If You Binge, You Are Powerful Beyond Measure!

If you gorged yourself on chocolate during Halloween or suspect you might find yourself eating too much on Thanksgiving, you know what it feels like to overeat. It's not unusual to overeat from time to time, most people do.

Binging is quite different in that it is more immediate and intense.

In order to understand binging, we must acknowledge its power. Often binging is described as “a trance in which a force takes over.”  A similar thing can be said about a woman’s child birth experience, a dancer on stage, or a act of life threatening self defese.

All these examples, whether we may think of some as more positive than others, point to inner power. Power is a good quality to maintain and binge eating is a powerful force being unleashed. Somewhere within we are sitting on our power, unable to unleash our expression or emotional flow. Binging points to a need to unleash.

Binging is an out of control behavior which helps balance other areas in our lives where we over control. We may intensely control our diet through calorie restriction. Such restrictions guaranty  a future binge because the body’s natural impulse is appetite rather than restriction. We may overly control our emotions: harnessing anger, sexual energy, desires; or perhaps we are overly controlling with others such as our partners, coworkers or kids. The balancing laws of nature dictate that the more we act as a control freak; the more we will lose control in another aspect of our lives.

In order for the body to binge, the body has to be in a deep state of stress. Stress will accumulate with our daily anxieties or fears that we try to push away in order to “survive” the day. We may feel we don’t have the time, the tools or the willingness to deal with these stresses and we put them aside. The nervous system doesn’t unwind.

If we binge, the body will need to relax the nervous system in order to digest such large amounts of food. To enhance digestion, the body sedates all our emotional processing and the mind goes a little numb. We feel like we got a break.

This is a response to the ego’s fear of discomfort. It comes from the same drive we all share to occasionally withdraw when life is uncomfortable and there is too much emotion in the system.

Nutritional Reasons That Can Cause Us to Binge (or Overeat):
The body isn’t always smart enough to let you know what you specifically need. Regardless of what the body lacks , whether it be fat, protein, or any of the micronutrients, it will simply call in hunger. Keep in mind that we don’t always crave what we need. We may crave carbohydrates when the body wants fat or protein (sometimes we crave things that meet an immediate need but do not fulfill what the body needs for healing.)

If we are dealing with binging or overeating, we need to evaluate if our body is really getting enough food, if our foods are providing all the needed nutrients, and if our diet is too strict that there is no pleasure in our meals. It is a common belief that emotional eating is a “bad” thing. We are emotional creatures; it is natural to crave pleasure from our food!

Going Beyond Nutrition: 
The body doesn’t do anything without reason. A binge can be a placeholder to digest past experience. We may put things out of our minds, but nothing gets swept under the rug within the body. Sometimes we have to find a place to metabolize our experiences and if we haven't learned healthier methods, a binge might be that place. To unleash such an uncontrollable power that would lead us to binge, there is clearly a message to which the binge is pointing towards.

Begin exploring for yourself:
1.  Where do you sense you are you a control freak? Where would those close to you like to see you less controlling?
2.  Are you really engaging in things that give you pleasure? In what great pleasures are you not engaged?
3.  Which "wilder" aspects of you are you restraining? Binging can be a release of power that we are holding back from releasing in another realm of life.
4.  Where is life asking you to relax more? (Work, money, relationships, sexuality?)

A binge is not a lack of power. You are too powerful to be contained. Power is the ability to act. The more tools we learn to decompress, relax the nervous system, and metabolize our life experiences, the more we are able to channel our powers into health and conscious living.

* Regarding the picture above: Yogis believe that each finger has a different energy, and there are hundreds if not thousands of mudras or hand positions with different meanings and healing capacities. Jnana Mudra is one of the simplest and most common mudras in yoga. Jnana means wisdom or knowledge. Its root is similar to the Germanic root for the word 'know.' Mudra means seal or gesture. Jnana Mudra is the seal of wisdom.