Reward yourself once a week, i eat something that has between 800-1000 calories, is it a big piece of cheesecake, or a 200g chocolate and that stops me from craving things during the rest of the week, and it's guilt-free cause i work out in the evening. I used to have the same problem as you, i am a chocolate addict, i can eat big amounts and by big i mean big. When i was binge eating i would go through 5000-7000 calories in an hour, so believe me, it works. Don't look at it as good or bad food, look at it as extra calories. I hope this will help you as it helped me.

Spicy, it seems you overlooked the portion of my post where I stated

Magazine models? They don't look like normal people. In fact they're some of the more photoshoped and weight pinched models. Have you ever seen how much work goes into making those models look a certain way? Newspaper models are a bit more realistic, but a lot of the time they to aren't your average body type.

My whole point about the modeling was that it's an influence in your life that will drag your attention to aesthetic details and will put a LOT of pressure on you to trim or tone something to what an employer thinks it should look like. In a lot of cases, yes, this is unhealthy.

Are fitness models healthy? Sometimes... Sometimes maybe not. There's a lot more to being healthy than being thin and having muscles, and being a bit pudgy is NOT a sign of poor health. Your body's a whole, but it operates individually. If you have low fat and high muscle but your heart isn't conditioned to support the increased pressure, or if it hasn't strengthened at the same rate as your muscles, you can have serious health problems, regardless of how great you look.

Fact is, exercise is one of the best things for you, but even exercise has its unhealthy disadvantages. Think of it like this. Naturally, we'd be moving virtually all the time. We'd be moving right from birth, and we'd have to excercise all day just to perform basic tasks of survival. This gives the body a LOT of conditioning over time which we generally don't get growing up in the same extent. The workout is actually fairly unnatural. We'd never live slow paced lives only to burst out with energy for an hour a day. You're putting a much heavier load on your internals all at once than you'd normally get the chance to. If your cells are hungry, they will be weak, and this load, and the physical effects of exercise will actually hurt parts of you. If you're dieting to force weight off for a job, your cells feel this. You might not, but rest assured that functions aren't being performed in your body exactly the same as they would be if you were eating fully. Over time this builds up in your body and the effects slowly accumulate. Note I said slowly. 1 extra dead cell in your arm wont give you weak tendens or anything, but constant abnormal dieting can result in minor virtually symptomless situations. If the rest of your body is operating at a pace it can't keep up with and meet demands of because it's been poorly conditioned through the dieting, you might get problems. You wouldn't want to train heavy impact if you were on a calcium free diet (granted I doubt that exists), so why's it any better to train heavily and stress other parts of your body that aren't getting their full fill of nutrience to keep top performance either?

We've seen athletes drop from heart attacks, strokes, we've seen them suffer organ failure just like the fat people. Granted, not at as high of a rate, but these things are happening which shouldn't be happening in a healthy body, something's compromising them, something in them obviously wasn't healthy enough despite their dedication to fitness.

We would never naturally make the concious decision to avoid food if we weren't being fed with all these studies and sciences which are admitedly still full of holes and gaps of knowledge and understanding. We were meant to eat what we could. Not avoid or deny ourselves food just because it contains something our body will convert into lots of energy we'd need to burn off but couldn't normally.

So yeah, model if you like doing it. But consider a change in your life if you can't be a model without concious effort towards keeping your weight down, or find work for someone who's happy with what you are. That's all I'm saying, health shouldn't be a struggle, or a goal (though it's good to set goals none the less), it should seem like a fact of life to you. Since the OP DID suggest they've considered getting out of modeling because of how it makes them handle their fitness, I think this is perfectly good advice to consider for her situation. If she sees any relevance or applicability in how she feels and what I'm saying, she can freely take whatever course of action she pleases. As things are now though, she doesn't seem to be on a track that's entirely working for her.

Hi Partygurl

First things first - you are not a loser. Binge-eating/bulimia can be incredibly difficult to control and, as you've clearly said, it's when you feel out of control in life that abuse of food/alcohol can mirror that sense of having no control. As you know, eating disorders are primarily feeling, not food, related.

You've mastered your impulses in the past - this is your evidence that you can do so again. Remind yourself of this - no-one but you controlled your eating disorder so you have, within you, more control that you might feel right now. Also, remember that, by binging, you're simply falling back into old patterns of coping which didn't work first time round (ie you probably felt some immediate release at the time but, ultimately, you probably felt worse about yourself/everything).

There are many little "tricks" you can learn to adopt to help you curb your binging impulses. People use relaxation (yoga, breathing etc) or distraction techniques eg if you feel the urge to binge, defer acting on it for 15 minutes - take a walk, wash your hair, call someone on the phone - the impluse will go within that timeframe. Or tell yourself you will wait one hour (or 30 mins or whatever you feel you can manage) and you will consider binging then. If you can, tell yourself the same thing an hour later. I would suggest that you don't try to tell yourself that you can never binge again - forever is too long for most of us to imagine and can feel like an impossible feat.

Maybe keep a food/feelings diary? If you can, if you feel the urge to binge, take a little time to write out everything you're feeling - don't worry about structured sentences(!), just words that express how you are feeling at that moment. This can help to get out the stuff you want to try to deal with by bingeing.

Finally, the key to successful mastery of an eating disorder is structure, structure, structure. Plan your meals IN ADVANCE and make sure you don't leave too long between meals - I would suggest that you ensure that you eat a snack (fruit/yogurt etc) between meals to ensure that you're not actively hungry at any time as food restriction can prove a powerful trigger to binge. Also, if possible, remove your particular binge foods from the house (of course this may be impossible but maybe try to move them to a cupboard that becomes "off limits" to you). Often, if the foods aren't readily available, you can get through the binge impluse because of lack of accessibility.

Hope this helps and doesn't feel too overwhelming - I've worked in an eating disorders clinic for a number of years and can get a bit passionate!

Good luck and be kind to yourself

meditation and then talking out your problems is really helpful. Don't allow yourself to turn to food to help your problems when apparently they make them worse in the end right!?