How To Cope With Binge Eating Disorder At Work
Binge eating disorder (BED) can overtake your entire life, so how do you cope with binge eating disorder at work? Sometimes work can help you deal with symptoms, other times it can trigger them. Learning how to cope with your binge eating disorder at work is a difficult part of your binge eating recovery journey.
How Work Can Help You Cope with Binge Eating Disorder
Sometimes I find that work helps me cope with my binge eating disorder. When I'm at
work, I'm away from my fridge, I have something to occupy myself, and I have people around me who I can interact with. All of these things help me to stop thinking about eating and actually eating.
How Work Can Trigger Your Binge Eating Disorder
However, binge eating disorder triggers still abounds when you're trying to cope with your eating disorder at work. Work can leave you feeling stressed out, physically tired, and if you have to deal with the public, emotionally exhausted. Sometimes work stress and the functions of the job can leave you vulnerable to binges.
Even if you don't binge, it's common to turn to comfort food to feel better after a long day. Some days when I get home I don't care about what's available to eat, I just want to feel full and satisfied. This sometimes leads to me eating when I'm not hungry or overeating.
How You Can Cope with Binge Eating Disorder At Work
When coping with binge eating disorder at work, it's important to work with your doctor or binge eating disorder therapist to come up with a way to identify triggers which are causing your binging or overeating and come up with a list of solutions to help you deal with them. This can take time and can also be very difficult. But once you isolate what is causing your binging or overeating, you can start to work on solutions for the issue.
For example, I've found that packing a lunch helps me. Before, I was ordering out and receiving portions entirely too large for my stomach since I've had gastric sleeve weight loss surgery. I would overeat and feel uncomfortable for hours afterward. But packing a lunch allows me to pack a reasonable portion for myself, enjoy my food, and not feel so stuffed afterward.
Balancing Work and Eating Disorders Isn't Easy, But I'll Do It
Find Star on Twitter and on her personal website.
APA Reference
LaBranche, S.
(2016, April 30). How To Cope With Binge Eating Disorder At Work, HealthyPlace. Retrieved
on 2024, November 22 from https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/bingeeatingrecovery/2016/04/coping-with-binge-eating-disorder-at-work
Author: Star LaBranche
I work with the public 8 hrs a day, 5 days a week which can be very stressful at times. I also have a very unpredictable workload that depends on the amount of people I see each day. It's rare that I ever have any down time to catch my breath. Some days I am completely overwhelmed especially in the afternoon when more people tend to show up or during the last 15 minutes of the day (often at 5 minutes before closing) when clients believe just because we're still open that there'll be enough time to deal with their issues
I am also a stress eater. To deal with that, I make sure I have a healthy breakfast (my biggest meal of the day). I skip lunch. I know, I know most people say not to do that but it works for me. Lucky for me the medication I'm on tends to reduce alot of my cravings. Instead I fill up on water and/or coffee and try to make time to go for a short walk on my breaks to relieve some of the stress. Then when I get home I sit down to a ready-made dinner (my smaller meal of the day where I load up on veggies) and by 9 PM I am in bed. I find getting enough rest is very important. It helps me cope a lot better with whatever stressors I may have to deal with the following day
One of the problems I do have though is that employees are always bringing in sweets for one reason or another. Sweets are my biggest downfall. I can never have just one so I a avoid them altogether. Because I work for a large organization we're often celebrating something. Someone got promoted, is getting transferred, retiring or their term employment has come to an end. Or else someone is going on maternity leave or it's another employee's birthday. Sometimes it's because of a particular holiday season, like Christmas and sometimes there's just no rhyme or reason at all. If there is healthy food involved like fruit and veggies, I will nibble on that but I stay the hell away from sweets because to me it's like drugs or alcohol, very very addictive!