade of issues elsewhere! Giving yourself a stress-based Conditional (“I can binge when I get upset”) is too vague and will just invite making excuses to binge.
Finally—it’s not a foregone conclusion that trauma will set them on a path of permanent self-destruction. You may have a more difficult situation than others, fine. But everyone is able to write their fate, and adversity will develop your strength of character.
If you go through these steps but still find yourself binging, then you haven’t followed the steps exactly. By definition, if you define a Food Plan, follow it 100%, and ignore Pig Squeals, you’ll be succeeding. This method is the systematic application of common sense and responsibility in a ruthless manner.
The only way to fail is to reject common sense, or consciously choose to let the Pig out of its cage. Are you willing to accept that you have incomplete control over your behavior? Do you really believe you’re powerless to decide what to do with your own body?
Review all your notes. Write the Pig Squeals down. Before you eat anything, be aware of what you’re eating and why; don’t unconsciously eat. Weigh the benefits and costs of indulging to raise the mental cost of indulgence. When you binge, review why you ignored the Pig Squeal, review your Food Plan, and commit to never violating it again.
Commit to your decision not to binge again.
What tips struck you as the most helpful?
What hesitations do you have about the idea of never binging again?
Do you recognize those concerns as your Pig squealing? Why do you think those hesitations are invalid?