5 Reasons Why You Binge in the Afternoon
The majority of the clients I see in my private practice struggle with binge eating - either currently or in the recent past. I’ve noticed it tends to happen around the same time of day. The two most common times binge eating happens?
Before bed
Before dinner
If you find yourself compulsively overeating before dinnertime, consider these reasons why it may be happening.
You binge because - you haven’t eaten enough earlier in the day.
While (diet) culture leads us to believe that we as a society are eating too much, I’ve found in many cases that we aren’t eating enough. We have a warped perception of a healthy amount of food.
Aim to eat breakfast, lunch, and 2 snacks before the dinnertime hour. The order in which you eat these depends on what works best for you and doesn’t have to be traditional meal times. A flexible eating pattern during the day might look like this…
Example 1: snack at 7, breakfast at 9, lunch at 12, and snack at 3
Example 2: breakfast at 6:30, snack at 9, snack at 11, and lunch at 2
Either example works, and almost any combination in between, as long as you aim to eat an hour within rising and every 3-5 hours. Eating at this frequency will prevent you from getting too hungry, and also lines up with what’s happening physiologically with your glucose/insulin/glycogen store cycle*.
Using a hunger/fullness scale, eat to a fullness level of 7 after meals and around 6 after snacks, give or take. Please don’t stop eating just because you no longer feel hungry. Please don’t stop eating because that “looks like it should be enough.” Stop to listen to your body’s cues. After a meal, you should feel full and satisfied.
By the way, if you’re new to checking in with your hunger/fullness cues, you might find it helpful to have this handy tool at your fingertips.
2. You binge because - you tell yourself you don’t need an afternoon snack.
You tell yourself that you don’t want to “waste your calories” or spoil your dinner by snacking in the afternoon. But you’re hungry, so you start snacking!
Then you mentally berate yourself for eating something that you hadn’t planned (even though your body needed it) and feel guilty. The guilt then drives you to eat more - now not just out of hunger, but out of uncomfortable feelings. It has turned into a binge.
Notice here that Reason #2 has both physical and mental implications:
Physical: You need the afternoon snack because you’re hungry.
Mental: You also need to give yourself PERMISSION to eat the afternoon snack.
For more info on the unconditional permission to eat, take a look at Principle #3: Make Peace with Food in Intuitive Eating by Tribole and Resch.
3. You binge because - you broke a food rule earlier in the day.
A food rule is any “should” or “should not” concerning your eating that is inflexible. Avoiding a certain food (with the exception of food allergies) or eating only at certain limited times or amounts/calories/points are all examples of food rules.
Here’s how breaking food rules can lead to a binge: you see donuts in the break room at work. You spend the majority of the morning avoiding them even though you want one. It’s a busy morning and you can see that your lunch is getting pushed back later and later, so you quickly eat the donut in an act of hunger, craving, and stress. Because you ate the donut compulsively without giving yourself permission, you didn’t actually taste it and you have trouble moving on.
Later on when you get home, the guilt lingers. Thoughts like “I already messed this day up” come to mind. So when you see another “off limits” food in the pantry, you go for it. Not because you really want that food or you're actually hungry, but because of unhelpful thoughts and feelings.
4. You binge because - you’ve gotten home from a long day.
Another reason for afternoon bingeing is arriving home from the overall stress of the day. A small study* found that 72% of binges happened after getting home from school or work. Why do you think this is?
During this transition time when we’re meant to switch roles and prepare for the night ahead, we’re often mentally catching up with all that’s happened during the day. We’ve moved from one task to the next throughout the day and haven’t had time process various interactions or decisions- a conversation with a coworker, a task that remains incomplete, a problem that you weren’t able to solve.
Upon arrival home, your brain full of these unresolved situations, you might feel relief to be in your own space and want to numb out the stress from earlier, and so you go to food.
Or maybe when you get home, there’s a different kind of stress to switch to while you process your kids’ and spouse’s days while juggling dinner and possible evening activities. In this instance, it’s easy to zone out on autopilot and eat mindlessly.
5. You binge because - you don’t have a plan for dinner.
The “what’s for dinner” question can feel difficult to answer after a full day. Indecision, not having a plan, and thinking about the various tasks involved in cooking when you are low on energy can result in feelings of dread and discomfort.
Oftentimes we try to avoid discomfort and indecision by turning to food. This can especially be the case when we are standing in front of the pantry trying to come up with a meal idea—you start snacking and then it may turn into a compulsive overeating situation.
Having a realistic and flexible game plan for dinner can give you the confidence to snack without it turning into a binge.
What now?
Reflect on the last time you binged or overate in a compulsive way. Can you look back to see if any of these 5 situations were happening for you?
hunger
avoiding forbidden foods
emotions
fatigue
indecision
What’s one small step you can implement to reduce your trigger?
eat an afternoon snack
include a favorite sweet food in your lunch
take small mental breaks at work
begin a post-work mindfulness ritual
plan dinner in advance
Not sure if it’s “technically a binge?”
Wanna learn more about your eating?
Get my free Eating Awareness Guide!
Sources*
Regulation of blood glucose: https://www.atrainceu.com/content/4-regulation-blood-glucose#:~:text=For%20people%20who%20do%20not,begins%20at%20about%2020%20minutes.
Abraham, S.F., & Beam, P.J.V (1982). How patients describe bulimia or binge eating. Psychological Medicine, 12, 625-635.