E 229 Breaking the Binge: Rewire Your Brain and Overcome Emotional Eating

Do you find yourself stuck in a cycle of emotional or binge eating? You're not alone. In this episode, we uncover how anxiety, habits, and emotions fuel eating struggles—and, more importantly, how you can take control. Learn powerful strategies to rewire your brain, regain confidence, and shift from chaotic eating to mindful, empowered choices.

🌟 What You'll Learn:

The connection between anxiety and eating habits
Why emotional eating feels so hard to stop (and how to overcome it)
Brain-based techniques to rewire your habits for long-term success
Simple steps to build confidence in your eating choices
It’s time to break free from bingeing and emotional eating. Watch now to discover how to transform your relationship with food and find the peace and control you deserve.

🛠 Tools & Resources:
Amber Abila's Email: amberabilacoaching@gmail.com
Website
💚Instagram
💚Free Support Group
💚Free Guided Urge Audio

💬 Let’s Connect!
Have questions or a success story to share? Send me a message!
Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review this podcast!

✨ Your transformation starts today!

Find my podcast
Email me: ccoufal@cynthiacoufalcoaching.com
Text me: 785-380-2064
More information

Transcript

Cynthia: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. I am so glad you're joining us today for the Teen Anxiety Maze. And today I have another amazing guest and this guest I know a little bit About because she and I were in the same coaching program for a while and I really got to know her there and I love what she's doing. And so I want you to meet Amber Abila and she is a conf, well she is a binge eater coach because she wants people to learn to be confident eaters.

But I'm going to let her kind of describe a little bit about herself and her story and why she became The binge eater coach that she is. 

Amber: Yeah, hi everyone. As Cynthia mentioned, I'm a binge eating and overeating coach. So I help people feel normal and in control around food by rewiring their brains.

So I use psychology and neuroscience to really take an insider perspective on how we can start to feel in charge of our eating habits again. Because so many of us start diets and [00:01:00] all of these other ways of controlling our eating that leads us to binge eating. to feel out of control. And so we really work on how can we start to be these natural, confident eaters again?

Cynthia: I love that. Well, a lot of my program is about anxiety, and we talk a lot about how we can get involved in destructive or unhealthy habits because we're trying to not feel uncomfortable emotions. And the one that I work with is anxiety, but a lot of emotions feel uncomfortable. And because we don't want to feel that discomfort, then we try to find different ways to feel better.

And some people turn to eating or food to feel more comfortable. And so is that a little bit about what you are noticing with the clients that you have? 

Amber: Yeah, so I myself, I never really identified as an emotional eater until I started learning a little bit more about emotional eating and what it was. I always thought like, I don't know, I just feel this desire and I want to eat.

[00:02:00] And in my journey, I, I did resonate more with like someone who was like a habitual eater or compulsive eater versus an emotional eater. And I think a lot of my clients do too, but there is definitely that emotional aspect to it. So a little bit about my journey. I started With dieting as most people who struggle with food do, I was a compulsive calorie counter where I wanted to keep track of everything that I put in my mouth.

I think this stemmed from anxiety, this stemmed from this need to control, and really get a hold of my life in a certain way. But after a period of time doing that, I started developing binge eating. I also struggled with bulimia for a bit of time, and I really tried it all. I went to therapy for many years.

I tried doing kind of the diets that weren't diets, such as intermittent fasting like Whole30, cutting out any processed sugar. All of the things that Google recommended, like drinking more water, calling a friend, eating more protein. And I was doing all these things, but [00:03:00] nothing was working, and I was still finding myself stuck binge eating.

And what really changed everything for me was looking at it as a habit. So, yes, there was an emotional component involved, and I could see where that started to show up. But for me, the biggest thing was looking at, you know, there's nothing broken with me. A lot of times in the eating disorder community, When you're struggling with something, especially, you know, binge eating is an eating disorder.

It is recognized as one, but we usually look at it as, oh, you know, there must be something just wrong with them and they must just have to be working on this forever. And they're always going to have to kind of be in recovery. And when I started viewing my eating habits as habits, That changed that for me, and I realized, oh, like, I've broken habits before.

I formed habits before. What if this could just be the same thing? So I focus a lot on people's urges, so the strong feeling of desire right before we go into eating that food, and how we can untrain that desire, so we stop getting those strong urges, and our brain learns to be safe without that extra food.

But I, of course, touch a lot on [00:04:00] emotions, too. how to sit with emotions, how to change your thoughts and feelings, because this is important not just for overall life management, but also to see how are we thinking about food, because that's really the root cause of why we're acting the way we are. 

Cynthia: Well, a lot of that seems like so similar to what I'm doing, except we're not talking about the eating part of it.

We're just talking about doing some of the other things in life that we want to do or some of the things that we want to stop doing and we can almost look at Any of these things that are getting in our way as how how would we change it if it was a habit? And I do think that we kind of get into this mode of well, something's wrong with me So there's nothing I can do about it Well Or this is just the way life is.

There's nothing I can do when there really is. Things that we can do about it. And so I like that you're kind of mentioning it that way, because I think that's very similar to how people would process anxiety. That's the same way that you [00:05:00] would process you know, how, what's going on with the, with the eating.

But you had mentioned, and I remember this so much when I was trying to diet all the time and was really like focused on food so much is that I would have anxiety about food or have anxiety about. the way I was eating or whatever. So can you talk a little bit about how not only could an uncomfortable feeling create us to want to eat or create urges, but how could we also just be anxious about food?

Amber: Mm hmm. Right. So if we're feeling anxious about food, it's usually coming from a history of a lot of food rules 

Cynthia: where 

Amber: we have been taught by some outside source other than our bodies, that there's a right way and there's a wrong way to eat. And we better figure that out, otherwise we're going to gain weight, be unlovable, everyone, no one will be our friend anymore, we're going to ruin our marriage, like all the things we've already said that won't happen if we don't lose the [00:06:00] weight and, and get where we want to be.

So. A lot of times it's coming from this place of, for example, you know, I said I was a big calorie counter. I had a lot of food anxiety about what, I can't go over my calories for the day. What are the calories in this food so I can know and I can make sure that they all add up to my perfect number that my fitness pal told me.

And so I was always really, I had to be very meticulous about, it's a lot of math to do every day. Yes. Stressful, that's anxiety ridden because we're like, do all these things add up? Am I getting the right amount of protein and fat? And oh my gosh, I went over on my carbs today. So that was really stressful just because it was such a specific way of doing it.

And it was like, I have to meet this amount. Which, by the way, like, our bodies do not meet the same amount of calories every day. So it's not even an accurate way of doing it. And historically, calories count on packages, and just, you know, The way we do things in MyFitnessPal are just totally off and inaccurate in themselves too.

But then we can also think [00:07:00] about food rules that might be not so noticeable such as, oh, I heard that, you know, I should never have more than two pieces of bread a day. And then we get anxious about, oh my gosh, what if there's bread at dinner tonight? I already had a sandwich earlier. Or I'm not supposed to have dessert every day.

That was like, I always struggled with how much dessert am I allowed to have. So it was really anxious. Okay. I have to plan this out. What day am I going to go to my dad's house for dinner so I can make sure I can have dessert then? And what if I go to dinner with a friend this week? Are we going to get dessert then?

So a lot of this anxiety is coming from trying to navigate all these food rules versus if we're just in tune with our body. It tells us exactly what we need, but because we have these rules in our mind, we don't think we can trust our body anymore. 

Cynthia: Does your body ever, like when you're saying intuitively, we know exactly what we need and probably how much we need?

Because of how we've been eating, has that kind of skewed it? And how would we reset it? Or how would we find what we need? [00:08:00] How would we know when we can trust our bodies? I guess is a good question. 

Amber: Right. And like this in itself can bring up a lot of anxiety because it's like, maybe you've tried listening to your body before and you're like, well, I listened to my body all day and I just went full binge mode and just had everything in sight.

Or I listened to my body and I didn't hear hunger all day. And what am I supposed to do? I didn't. Am I just not supposed to eat all day if I didn't feel hungry? So, one, you know, I work with people in general who are more on the binge eating side of things. And that throws off our hunger regulation signals a lot.

Because, just think about it, you're over flooding your body with usually a whole bunch of carbs and sugar. And it's having to work overtime and do all these extra processes to try to figure out what to do with that food. And so that can really throw off our body in a lot of different ways. So I do work with people in normalizing their eating habits, like back to where they are.

getting in a more consistent schedule instead of having like nothing all day and then giant binges at night. Because being in a schedule of those regular meals will [00:09:00] help to start regulate things out. But it's also an exercise of really just learning to trust yourself. So many aspects of life we are taught that We need to pay someone.

We need to trust someone else. We need to get help from the expert. And you know, well that those things can be useful. No one knows your body better than you. No one knows your desires better than you. No one knows what you need more than you do. And the best place to start, I would just recommend starting with like one meal at a time.

So when I was calorie counting, what I did is instead of saying, all right, we're just going to say screw calorie counting and come off of it, because that made me really scared and anxious of how will my body tell me how, what to eat and how well I know I decided, okay, I'm just going to stop tracking breakfast.

Great. All right. So I'm going to stop tracking breakfast. I'll still allow myself to track lunch and dinner and then I stopped tracking lunch and then dinner and then, you know, so I started really slowly to start to see, okay, look, my body's okay. I can trust my body now. And then I think also [00:10:00] the third thing would just be.

Really starting to tune into your body, to tune into your body. But what I mean by this is, we go throughout a lot of our day in our head. A lot of what we do, our work, our school, our life, we're thinking our way through it. We're not really feeling our way through it. So we're in our head a lot of the days, and eating is a body based activity.

It is something that occurs internally. So we need to practice checking in throughout the day with what's happening in our body. And this can look like asking how I'm feeling emotion wise. That's checking in with your body. It can be looking like, am I hungry right now? Do I need food? Oh, was I overly full after that meal?

Like what, what, what am I feeling in my body now? How did that meal settle with me in the next three hours? Did it keep me full or did it make me sluggish and tired? So just having these little checkpoints throughout the day will help you start to tune in or doing like meditation. Yoga, all of these things that help connect us to our body will build that.

new trust with it. [00:11:00] 

Cynthia: I love that. And those are just the very things that I would, I mean, it just sounds so much like the same things that we do in, in my program where we're just, we're learning to listen to ourselves and process emotions and our body. And we talked a little bit about Maybe this was before we started recording, but talking about how processing is like, you know, there's a continuum, there's a beginning and middle and end.

And you were saying that hunger or urges have that same process where there's a beginning and middle and end to that. So do you teach something about that with your clients to help them to see, you know, that they can sit through an urge? 

Amber: Right. It, Urges are one of the main pillars I do teach to my clients because I think they're so important.

Because once we stop acting on our urges, our brain stops getting the reward of extra food, which leads it to rewiring itself so it stops giving you those urges for food. 

Cynthia: Which is 

Amber: essentially how we change our brain to be this natural confident eater. Now, When we get in [00:12:00] urge, most people, one, they don't even know what an urge is.

So to describe an urge, it's this feeling of over desire. It's too much desire for something. So when you're desiring food, when you're not hungry you know, occasionally we can have cravings and that kind of gets a little more nuanced because, you Sometimes we do just want to eat something just because it tastes good.

But when we have the strong desire to binge, for example, and we're like, I just want to eat, you know, half the thing of cake right now. Or five of those cookies. That's too much desire. We don't need five cookies right now in this moment for our hunger. So when we see we have this strong feeling of desire for something we don't need, it also tends to feel a lot like anxiety where we're kind of panicking of, oh no, I want all this extra food.

I don't really think I need it. So you can find that feeling too. And then once you start getting an urge, it's important to acknowledge it so you know that it's happening, but also to tell yourself a few important facts about urges. So urges are harmless. They can't hurt you because they're just thoughts and feelings.

Most people think when they get an [00:13:00] urge, it's super painful, and if I don't act on it now, I'm probably going to die. Like, we might not recognize that logically, but like, that's what is going on in the back of our brain, of, I need to eat right now or I'm going to die. That's what your brain thinks right now.

And so it's showing our brain, look brain, we're not going to die. We've had our meals for today. We've, we've fed ourself, which is an important thing to do. Make sure you're doing that. But it's like, okay, if we fed ourself, we've had a really solid breakfast, a really solid lunch, a really solid dinner, and a few snacks.

Like. I don't need any more food. So seeing that your brain is just going on autopilot. It's just giving you an old automatic suggestion based on what you've done in the past. And to realize that we can sit through that, that it's not going to hurt us. It doesn't have any power over us. It can't make us act.

We can sit through it and we're going to be okay. And if this is your first time trying it your brain's probably going to throw a tantrum because it's I like to compare it to if you have, you know, every time you had a toddler go into the toy store with you and they threw a tantrum and you gave them the toy, they're going to keep throwing the [00:14:00] tantrums because they got a reward for it.

So your brain has sort of been throwing tantrums around food all this years, all these years, and if you keep giving it the reward of food, it's going to keep throwing tantrums. Giving you those tantrums might feel a little hard. You might have this feeling of anxiety sitting with this urge too, but know that every time you get through it, it does get easier.

I'm also going to give Cynthia the link to my free urge audio. So because this is something that was so hard for me in my journey, and I know it's so hard for so many clients to sit with an urge, I have an audio that walks you through step by step what to do when you have an urge, and gives you these important reminders.

Because we always want someone to just like yell in our ear, hey we don't actually want the food, like slow down, pause for a second. So that's what I do for you basically in a very loving kind way, is help you see that this is not something you want to do, and give you that moment to pause. 

Cynthia: I love that so much.

I, I need that. I've, I've worked on that a lot for myself, but, you know, it's probably just like anxiety. Anxiety doesn't go [00:15:00] away. We just learn to manage it. Urges don't necessarily always completely go away or, you know, Our sometimes our anxiety over food maybe don't doesn't totally go away, but we learn how to manage it without going ahead and eating or doing those things.

Now, do you work with teenagers or do you have have you had teen clients? 

Amber: I have before. Yeah, so I can definitely, if someone is a teen who is listening to this right now and you're struggling with it the most important thing is that you do get your parents involved in it because it is a medical condition.

I'm sure it's the same thing with you. But as long as you get your parents on board, I'm happy to have a call with the teen and their parent together to help them work through that. 

Cynthia: Okay. And do you do one on one coaching? Do you do group? Both? How does that work? 

Amber: Yes. So I have usually. I always have spots for one on one coaching.

I do occasionally fill up, but you can check. I'll put a link below to work with me one on one to see if I have availability and book a free consultation call with me so we can chat about your goals. And [00:16:00] then I do occasionally do groups too. They are open and closed, so depending on what time of year you're looking into working with me, the group is either going to be closed or it might be open, but you can always wait if you're interested more in group coaching for that option to become available.

Cynthia: Okay. Does, when your group is closed, is there like, do they get like a waitlist message or does it just not go anywhere at the time when it's closed? 

Amber: I'll just have a link just with the work with me page. If you go to my website and you see there's a a tab at the top for group, then the group is open.

Okay. It happens. I usually have a group every three months or so. So if it's not the time for the group, it's usually coming pretty soon. 

Cynthia: Okay. I love that. And you, well, you mentioned the free like talk you through an urge. So we'll make sure that people have access to get to that. And anything else that you, will you have your podcast, The Confident Eater, which I have listened to and it is very helpful and has helped me to reframe some of the things that I've [00:17:00] thought about food for so many years.

I just think that we've learned so much stuff in our lifetime that's been bad information and we're having to just like relearn stuff about eating. 

Amber: Right. I mean, the diet culture is the billions of dollars of industry, so they are making a lot of good money off of us. Yes. And, you know, I always joke that I'm the only person who makes money off of teaching people to listen to their bodies.

Because if everyone just told you, hey, all the wisdom is in your body, Like, the diet companies wouldn't exist, but unfortunately we have become so disconnected with our body in the modern world that it is so helpful to have a coach who is an expert in this to walk you through step by step what to do when you're having these urges, how to connect to your hunger and fullness, how to learn how to eat these foods in moderation, because that's just not really common knowledge that we know or are taught.

It's something that we know when we're babies, but gets unlearned very quickly through our society and culture. 

Cynthia: Yes. Oh, I love that. Well, and I think that [00:18:00] about so like I get so much out of working with people just because I know a lot of stuff and I know how to manage a lot of things in my life, but just talking to somebody who knows a little bit more about the subject than I do.

I just get so much out of that. And sometimes they reflect things back to me that I'm like, Oh, I never thought of that before. And whenever I've worked with a coach, all the knowledge that I gain sometimes is coming from me, but it took another person to show it back to me or another person to open that thought process up for me.

So I think that's what's so great about working with a coach is that even if someone has kind of. Some understandings of some of this stuff. It's still helpful to work with someone to get it all figured out and somebody that can really help you solidify how you're doing things or how you want to do things.

And so I just encourage people to reach out to you if this is something that's really resonating with them and or their teen where they can talk to you about how [00:19:00] to, how to help with that. And I am so glad to know you and I'm so glad that you could give us some knowledge about that today. 

Amber: Thank you.

And I'll make sure to give you all the links of where to find me in the show notes. And I'll just say one more thing that, you know, there's a lot of times a lot of shame around eating. We're taught as women the worst thing we could do is like overeat and gain weight. So sometimes it's hard to admit that we're struggling with that.

But I just want you to know that you're not alone and that there are like literally so many women come to me every day. Talking to me about their struggle. I was in the dark about it for so many years because I thought, Oh my gosh, I'm the only one who's doing this. I promise you, you're not. And sometimes we think with eating too, like, I could just try harder or willpower our way through it.

But binge eating is a medically recognized eating disorder. You know, so not that anything's broken with you, but it is serious and is kind of hard to get out of your own. It's more than just a willpower issue. There's a lot going on under the surface, which is why it's so important to work with a professional through it.

Cynthia: I agree. Well, I so much. This was so good. [00:20:00] And I wish you much luck and look forward to seeing you again. 

Amber: Thank you.