I need to improve my diet. I sort of go on these see-saw binge eating diets, often feel bloated, often eat for the sake of eating. How do you improve your diet?
Quick diet tips:
1. You're not eating enough.
2. Seriously, you're not eating enough. If you like to eat, I'd encourage you to switch to 6 smaller meals a day so you have an excuse to eat. Then you will feel full all the time. I lost 50 pounds doing this.
3. Begin with baby steps. That means don't go nuts on healthy foods or eating a bunch of useless salads and stuff like that. Start with something small: make a turkey sandwich with tomato & lettuce on whole-wheat bread. Easy to make that taste good, probably healthier than you were eating before.
Basically, the whole thing boils down to doing something you can sustain as a habit. Diets aren't habits because they're meant to be short-term. When you finish, you go back to what you were doing because you have no long-term plan. The fix isn't to keep dieting, the fix is to change your habits. And that doesn't mean giving up everything you love, nor does it mean making crazy changes overnight.
The best way I found to combat hunger was to never let myself get hungry. Eating a small meal, like half a sandwich, every few hours kept me from getting hungry. It's pretty easy if you make one change at a time. For example, I switched from boxed cereal to oatmeal in the morning...you can do maple, honey, berries, peanut butter, brown sugar, nuts, all kinds of stuff to dress it up & make it taste good. You don't have to make a kale smoothie with hemp hearts & soy protein powder, you know?
Getting into the bigger picture, you can pretty much eat whatever you want within numerical limits if you do IIFYM (i.e. eat Burger King & lose weight). Or you can eat 100% clean and pretty much eat as much as you want and get good results. Or you can exercise for like two hours a day. There's no one way to get healthy; there are multiple ways, you just have to choose what works best for you.
So the question to start off with is, what are your goals? Do you want to lose some weight? Do you feel sick all the time? You mentioned wanting to improve your diet, binge eating, eating out of boredom, and feeling bloated. So basically - do you want to feel better & get in shape?