3 Tips for What to Do When You Overeat

We all make mistakes. We might not like to admit it, but still, none of us is perfect. And sometimes, the mistakes we make involve food.

I suspect all of us have, at one point or another, overeaten. You may have even overeaten by a lot, to the point where you feel uncomfortable, tired, and possibly even sick.

In these cases, if you’re like most people, your first impulse might be to beat yourself up, maybe even think you’re a bad person because you supposedly “lack willpower” and are therefore a “bad” person.

But I’d suggest a different approach.

1: Forgiveness

First of all, rather than beating yourself up, I suggest forgiving yourself. This isn’t a life-or-death situation, and overeating doesn’t make you a bad person.

Plus, calling yourself names or making yourself feel even worse won’t help. You’d do much better to let it go and treat yourself kindly and with forgiveness.

2: Review what happened

But just because you forgive yourself doesn’t mean you want to make the same mistake again. So, once you’re feeling a bit better, think about what happened to see if you can identify why you overate.

Personally, I know I’m much more prone to overeating too much if I get too hungry. If situations come up where you’re held up at work, caught in traffic, stuck waiting for an appointment, or more, you may find that you can’t eat something when you’re initially hungry. In those cases, by the time you’re able to eat, you might be so hungry that you devour everything in sight.

Overeating can also easily happen at holidays or other special occasions. You might have a relative who encourages you to keep eating, or it might simply be that the food is so good you want to try everything. 

I used to run into this at work conferences, too, when the food was free and often fancier than anything I made for myself. It was all too easy in those cases to sample everything, often too much of everything.

These are just a few examples, but whatever your reason, see if you can identify it.

3: What could you do differently

Once you know what contributed to overeating, see if you can think about what you’d do differently the next time you’re in a similar situation.

For myself, if I’m feeling extra hungry, it can help to do a few things:

·      Eat a small amount and then wait a bit for that to calm down my hunger pangs

·      Eat slowly, give time for the signals from my stomach to reach my brain to let it know I’ve eaten

·      Have some tea or something else to drink, since thirst can sometimes feel like hunger

You may also try to keep snacks on hand, so that if you are stuck somewhere, you have something you can eat to tide you over.

Or in times when I’m surrounded by a bunch of food that all looks good, I remind myself that I’m not obligated to eat all of it. If possible, I may plan to bring some home. If not, I’ll be as choosy as possible and only eat what’s most appealing – and if I discover that I don’t like it, I won’t make myself finish it.

You may also simply acknowledge that there are times when you’ll eat too much, and that’s okay. Though even then you may want to try to reduce how much you eat so you don’t feel as sleepy, bloated, uncomfortable, or nauseous.

Learning is a better option

Although you may feel tempted to berate yourself when you overate, it doesn’t really get you anywhere. Not only won’t it change the fact that you overate, but it likely won’t help you avoid overeating in the future.

Instead, if you really want to change your eating habits, the best thing you can do is forgive yourself, then try to learn from it. See if you can identify what contributed to your overeating, and then think about how you could avoid that in the future.

Not only will you feel much better with this approach, but you’ll be less likely to overeat in the future. And that should be the real goal.