So here’s the deal – I love food. I love food as much as I hate running, and if you read my last post, you know how much that is.

And I love healthy food. Give me a bowl of quinoa salad any day and I’ll be happy. Every Sunday night I spend an hour making my lunches for work for the week, painstakingly weighing every gram of tomato, every chickpea, every turkey breast. I like the precision of it, I like the restrictive nature of having to fit my meals within certain calorie boundaries every day, and it keeps me on track with decent results.

So Monday to Friday I’m Little Miss Wholefoods, basking in the glory of my pretentious lunches that my colleagues mock me for. And then come Saturday, my boyfriend goes out and BAM! I start eating like Sainsbury’s has gone into administration. He tells me its called an ‘extinction burst,’ and its my body’s way of clinging on to my old, bad eating habits right when I think going cold turkey is about to succeed. Except extinction bursts are supposed to happen maybe once a month, once every two months, and mine seem to kick in, like clockwork, at 15:00 every Friday.

If I have no Friday plans, its not that much of a big deal, because I know I’ll be pounding the pavements on an after-work run and then hitting the gym to counter-act my bad choices, but if I’m going out with friends, it all goes wrong. One mistake becomes two, and by the time it’s gone that far, I might as well just write off the whole day, which I do with glee. Then Saturday comes, and my boyfriend leaves the house all day to play hockey, leaving me alone with a kitchen full of food, a purse full of change, and a cornershop about 7 doors down.

Being on a diet (sorry, changing my lifestyle) has made me realise that I genuinely can’t be trusted when left to my own devices. On one terrifying date night, my boyfriend went to the toilet in Marks & Spencer and, like a woman possessed, I filled my backpack with Percy Pigs before he re-emerged. I confessed all once the cloud of madness had passed, and cried about it in the street like a massive pap. Genuinely, it’s like something takes over me and I just eat and eat and eat, and then wake up from it all an hour later and regret every mouthful. It’s not only disconcerting, it’s also exhausting.

So how do you keep a lid on these so called ‘extinction bursts’? To be honest, the only way I can think of is to have no plans during the week other than work-run-gym-bed, and not be left alone in the house for extended periods of time at the weekend. If I’m busy, I rarely think of food, it’s just when I’m alone, bored and lazy that it all goes wrong.

So keep busy, stay vigilant and if you do binge eat, either stick to ‘healthy junk food’ – things like Nakd bars, dried fruit, soreen and nut butters, greek yoghurt that feel like a treat but are actually fairly good for you – or get someone to hide your purse and shoes so you can’t sneak to the shop. I’ll keep you posted on how I do..