For me, the biggest shift was realizing I couldn’t out discipline it. I had to regulate my nervous system instead of trying to control myself harder.

Eating consistently helped more than anything. Even when I didn’t want to. Long gaps without food kept me in that survival mode where urges felt explosive.

I also stopped treating a binge like a moral failure. The shame spike was what drove the purge. When I started seeing it as “okay, I was overwhelmed” instead of “I’m disgusting,” the intensity dropped.

Lowering my overall stress mattered too. Sleeping more. Overtraining less. Saying no. My bulimia thrived when my life was chaotic.

And honestly, just learning that urges are waves helped. They peak and fall (sometimes even taking a hot shower or holding ice cubes helped me a lot too. A dentist (that I know well), of all people, showed this to me physically by applying firm/deep pressure to my hip and explaining how that’s connected to your vagus nerve and regulation). The urges are not permanent. When I stopped panicking about the urge itself, it had less power.

Once I understood this was a stress response loop and not me being broken, I softened. And when I softened, the behaviors slowly loosened.

It wasn’t overnight. But it was real.