So, you’ve had a binge.

You found yourself caught in the haze of eating—scooping ice cream, slathering butter on toast, piling on peanut butter. You wanted to stop, but you couldn’t. The urge pulled you in, and you kept going, eating without chewing, tasting, or truly enjoying.

Now, you wake up feeling awful. Your stomach aches, your clothes feel tight, and your body feels heavy and uncomfortable. All you want to do is hide, overwhelmed by guilt and regret.

I’ve been there. More times than I can count. It’s a tough way to start a day and an even tougher way to live.

But what can you do to feel grounded, calm, and at peace after a binge?

Watch this brand-new episode of Love Yourself Friday to discover how to heal your food hangover and reconnect with yourself.

1. Don’t do the obvious

The most natural thing you want to do when you wake up with this dreadful feeling is to go on a diet, skip breakfast and make yourself suffer for having lost control. Don’t do that. Remember that diets don’t work and as Geneen Roth, prolific author, workshop leader and my hero, says: For every diet, there is an equal and opposite binge. And you know that that is true, don’t you? 😉

2. Start anew

So, what do you do instead of going on a diet? You start from the beginning. Yes, even when you’re not particularly hungry, you eat that breakfast and take it from there. Skipping meals is not an option, especially after a binge. When you mess with your routine, you mess with your head and, yes, this’ll lead to more binges in the not so distant future.

3. Leave the judgment in the kitchen

I don’t know about you, but the “day after” the big binge is often worse than the binge itself. There’s all kinds of mind chatter going on:

You’re fat. Look at your face; it’s at least 2 pounds rounder than yesterday. Everyone will see that you’re a failure, that you’re weak. You just don’t measure up. Ugh.

Instead of beating yourself up, making yourself feel uber guilty and judging yourself for having ruined everything and so on, try to challenge yourself to see this binge as just that: you’ve eaten more than you wanted to eat and you feel fat now.

What if that was all it was? What if you weren’t a loser at all? What if this doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t say anything about you and your worthiness as a person? What if it was just food? Think about it.

4. Expect the next binge

The worst thing you can do now is to promise yourself that “it won’t ever happen again”. The truth is that most likely, it will. You will binge again, you will eat emotionally. It’s normal. It’s human. So, don’t put all that pressure on yourself promising yourself that it won’t happen again. Instead, make peace with the fact that it will.

On to you: what are your best tips to deal with the *day after*? Share them with us.