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"Sorta.\nYou know how every once in a while, you&amp;#39;re supposed to switch to a clarifying shampoo to remove build-up? Well, I needed the same sort of intervention for my eating this weekend. There was plenty of build-up over the last couple of weeks, but Thursday and Friday were\nout of control\n. Thursday night, I went out with a couple of friends to a fabulous new restaurant, The Libertine. My friend&amp;#39;s brother runs the place, so instead of ordering, we left it up to the chef to send out his faves. I know I should have known better&amp;#8212;I have little self-control in being able to resist what&amp;#39;s right in front of me, and should have ordered more carefully. We had ridiculously delicious but decadent food\u2026 lobster-roll sliders, trout topped with escargot, duck sausage, hazelnut trifle, a tequila concoction I couldn&amp;#39;t resist from an adorable bartender, lots of wine (seriously, it was like Thanksgiving landed on 11-13-08). I continued to binge (and I do mean binge) through my Friday; I&amp;#39;ll spare you the gory details, but let&amp;#39;s just say I left my apartment in the rain just to go buy a pain au chocolat (chocolate-filled croissant) from Amy&amp;#39;s Bread.\nAnd then, typically, the guilt set in. I woke up on Saturday feeling like I had both a  physical and emotional hangover from two days of hard-core calorie hedonism. Eating like that is exhausting!\nI needed\u2026 food rehab.\nSimply writing down everything I ate in a food diary wasn&amp;#39;t going to cut it. The point wasn&amp;#39;t to obsess but to have an emotion-free eating plan to commit to. I wanted to think about food\nonce\n&amp;#8212;when I planned what I was going to eat&amp;#8212;not 20 times a day. So I decided to write down a food schedule&amp;#8212;and stick to it.\nThat&amp;#39;s exactly what I did. And while I&amp;#39;ve come a long way from my carb-phobic college days on Atkins (I am a huge fan of whole grains now), as part of my 2-day &amp;quot;clarifying diet,&amp;quot; I decided to nix most of them. Time and time again, I&amp;#39;ve discovered that the foods I gravitate to when I want to binge are refined carbs&amp;#8212;so these had to be completely off the table. I know this is a point of contention for many people who have a very &amp;quot;everything in moderation&amp;quot; approach towards food, but I know that this approach doesn&amp;#39;t work for me: If I allow myself even a bite of a cupcake, I&amp;#39;ll want 10 of them! So my list of &amp;quot;approved foods&amp;quot; for Saturday and Sunday included lean protein (fish, chicken, tofu, egg whites, nonfat Greek yogurt), non-starchy veggies, and fresh berries (yep, only berries). And I could have all the tea I wanted. And gum. And that&amp;#39;s pretty much\nit\n. And all those other healthy foods I usually fool myself into thinking it&amp;#39;s OK to binge on&amp;#8212;cashews, grapes, low-fat cheese, whatever? Buh, bye&amp;#8212;for now! I went to a brunch on Sunday at my friend&amp;#39;s apartment, and the absolute ONLY way I was able to resist the homemade chocolate walnut waffles was that I had planned my food ahead of time. My friend very considerately asked me what I wanted to eat before I got there; she&amp;#39;s a vegetarian, so she said she knows too well what it&amp;#39;s like to be invited to a meal at someone&amp;#39;s home and awkwardly face the what-the-hell-can-I-eat-here dilemma. So she was well-stocked with scrambled egg whites cooked with Pam, lots of strawberries and a steady stream of decaf coffee (yes, I brought my own low-fat, sugar-free soy milk, and didn&amp;#39;t feel guilty about that, either). In the end, that brunch was about the company&amp;#8212;no one cared that I wasn&amp;#39;t licking maple syrup off my fingers.\nI have to say, the last two days of &amp;quot;clean&amp;quot; eating were tough&amp;#8212;I&amp;#39;ve literally had to pin myself down to keep from going to the deli to pick up something that wasn&amp;#39;t on my food plan&amp;#8212;but I feel so much better (and more in control) for it. I&amp;#39;m going to start adding back in more fruits and whole-grain carbs today, but I&amp;#39;m going to keep the refined carbs on the &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; list, for now.\nCan any of you relate to the way I felt when I woke up on Saturday morning, post-binge? The best advice I can give you guys, if you do have Monday Morning Food Hangover, is to plan what you&amp;#39;re going to eat for next couple of days. It doesn&amp;#39;t have to be as detailed as &amp;quot;4 ounces of steamed chicken&amp;quot; (I didn&amp;#39;t measure my food either)&amp;#8212;but write down a list of the foods you want to eat and the foods you don&amp;#39;t want to touch. It really helped me, and helped eliminate some of my obsession with food throughout the day. And I feel a little more ready to kick-start a healthier way of eating again. Wish me luck!"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/story/i-put-myself-in-food-rehab-thi>