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Welcome to the Brain Over binge podcast where you learn a simple brain-based approach to ending binge eating. I’m Catherine Hansen, your host and I recovered from bulimia and binge eating over 19 years ago and it just hit me the other day that I’m now going on my 20th year binge free. I quit in the summer of 2005 and at the time I knew at a deep level that it was done. So it doesn’t really surprise me that I’m sitting here going on 20 years, but it’s still hard to believe that so much time has passed and I’m very thankful that I get to continue helping others overcome this. My hope is that this podcast and my books and my story helps you believe that it is possible to completely walk away from this habit and never look back. Today I’m going to share some insights surrounding the topic of grazing on food with the hope that it helps you understand grazing behavior better and also understand any connection that it may have to your binge eating behaviors.

I also hope that this episode will help you reduce any grazing behaviors that you do deem harmful in your life. Although as I’ll talk about, grazing isn’t an inherently harmful behavior, it can be a way of eating that works for certain people or in certain circumstances. I want to share a little about my own experience with grazing to start this off because I can be a bit of a grazer from time to time. Not always, but this way of eating has come and gone in my life at different times and I’m currently in more of a grazing pattern now, which I’ll explain In an ideal world when I have the time and energy, I really like to eat three larger meals a day and a few smaller snacks as well, but the busier I am, the more my eating can look like grazing. This was especially true when my four children were little and there was just the chaos of raising four kids so close in age and at that time I definitely grazed more.

I just grabbed what I could every couple of hours maybe to try to keep my energy up and even now that my kids are teens and preteens, there are still days when I’m on the go so much that just eating whatever I can, whenever I can fit it in just makes sense and fits my life. But when things slow down, I do usually gravitate back to those three meals and snacks when I can. At this point in time, what’s going on for me as far as grazing isn’t necessarily busyness. Of course that’s going on as well, but I shared in a recent episode that I went through a time over the summer and a little before that where my really decreased due to going through a really emotional situation and feeling really stressed during the summer months when my appetite was still low. I found it so much easier to eat smaller meals rather than bigger ones, but in order to get my body the nourishment it needed throughout the day, I needed to eat more often.

So it ended up looking a little more like grazing. This way of eating felt good to me over the summer because the idea of eating a big meal just wasn’t appealing because of my low appetite. The episode where I talked about this decrease in appetite that I went through is called emotional not Eating, and it’s episode 1 51 and I’ll link that in the show description if you want to go back and listen, even though my appetite is back for the most part now, I found myself continuing to eat the smaller meals more often. It just feels intuitive at this point in time and it feels like what my body needs. So I just follow my body when I feel some hunger, I’ll have a snack or a small meal and then I get right back to whatever I’m doing and I really just don’t think too much of it.
I have been starting to eat some more bigger meals again and I’ll probably get back to the three meals with some snacks on a more consistent basis at some point soon. I’m using myself as an example here, but the larger point that I want to make is that sometimes grazing just works. It feels normal and natural to eat in this way for whatever reason it can fit your life or it can feel like what your body needs and it doesn’t cause any distress and there’s not a thought that something is wrong. However, I often hear from people who tell me that their grazing is a problem. I talk to one-on-one clients or I get emails from people saying that eating too frequently is causing them distress and is not feeling like what their body needs. So in this episode, I want to address grazing and when it might be a problem and also how it’s related to binging, and I want to give you some ideas that may help you curb any grazing that feels problematic to you.

The first thing I want to mention that I think is important is that grazing is definitely not the same as bingeing. There’s a definition of grazing that I found that I think fits really well and it’s eating small quantities of food at frequent but irregular intervals and the definition of binge eating is eating in a discreet period of time. For example, within a two hour period, an amount of food that is definitely larger than what most people would eat during a similar period of time and under similar circumstances. And it’s also characterized by a sense of lack of control over the eating during the episode, like a feeling that you cannot stop eating or control how much you’re eating. We’re going to come back to the lack of control part, but just looking at the quantities in these definitions, there’s a big difference between grazing and binging just in the sheer amount of food consumed.

Grazing is small amounts and binging is those larger amounts. Now, there isn’t a calorie limit where anything over a certain number of calories is a binge, and there’s also not a calorie rule that defines grazing either. So these definitions leave room for interpretation, but just by the definitions alone, the majority of the time grazing does not fall under the category of binge eating. But I will say that there’s some nuance there and I’ve seen that grazing can sometimes fit the definition of bingeing if the grazing is very frequent and sustained through a long time period. For example, if someone is eating every few minutes through a whole day, let’s say they’re eating nearly nonstop for that entire day, and if someone is doing that, they may end up eating much more than a normal person would eat in that same time period, which is that day and under similar circumstances.
And if you add in that feeling of being out of control, then yes, this type of grazing behavior can fit the definition of a binge. Another way that grazing and binging are related is that grazing behaviors can be included in binge eating episodes, and I’m going to dive a little deeper into that. I know in my experience, I would typically have these specific binge episodes where I would eat these massive quantities of food in maybe a couple of hours, but then after that time of really binging to the extreme, I sometimes would just keep eating for the rest of the day in this more grazed like way. It definitely wasn’t normal grazing. It was me feeling driven to keep the binge going in some way, but I felt so sick and full that I simply couldn’t keep eating with the same speed and in the same quantities.

I still consider this post binge grazing behavior, a sort of continuation of the binge itself. There was another way that grazing would show up that felt a lot more like bingeing to me, and what would happen would be I would wake up and just feel really hopeless about my eating and just give up on trying to eat normally at all. I would just start eating from the moment I woke up. I wouldn’t eat with that same desperation of a typical binge, but I would just get one food item after another, and I think if anyone would’ve saw me at any one particular time that day, they may think that I was just eating normally, but if you looked at that entire day of me just feeling hopeless and continuing to eat one thing after another, it just wasn’t normal at all. It was huge amounts of food even though it wasn’t contained to a very specific episode.

And even though it looked more graze like those days, I certainly considered to be binge days because it was so far away from what my normal eating looked like because I felt so powerless and out of control. These grazing binges as I could call them, gave me a similar awful feeling of shame and similar physical effects as though shorter, more contained binges. It felt nothing like my grazing feels now, which like I talked about in the beginning in a lot of ways feels like a healthy way to take care of myself. Sometimes it feels like a way that fits my life that allows me to get nourishment and if I graze now and look at my whole day, the amount of food I consume is normal and it’s the amount that my body needs. So, so far I’ve said that binging is different than grazing, but also that grazing can fit the category of a binge if it’s very frequent and out of control, and also that grazing can be included in binges.

If you’re someone who does see your grazing as a form of binging or as a part of your binging, it’s important to learn how to dismiss these urges to graze in this problematic way just like you would dismiss any other urges to binge for most people, if you take a look at your behavior and the problem that it’s causing in your life, you can really tell the difference between urges to graze in a way that’s normal and natural and urges to graze in this more binge like way. It may take some practice and some self-observation to learn the difference, but you can absolutely learn to stop these graze like binges. It’s important to remember that when you dismiss urges to graze in a harmful way, you need to make sure that you’re not dismissing urges to eat altogether. You have to replace the harmful grazing with a way of eating that feels better for you and nourishes you and gives you the food that you need.

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What may happen is that you start snacking or grazing and then you find yourself wanting more and more and the grazing in the amount of food you’re eating and the speed you’re eating it and the urges to binge start appearing and then it spirals into a binge. When this happens, there’s typically two things going on. The first thing is that the grazing activates a pleasure process in the brain and the brain naturally wants more pleasure, so you have urges to eat more and more of the food. If you don’t recognize this is going on and if you do have a binging habit, this natural drive for pleasure can activate urges for that excessive temporary and ultimately harmful pleasure of a binge. You may not even be consciously thinking this. Your experience simply may be that when you start grazing, you feel unable to stop until you’re in a full blown binge.

The second thing that’s typically happening when grazing transitions to binging is that the, I’ve blown it, thoughts are appearing. This is especially common if you are still trying to restrict your food or be on a diet. If you start grazing on things you think you shouldn’t be eating, you may start having thoughts that you’ve eaten too much or you’ve eaten too much of something unhealthy or you shouldn’t be doing this or that you’ve already ruined your eating for the day, and when you have that binge eating habit, the brain’s next thought is often, well, you might as well keep going and then those you’ve blown it, you might as well keep going. Thoughts are often followed by some thought that says, this is the last time you’ll ever do this and you’ll start over tomorrow, so the grazing makes you feel like you’ve done something wrong and then instead of trying to contain it, your brain encourages you to do the opposite and abandon all control.

If you can relate to this, it’s really important to increase your awareness surrounding any grazing that you do. It’s important to try to pause and notice what’s going on in your brain. It’s important to recognize that those, I’ve blown it, thoughts are just neurological junk and you can learn to dismiss them. Stopping at any point during grazing, even if you’ve already eaten more than you think you should have is so much better than going into a binge. It’s so much less harmful to your health and your mental health. It’s not going to cause those physical and emotional consequences that binging does just beyond to your brain and know that grazing is never a justification for binging. Just because you’ve grazed on this or that, it does not mean you’ve failed and it does not mean a binge is inevitable. Even if you do have some negative thoughts about what you’ve eaten, it’s okay.

Just remind yourself that no one is perfect and this is a great opportunity to disconnect grazing from binging because everyone grazes from time to time, you don’t want to ever feel like you have to avoid grazing in order to avoid binging. Now, that being said, if right now grazing is always a problem for you and it always spirals into a binge, there’s nothing wrong with deciding not to go into that behavior in the first place. Some people who have that strong connection between grazing and binging find it really helpful to have some structure in their meals and snacks so that they’re eating at more specific times and they’re dismissing urges in between those times. If you’re using this strategy, then when your brain encourages you to graze, you just remind yourself that you’ll be having a meal or a snack very soon. If the idea of this structured approach that does not include grazing, if that feels too restrictive and you don’t want to give up grazing altogether, another strategy that can help is to use a pause before you start to graze or even after you’ve already started grazing.

This is really about just learning to set some gentle boundaries for yourself and knowing that your brain often does encourage you to keep going, but that’s okay. You can learn to have these gentle self-care limits around your food and around your grazing behaviors. What this could look like is as you start to reach for some food, you take a few deep breaths and you really decide how much you’re going to have, you can visualize it in your mind or you can actually take it and put it on a plate and maybe move away from the rest of the food. Then you eat the food and you enjoy it and also recognize that because of your past patterns, your brain might encourage you to keep going, and that’s your opportunity to dismiss urges to graze in that more harmful way. Deciding what’s right for you as far as how grazing fits into your life and when it fits into your life and how to best avoid binges can involve a lot of personalized decisions, and this is something that coach Julie and I work with people on very frequently in one-on-one coaching and also in group coaching as well.

We would love to help guide you through some of these decisions so that you can find a way of eating that works for you. I want to give two more final tips as I end this discussion on grazing, and the first is that if you find yourself grazing very frequently, really take a look and make sure that you’re eating enough overall. If you’re eating too restrictively and not giving yourself enough calories, you could be operating out of genuine hunger. If you’re not giving yourself enough food, of course your mind is going to keep you focused on food and it’s going to keep encouraging you to go back for more food. In this case, instead of focusing on reducing the grazing, you would be better off turning your attention toward adding some satisfying meals and satisfying snacks to your day, and that can really help reduce those desires to graze.

That tip is really about looking at the quantity of food, and my last tip is also to look at the quality of food you’re eating as well. As you know, I do want people to have the freedom to eat all types of foods, but if you’re frequently eating highly processed foods and especially eating those on an empty stomach where it’s spiking your blood sugar, this can lead to desires to graze as well. You could be getting blood sugar highs and then crashes, which can lead you to want to reach for more food even if you didn’t eat that long ago. In this case, again, instead of focusing on reducing the grazing, it would be much more helpful to focus on adding in some more satisfying and blood sugar, stabilizing foods like fats and proteins and slow digesting carbohydrates, and that can help you stay more stable as far as your cravings, which then naturally reduces that desire to keep getting more and more food and going into those grazing behaviors that can become problematic, and if you’re doing these two things as far as eating enough and also making sure you’re getting some quality foods as well, and you still have a desire to graze that you think is problematic, then I do believe that habit does become a factor as well.

Your body and brain could just be used to constantly reaching for food, and it is about learning to break that habit. Just like you learn to break the binging habit, you can just start to gradually add some space between your eating. You can start with whatever interval feels comfortable for you right now, and even if it’s as little as 30 minutes between times that you’re eating and you can gradually increase that, so you’re giving your body some time to digest, some time to start to notice your hunger and really get in touch with those signals again, it’s also helpful to have some space between your eating in order to just focus on life. If you’re constantly grazing and focusing on food, you’re not focusing on the things you truly want and need to be focusing on, so that’s a big benefit of reducing problematic grazing as well.

You never have to be perfect about this or turn it into any sort of rule because like I said, everyone grazes from time to time, and it can even be a behavior that works for people and fits their life. You’re simply trying to find a level of grazing that feels right to you and doesn’t create any consequences or negative effects. There’s no one right way and there’s a lot of freedom in that, and I want you to empower yourself to make decisions about grazing or about the way that you’re eating that just feel authentic to you. And again, if you need some guidance with this, we would love to help you in one-on-one coaching or group coaching. You can find those links in the show description as well as links to the other brain over binge resources, including My Books online course, and also the free inspiration booklet that you can use daily to keep yourself motivated as you break the binge eating habit and also any problematic grazing habits as well as you continue on your journey. I want to encourage you and remind you that you have the power to change your brain and live a binge free life.

The Brain Over Binge Podcast is produced and recorded by Brain over binge recovery coaching LLC. All Work is copyrighted by brain over binge recovery coaching LLC, and all rights are reserved. As a disclaimer, the host of the Brain Over Binge podcast are not professional counselors or licensed healthcare providers, and this podcast is not a substitute for medical advice or any form of professional therapy. Eating disorders can have serious health consequences and you’re strongly advised to seek medical attention for matters relating to your health. Please get help when you need it and good luck on your journey.

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