Good Goals or Binge Eating Triggers?
The Importance of a Clarity Check!
Support Your Binge Eating Recovery
If you binge eat, you can use this New Year's time of new beginnings, fresh starts, and New Year’s resolutions to renew your commitment to recovery. But please be aware of the different kinds of resolutions.
The best resolutions you can choose are those that support your healthy way of living and add energy to your life. Be wary of resolutions that trigger slips or major eating disorder acting out. Here are some examples of both.
New Year’s Resolutions for Eating Disorder Recovery Support
Here are examples of New Year’s Resolutions for recovery support. These resolutions involve activities that weaken the need to binge.
I resolve to:
- Learn something new
- Take a class on what I care about
- Keep my environment clean and organized
- Write thank you notes to people who have helped me in any way
- Reach for what I’ve been postponing
- Remove or protect myself from negative people and situations
- Give me one beautiful experience every day, even if that means something as simple as looking for a moment at a cloud, a flower, a child’s smile, or a kitten at play
- Listen to classical music at least once a month
- Read a classic novel at least two during the year
- Develop a regular routine for sorting clutter
- Find a way to get better at what I do
- Make my home more inviting
- Get a medical, dental, chiropractic, etc. checkup
Examples of Possible Triggering New Year’s Resolutions
These resolutions involve activities that trigger binges.
- Eat "X" every day
- Diet until I lose "X" pounds
- Skip a meal at least once a day
- Not eat breakfast, lunch or dinner
- See how low I can go without eating
- Stop eating on weekends
- Only eat after work
- Eat nothing during the day
- Starve till I am a size "X"
- Treadmill till I am a size "X"
- Find ways to make purging easier
- Quit therapy and do it on my own
- Quit school, support groups, OA and do it on my own
- Leave town so I can feel better someplace else
- Tell xxx how angry and resentful I am with him/her
Supportive - The supportive resolutions are not about food at all. They are about developing yourself and nourishing your mind, heart and body. They are about helping you become more sturdy, healthy, enriched and competent in this world.
They are about opening your mind and heart to the beauty in people, the world and yourself. These resolutions touch on the essentials for your eating disorder recovery.
Triggering - The triggering resolutions are about rigid control, limited perspective and attempts to get quick gratification for frustrated feelings. Giving yourself specific limiting controls will only build up pressure to binge eat. Withdrawing from support and healthful activities serves to gratify a desire for control that leaves you defenseless against the power of your own eating disorder's distorted thoughts and feelings.
Clarity Check - Yes, New Year’s can be a time when you take a fresh look at what’s going on in your life and what’s not going on in your life and make preparations for the positive changes you want. Please run a clarity check on every resolution before you make your commitments.
Ask yourself, Is this resolution coming from my eating disorder symptoms? Will it trigger binge eating? Or is this resolution coming from the healthy life force in me that wants to thrive and prosper?
Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Written by Joanna Poppink, MFT. Joanna is a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in eating disorder recovery, stress, PTSD, and adult development.
She is licensed in CA, AZ, OR, FL, and UT. Author of the Book: Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder
Appointments are virtual.
For a free telephone consultation, e-mail her at
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