In this post, I’ll share some insights surrounding the topic of grazing in binge eating recovery, with the hope that it helps you understand grazing behavior better and any connection it may have to your binge eating. Grazing isn’t an inherently harmful behavior—it can be a way of eating that works for certain people in certain circumstances, but you can learn to reduce any grazing behaviors that you deem harmful in your life.
Sometimes grazing makes sense, sometimes it feels wrong
First, I want to share a little about my own experience with grazing, because I can be a bit of a grazer from time to time. Grazing has come and gone in different periods of my life, 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 like to eat three larger meals per day and usually 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 younger, and I was involved in the demands of raising four kids very close in age. I just grabbed what I could every couple of hours to try to keep my energy up. Even now that they are teens and preteens, there are still days when I’m on the go so much that I simply eat whatever I can, whenever I can fit it in.
Grazing just makes sense and fits my life at times, but when things slow down, I usually do gravitate back to those three meals and snacks when I can. At this point in time as I’m writing this, what’s going on for me as far as grazing isn’t necessarily busyness, even though that’s still a factor as well. I shared in a recent podcast episode (Episode 151: Emotional Not Eating) that I went through an emotional and stressful time a few months ago, and my appetite really decreased. When my appetite was so low, I found it so much easier to eat smaller meals rather than bigger ones, but in order to give my body the nourishment it needed throughout the day, I needed to eat more often. So my eating ended up looking a little more like grazing.
This way of eating felt good to me at the time because the idea of eating a big meal wasn’t appealing at all due to my low appetite. Even though my appetite is back for the most part now, I find myself continuing to eat the smaller meals more often. It feels intuitive at this point in time, and it feels like what my body needs. I just follow my body when I feel some hunger, I have a snack or a small meal, I get right back to whatever I’m doing, and I really don’t think too much of it. I have been starting to eat some 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 simply works. It feels normal and natural to graze for whatever reason, or it can fit your lifestyle, or it can feel like what your body intuitively needs. When grazing is done in this way, it doesn’t cause any distress and there’s not a thought that something is “wrong.”
I often hear from people who tell me that their grazing does in fact feel “wrong” and is a problem. I talk to one-on-one coaching clients or I get emails from people saying that eating too frequently is causing them distress and is actually not feeling like what their body needs. So for the rest of this post, I want address when grazing might be a problem and how it can sometimes get connected to bingeing. I also want to give you some ideas that may help you curb any grazing that feels problematic to you.
Grazing and bingeing are different, but can be linked
It’s important to know up front that grazing is not the same as bingeing. A good definition of grazing is: “eating small quantities of food at frequent but irregular intervals.” In contrast, the definition of binge eating involves eating large quantities. The official definition 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.” Binge eating is also characterized by a sense of lack of control over the eating during the episode—a feeling that you cannot stop eating or control how much you’re eating. I’m going to come back to the lack of control part, but for now, looking at these definitions, you can see that there’s a big difference between grazing and bingeing just in the sheer amount of food consumed.
That being said, there isn’t a calorie limit where anything over a certain number of calories is a binge, and likewise, there is not a calorie rule that defines grazing. The definitions of bingeing and grazing leave room for interpretation, but the majority of the time grazing does not fall under the category of binge eating. However, there is some nuance there and grazing can sometimes fit the definition of bingeing if the grazing is very frequent and sustained throughout a long period of time. For example, if someone is grazing every few minutes through a whole day, they may end up eating much more than a normal person would eat in a day. 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 bingeing are related is that grazing behaviors can be included in binge eating episodes. In my own experience, I would typically have specific binge episodes where I would eat massive quantities of food in maybe a couple of hours, but then after that time period of bingeing to the extreme, I would sometimes just keep eating for the rest of the day in a more graze-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 considered this post-binge grazing to be a continuation of the binge itself.
A different way that grazing felt like bingeing was when I would wake up feeling hopeless about my eating and give up on trying to eat normally at all. I would start eating from the moment I woke up, and although I wouldn’t eat with the same desperation as a typical binge, I would graze from one food item to another for most of the day. I think if anyone would have seen me at any one particular time during that type of day, they may have thought I was eating relatively normally, but if you looked at the entire day of me feeling hopeless and eating so frequently, it was not normal at all. I ate huge amounts of food even though it wasn’t contained to one specific episode. I certainly considered those days to be “binge days” because my eating was so far away from what my regular eating looked like and because I felt so out of control.
These “grazing binges,” as I could call them, gave me a similar awful feeling of shame and similar physical effects as my shorter, more contained binges. The grazing binges felt nothing like my grazing now—which feels like a healthy way to take care of myself sometimes and a way of eating that fits my life during certain circumstances and allows me to get nourishment. 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.
You can dismiss urges to graze in binge-like ways
So far I’ve said that bingeing 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 your grazing appears in these ways, it’s important to learn to dismiss urges to engage in this problematic grazing behavior—just like you would dismiss any other urges to binge. If you look at your behavior and the problem that it’s causing in your life, you can usually 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 self-observation to know the difference, but you can absolutely learn to recognize and 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 all urges to eat. You have to replace the harmful grazing with a way of eating that feels normal for you, nourishes you, and gives you the food that you need.
Grazing can spiral into binge eating
Now I’m going to shift my focus to another way that grazing is connected with bingeing, and that is a common pattern of grazing leading to bingeing. This pattern shows up often in the people I work with, and it showed up for me as well. In this case, what happens is that you start snacking or grazing and then you find yourself wanting more and more. The grazing increases in the amount of food you’re eating and the speed at which you’re eating it, and then urges to binge start appearing and what started as grazing spirals in a binge.
When this happens, there are 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 have a bingeing habit, this natural drive for pleasure can activate urges for that excessive, temporary, and ultimately harmful pleasure of a binge. You may not 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 bingeing is that the “I’ve blown it” thoughts appear. This is especially common if you are trying to restrict your food or be on a diet. If you start grazing on foods you think you “shouldn’t” be eating, you may start having thoughts that say, “you’re bad for eating this way,” or that “you’ve already ruined your eating for the day.” When you have the binge eating habit, the lower brain’s next thought is usually, “you might as well keep going.” You’ll likely also have thoughts that say “this is the last time,” and “you’ll start over tomorrow.” In effect, 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 and learn to view those “I’ve blown it” thoughts as neurological junk and 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, and it’s not going to cause those physical and emotional consequences that bingeing does. Just be on to your brain and know that grazing is never a justification for a binge. Even if you’ve already grazed on this or that, it does not mean you’ve failed, and it does not mean a binge is inevitable. It’s ok if you have some negative thoughts about what you’ve eaten—that’s much better than the negative thoughts and feelings that follow a binge. Remind yourself that no one is perfect and this is a great opportunity to disconnect grazing from bingeing.
Everyone grazes from time to time—you don’t want to ever feel like you have to avoid grazing in order to avoid bingeing. However, 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 a strong connection between grazing and bingeing 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 between those times. If you’re using this strategy and your brain encourages you to graze, you can 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) 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—with the goal of learning to set some gentle boundaries for yourself. When you pause, you can decide on an amount you will eat, knowing that your brain will likely encourage you to keep going beyond that amount. You can accept that it’s okay for your brain to react that way and still stick to your self-caring limits 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 consciously choose how much you’re going to have. You can visualize it in your mind, or you can actually take the food and put it on a plate and maybe even move away from the rest of the food. Then, you can eat the food you’ve chosen and enjoy it. When your brain urges you to keep going, 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 we help people with frequently in one-on-one coaching and also in group coaching. Coach Julie and I would love to help guide you through some of these decisions so that you can find a way of eating that works for you.
Food quantity and quality affect desires to graze
I want to give two more final tips as I end this discussion on grazing. The first is that—if you find yourself grazing very frequently—really take a look at your eating and make sure that you’re getting enough food overall. If you’re eating too restrictively and not giving yourself sufficient calories, your urges to graze could be appearing out of genuine hunger. If you’re in a state of physical food deprivation, 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 significantly reduce those desires to graze.
The last tip is to look at the quality of food you’re eating as well. If you’re familiar with the Brain over Binge approach, you know that 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 foods on an empty stomach—it could be causing spikes in your blood sugar which can lead to desires to graze. You could be getting blood sugar highs and then crashes, which can leave you wanting to reach for more food even if you didn’t eat that long ago. Similar to when there are deficiencies in food quantity, when there are food quality issues, the focus shouldn’t necessarily be on reducing the grazing. Instead, it’s much more helpful to focus on adding in some more satisfying and blood-sugar-stabilizing foods like fats, proteins, and slow digesting carbohydrates. That can help you stay more balanced overall as far as your cravings, which then naturally reduces that desire to keep getting more and more food and going into those problematic grazing behaviors. Looking at the way you’re eating also includes looking into any health conditions you may have that are leading to abnormal craving and getting nutritional and/or medical help when necessary.
If you’re doing well as far as eating enough, and also making sure you’re getting some quality foods as well, and you still have desires to graze that you think are harmful, then I do believe you need to look at habit as a strong factor as well. Your body and brain could simply be used to constantly reaching for food, and it is about learning to break that habitual behavior. You can start gradually adding some space between the times that you’re eating, starting with whatever interval feels comfortable for you right now—even if it’s as little as 30 minutes. You can slowly increase the intervals so that you’re giving your body some time to digest and some time to start to notice your hunger and really get in touch with your appetite signals again. Another benefit of having some space between your eating times is so that you can focus on life. If you’re constantly grazing and focusing on food, you’re not giving attention to the things you truly want and need to be focusing on, which is an important motivation to end the problematic grazing.
You never have to be perfect surrounding grazing or create rigid rules—because like I’ve talked about, 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 knowing that. I want you to empower yourself to make decisions about grazing that feel authentic to you, and we’re always here to help you in coaching if you need it.
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Brain over Binge resources:
Free Inspiration Booklet – The booklet contains 31 daily messages to help you stay focused and motivated each day as you let go of binge eating.
One-on-one Coaching – Book a 45-minute private and highly personalized session with Kathryn or Coach Julie. You will learn to change your thinking, uncover what is holding you back, and get on a path to complete freedom from food issues.
Group Coaching – Get help from coach Julie and support from others who are overcoming this habit. Includes a forum that is open 24/7, group coaching calls, mindfulness resources, plus course access.
Brain over Binge Course – Self-paced online lessons (plus an app) for only $18.99/month. Includes over 125 tracks to listen to that give you the information and answers you need as you end binge eating.
Brain over Binge Books – Get Brain over Binge and the Brain over Binge Recovery Guide on Amazon and Audible.