I was thinking recently about the importance of eating enough calories early in the day when you are in the process of breaking the binge cycle. Many find, including myself, that even once we our back up near our bodyweight set point, if we haven’t eaten enough throughout the day, even unintentionally, our animal brains may start trying to convincing us to binge. The animal brain is extremely effective at influencing our behavior for several reasons:

Your Animal Brain Disguises Cravings Into ‘Rational’ Arguments

Our animal brains doesn’t just create the urge and cravings to binge, but it packages these cravings into a form that connects with our human brains, often in the form of ‘rational’ explanations of why binging would be a good idea. 

One common ‘rational’ thought that is common while under this spell is “If I eat a regular meal now then I might still have cravings and binge regardless, and then I’ll have binged on top off having a meal, so i might as well just go straight to the binge now”.

When your animal brain takes over, these ‘rational’ thoughts can be convincing even if they don’t make much sense when your human brain is in control. Unless you are very far below your bodyweight set point, simply eating a regular meal would likely get rid of these cravings, but it will try to convince you otherwise. 

It Knows You & Takes Advantage Of Your Soft Spots

Since your animal brain is a part of you, it knows what ‘rational’ thoughts are most convincing to you and it takes advantage of this. For instance, my animal brain successfully convinced me to binge countless times throughout my eating disorder by tapping into my strong desire to not waste food.

The ‘thoughts’ I would get were along the lines of “you can’t let all of those leftovers go to waste, you need to eat those now because you know that they often go uneaten if you don’t. And you probably can’t just eat normal amounts of them either because then tomorrow there may be new leftovers and then you wont be able to keep up”. With my animal brain in control I can spot the holes all over this ‘rational’ argument, but to my calorie deprived state it was extremely convincing.

It Learns What Works Over Time

Much like a machine learning algorithm, your animal brain gets better with practice because it learns from the past and will stick with arguments that were successful for it in the past. This is why it may be common for one’s animal brain to use a wider variety of ‘rational’ arguments at the beginning of someone’s experience with binge eating because the animal brain is literally testing our different messages to see which ones work on you and which ones don’t. Overtime, It drops the ones that weren’t convincing and sticks with the once that were most successful at controlling your behavior. What’s even worse is that these tactics get more effective overtime because every time that a thought leads to a binge is strengthens a circuit in our brains, leading to a habitual response.

Takeaway

The longer I have been out of restriction, the more I know that once I eat enough calories in for the day these whispers from the animal brain will not surface. I used to believe that if I ate a lot early int the day then I would just be hungrier later and would have wasted my calories early, but I now I can trust that I naturally need to eat far less at night to feel satisfied if I ate more earlier in the day, and it has the added plus of not having to spend any mentally energy dealing with the whispers of my animal brain.