Recover Fast From Thanksgiving (or Any Overeating Episode)

Ok, it’s the day after Thanksgiving and, well, you went to town yesterday with food. Whether it was Grandma’s pecan pie, that extra plate of turkey and stuffing, or the marshmallow sweet potatoes, here’s what to do to recover quickly (based on my direct experience with hundreds of overeaters):

• First, get some healthy food in you. I know its counterintuitive because most people want to eat as little as possible the day after a feast in order to try and make up for the calories, but that actually seems to signal the brain that you’re living in a feast or famine environment, making it more likely you’ll overeat later on. The way to make up for a day of abnormal eating is with several days of normal eating, not another abnormal one!
• Second, if it’s not medically contraindicated, try to get some tender leafy greens and water into your system. What usually happens in an overeating episode is you’ve taught your survival drive to make an error. You inadvertently trained it that the artificially dense source of calories is where “the good stuff” is, and it will therefore crave more. You can begin to fix this misdirection with tender leafy greens because the chlorophyll and fiber are natural sources of healthy nutrients and your system will begin to point back in that direction. The unnatural cravings stimulated by the overeating episode will begin to fade.
• Third, take stock of anything you did successfully during the overeating episode. Our natural tendency is to collect evidence of failure by repeating negative things to ourselves after overeating: “Why can’t I stop pigging out!?” “OMG, will I ever learn!?” “What’s wrong with me!?” etc. The problem with this kind of thinking is that despite the fact we all tend to believe it will serve as a punishment for the episode and make us less likely to repeat it, what it actually does is direct our brain to collect evidence that we can’t stop and that there’s something terribly wrong with us. As a consequence, we develop a failure identity and become even more likely to have more overeating episodes! So don’t ask, “Why can’t I stop?” Instead, ask “What did I do right? Did I have five cupcakes instead of 15? Only one cup of hot chocolate? How did I stop myself and how can I do even better next time?” These kinds of questions cause you to collect evidence of success and develop a success identity.
• Fourth, eliminate decision-making for the next 24 hours by writing down exactly what you plan to eat. Willpower is the ability to make good decisions, and the day after a binge you’re going to be short on it. Therefore, you can minimize the need for willpower by deciding everything beforehand, especially if you do so early in the day.
• Fifth, set an alarm to go off every few hours, and when it does, take note of how you’re feeling and write it down. Not quite as bloated? Put it in your recovery journal. Feel less brain fog than you did right after you finished binging? Write it down. More energy and presence to be with the kids, family, friends, and pets? You get the idea. What this technique does is pull you through the recovery process a few hours at a time. You’ll begin to look forward to the next time the alarm goes off because you’ll know you’re going to feel that much better, and before you know it, you’ll be through that critical first 24 hours post-binge and back on your way to a more normal relationship with food!