Food diary for binge eating disorder?
On the home page of Yahoo! today you will find an article written about food diaries. (Thanks to Julie for giving me a heads up!) You can see the article here.
The study had a little over 1,600 men and women participators. Interestingly enough, people who kept a food diary lost twice as much weight as people who didn’t. I think keeping a log is a great idea because it helps people keep track of everything that goes in his/her mouth. It’s a good way to stay accountable for what you ate.
That being said, do you believe the same is true for people who have binge eating disorder? Do you think that it will help him/her think twice about bingeing, or that it will cause more bingeing due to pressure to write it all down?
I personally think that it could be very detrimental to anyone that binge eats… However, I have heard from a few people that keeping a food log really helped them stay on top of binge eating disorder. I guess we are all different and it’s super interesting to me.
What are your thoughts?
For me, keeping a caloric food diary for weight loss was one of the things that triggered my BED. However I find that journaling frequently is very helpful, as you suggest in your ebook. But I do it not so much to calculate everything eaten but more to explore causes, triggers, etc. For instance I might write that I ate well today (meaning no bingeing) but not write everything I put in my mouth. Or I might write that having a big dinner out lead to a continued binge for me. I speak in more general terms about food. For some reason writing down every single thing I eat takes triggers an unhealthy “diet” mindset.
I have kept food journals and I thought I was helping myself by doing so but I only recently realized that it actually was doing the opposite. I would write down what I ate and I would also write what an idiot I was for eating so much and how stupid I am and a lot of negative statements when I had a binge day. I would put smiley faces or stars on the days I ate healthy and execerised but that was it I never wrote good job keep it up this makes me happy nothing postive. I just realized this by looking over some old unfinnished food journals that I had around the house. So with that said I have been doing as you sugguested in your eBook to just journal and like Jennifer mention I am more general about the food intake. So food journaling is not for me who has BED.