If "Brain Over Binge" Didn't Work For You, Here's Why (Dietitian Reacts | Book Review)

You read Brain Over Binge. You tried to “just stop binging.” You waited for your “animal brain” to quiet down… but somehow you still ended up knee-deep in granola at 11 p.m.

You’re not broken. The book just left out a few key chapters. 🤣

In this episode, I'll review Brain Over Binge through the lens of an evidence-based dietitian who works with women struggling with binge eating. I'm breaking down what’s actually helpful, what’s missing, and why you can’t "animal brain" your way out of every binge urge.

If you’ve ever felt like you “failed” the book everyone swears by, this episode will help make sense of why + give you a better roadmap forward.

JUMP TO:
00:00 Brain Over Binge: The Book Everyone’s Talking About (But Few Understand)
01:45 Meet the Woman Who Says She Beat Binge Eating Cold Turkey
03:54 When Lived Experience is Helpful vs Harmful
06:22 What Brain Over Binge Does Get Right
08:25 Where Things Start to Get Sketchy
15:37 Helpful, Harmful… Maybe Both?
16:59 What's Missing Pieces: What Brain Over Binge Leaves Out

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Transcript

Michelle Yates (00:00)
Hey friends, welcome back to Nourish and Free the Podcast where mental health meets physical health, food guilt gets ghosted and toxic, long list advice gets roasted. I'm Michelle Yates, a registered dietitian, a certified health mindset coach with my master's in health psychology and someone who has spent years helping women overcome binge eating and compulsive Today we're diving into something that a lot of you have either asked me directly about or stumbled across on your own.

which is Brain Over Binge. If you've ever typed how to stop binge eating into Google or browsed Reddit threads late at night for answers, you've probably come across this book or this program.

Maybe you've even listened to the Brain Over Binge podcast or considered buying a workbook or coaching. It's everywhere, it's popular and it promises a really simple solution. You don't have to fix everything in your life to stop binge eating. You don't have to go to years of therapy. You just have to stop acting on the urges.

But does it actually work and is it safe? And what do we need to keep in mind as we evaluate it from an evidence informed perspective? That's what we're breaking down today through the lens of a dietitian who has seen what actually helps people stop binge

Michelle Yates (01:12)
if you find that this podcast episode didn't go into quite as much detail as you were hoping for, I do have an article on Brain Over Binge that is much more detailed. I'll put that in the show notes if you find that helpful.

And don't forget to leave a rating or review on this show, you guys. It really does help so much the more positive reviews of this show, the more that it is recommended to other people on their podcast platforms.

Michelle Yates (01:33)
For the record, I did read the book, probably about 70 % of it. Some of it was glossed over because there was a lot of repetition, but I'm going into this with eyes wide open, so I'm really excited to share

Over Binge began as a self-help memoir written by Kathryn Hansen. Hansen struggled with bulimia nervosa for years. She tried therapy, nutritionists, doctors, and ultimately said none of it worked for her, wasn't making any progress. Then she stumbled upon a substance abuse recovery book in a bookstore.

read the whole thing in seven hours while at the gym and had this light bulb moment. What if binge urges are just like cravings that an addict would have? What if they're not wounds to unravel, but simply just junk signals from the brain and a habit that needs to be broken? That became the foundation of Brain Over Binge. Hansen says that binge urges are nothing more than neurological junk.

coming from your lower brain or animalistic brain or primitive brain, what she's referring to is the limbic system. And once you learn to see those urges as faulty messages, you don't have to act on them anymore. Since publishing her book, Hansen has expanded Brain Over Binge into a workbook. She's got a podcast, like I mentioned, there's courses and coaching programs. So when I say Brain Over Binge, I'm not just talking about the book.

rather it's a whole brand at this point. It's a whole framework. It's a whole way of life really.

So let's talk about who Kathryn Hansen is, which is the author of Brain Over Binge and the founder of this whole premise. Kathryn Hansen is not a dietitian, therapist, psychologist, or doctor. She doesn't have any formal training in eating disorders or behavior change, psychology, none of that. Her authority comes from one thing, her personal story.

Now let's be real, lived experience is absolutely powerful, no doubt. When somebody shares their personal story of overcoming something really hard, it can be inspiring and relatable and motivating. but it's not enough to then go on and give other people advice, and there's reasons for this. Lived experience is not the same.

as evidence-based practice because there's a lot of things to learn and to understand about something like binge eating and binge eating disorder. Just because something worked for one person doesn't mean it will work for everyone or that it's

I see a lot of on Instagram and Tik Tok. There's these binge eating coaches that don't have any credentials in the field. They're just coaching based off of what worked for them.

we're slipping into really dangerous territory because not able to see any warning signs of heading into danger zones or pick up on things that really need to be highlighted in order to connect dots for people.

So that's an important lens to keep in mind as we go deeper into this review.

And sometimes I talk about my personal story. It's because, again, the lived experience is powerful. It helps you to empathize with people who are going through what you're going through. But it's not enough to then be able to personally coach them through what they're going through because they are their own person. They have their own story, their own struggles, their own coping skills that they've learned, their own brain chemistry, their own, all the things, right?

And so it's not enough for me or anybody to just say, hey, this is what I did. So it should work for you Rather, you need to have somebody that also has credentials behind that to be able to personalize when things do not go the same way that it went for them. They should still be able to help that person with overcoming the behavior, even if

What they did doesn't work for that person.

Okay, I want to be fair here. There are things that Brain Over Binge gets right and I was actually really impressed about as I read this book. The first one is it provides a lot of hope and also simplicity. For people who have been stuck in binge cycles for years, Brain Over Binge does make recovery seem less overwhelming, which is great. The message of you're not broken, you don't need to dig through your trauma or fix every problem in your life. You just need to stop binge eating.

It might sound overly simplistic and it is, but sometimes people need simple. They're kind of tired of all the layers and the nuance and they just need to know that they can get through this.

She also talks about, I mean really the main premise of the book here is separating yourself from binge urges. This is a huge one. Hansen talks about learning to see urges as separate from your true self. This is actually a well-known therapeutic technique used in acceptance commitment therapy or ACT. And then she also talks about some other things that are more along the lines of dialectal behavior therapy or DBT.

She talks about riding the urge or urge surfing. Well, we call it that in treatment, riding the urge or urge surfing. ⁓ She didn't necessarily call it that. So yeah, like the things that she's talking about are actually effective for many people,

I think that's where this book does do a good job is the small things that it does recommend or the mindset shifts that it creates are generally or they have potential to be effective for some. Now there's a backside to that. There's ⁓ another side to that, but we'll get to it.

The other thing I really appreciate about this book and this method is that it encourages adequate eating. I nearly cheered when I read this part. She's very clear that restricting food, dieting, or white-knuckling your way through hunger is not the answer. And she encourages balanced, regular eating, something that dietitians and eating disorder professionals have been preaching for years. And I feel like everybody is always against us on that for some bizarre reason. So that was really cool to see that.

It made me happy. It gave me some more warm fuzzies. And then the last thing is that this book is generally really accessible. There's a lot of accessibility behind this program. The resources are affordable. The podcast is free. The books are cheap. The courses are lower cost compared to formal treatment. Again, that's probably because there's no credentials there, but that accessibility does make brain over binge a starting point for someone who might not otherwise seek help. So yeah, there's some positives here.

for sure, and I don't want to minimize that.

But now we need to talk about the underside, the things that brain over binge didn't quite get right or didn't land well with me, which I've already kind of spoken to this, the oversimplification was just really frustrating for me. The brain over binge core message is essentially just don't binge. It's basically saying, okay, whenever you get an urge to binge, it's coming from this animal.

part of your brain, the primitive part, and it's a learned behavior that you don't have to act on. So don't. And it's like, she separates, you know, there's the animal brain and then there's the human brain, which in treatment we might call it the eating disorder self or the true self, or you could say, you know, it's the blind part of the brain, the limbic system, the learned response part versus the prefrontal cortex, the...

true side of you, your true side. I mean, there's so many different ways that you can go about discussing this. so it's, what I'm trying to convey here is that this is not a brand new concept. But if you were reading her book and you'd never approached eating disorder treatment before, you would think, oh wow, this is totally new concept that she figured out and found the missing link, which is this difference between the.

quote unquote animal brain and the quote unquote human brain. her, you know, recommendation is don't worry about all the fluff of if it's coming from trauma, restriction, shame, emotional regulation issues, chemicals in the brain. She's like, nah, that doesn't matter. You're going to waste years in therapy trying to dig through all of that. All it is is it's the animal part of your brain trying to get you to do something that you don't.

have to do, so just don't do it. So on one hand, that's exactly what somebody needs to hear is, I actually do have an agency over this. I actually can decide not to act on this behavior, but it doesn't do much more than that.

It doesn't provide any coping skills other than providing the wave of an urge, which she doesn't even put into that language. I guess nobody ever taught her that before and she thought that was ground-shaking. I don't know how that got missed in her treatment, but I suppose this was a while ago, was over two decades ago that she was getting treatment. So to her credit, she might have just not had great...

advice in her treatment because maybe it was still catching up to what truly is helpful. Maybe for her it truly was ground shaking at the time. But now in 2025, it's just not. And so anyway, she talks about the urges coming and just sitting in them basically, which is what we call riding the wave of an urge or urge surfing and then letting it pass. And some people find that it's as easy as that.

They just gotta sit and let the urge go away. Others find that they need distraction. Others find they need to sit and journal through it. Others find that they need to talk to a friend. Others find that they need specific coping in the midst of that urge. She did not, which is fine, but many people do. So this can come across as very oversimplified when it's just, you actually don't have to binge. So whenever you get an urge, just don't act on it.

So happy for her that that's all she needed. That's great. It sucks that she felt like so much of her eating disorder treatment was basically worthless. But I don't love that now this is being broadcasted to the world as a solution that many other people who struggle with binge eating will able to pick up and do as well.

And then here's another kind of red flag with this is that when we do oversimplify it like this and make it seem like it's so easy, then there's a lot of potential for shame when someone does relapse. And relapse is super common, especially with binge eating. Brain over binge frames it as you're not resisting hard enough or you didn't remember that this is the animal part of your brain and you can act on the human part of your brain.

That can leave people feeling ashamed and like failures instead of seeing relapse as a part of the recovery process and then persevering through that and building resilience.

And another issue that I have with this is that it's really minimizing emotions and trauma. This book is very anti-therapy and there's a bajillion disclaimers about like, I'm not anti-treatment, I'm not anti-therapy. but then in the same paragraph or the same breath, it'll say, but I disagree with therapy. You do not need therapy for binge eating. And so it's like.

Pick a side, man, pick a side. So Hansen really discourages looking into your past, managing your feelings or learning coping tools. But here's the thing, many people, for many people struggling with binge eating, emotions and trauma are a part of what drives binging. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away. Sometimes putting separation can be helpful, but again, like that's not always.

the end of the story for people, there needs to be more.

And then another red flag for anybody listening who's a trauma informed provider, you're going to have already picked up on this is that it's just not trauma informed. If you have co-occurring mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, PTSD, I mean, this, this approach could feel dismissive or unsafe. mean, imagine telling someone with PTSD that they're been injured or just junk and to ignore them.

That's not trauma informed care. And then, know, there's not really, another red flag, there's not really any scientific backing here. This is a big one. Brain over binge hasn't been studied. It's not evidence-based. Ironically, the strategies Hansen described are lifted from evidence-based therapies like ACT and DBT, but she doesn't present them in a research-backed way because her presentation of them is not research-backed.

It's interesting, she's pulling pieces out of things that are well studied, they are conventional and traditional, which she's very against, and then claiming them as her own. And then the last red flag as a result of all of this, which goes along with what I was just saying, is that this is really discouraging people from seeking professional help.

even though she includes a disclaimer that says you should still seek support. This should not deter you from getting professional help. The overall tone of Brain Over Binge is really dismissive of therapy and nutrition counseling and psychiatry. It's a very like this way versus them. This is the right way. That's the wrong way. And that's dangerous because for some people, for many people, professional help is life saving and necessary. So

Yeah, Brain Over Binge can help, but it can also harm.

best, Brain Over Binge gives you a few puzzle pieces, but at worst it convinces you that those are the only pieces. And when the puzzle doesn't fit, you're left with nothing. What if you need like 20 more pieces that going to get professional help would have helped you gather?

You're left being like, how do I fill in all these gaps? I have no idea and apparently conventional treatment methods also have no idea, so I'm But the reality is those conventional treatment methods could help with finding those other pieces.

So here's my bottom line as a binge eating dietitian reading the Brain Over Binge book. Is Brain Over Binge legit? Not really. And is it helpful or harmful? Well, it could be both. The strategies aren't new. They're not revolutionary. In fact, they're pieces of ACT and DBT, which are well-established treatment modalities in eating disorder recovery.

But it's presented in a way that makes it sound like they're groundbreaking. No one's ever thought of them before for binge eating. That's why some people feel helped is because they actually are engaging in these treatment modalities that are well but recovery is not a one size fits all. So if those specific tools do not help somebody, they're left feeling like, I don't know where to go because apparently.

professionals don't know what they're talking about according to this author. If you've tried Brain Over Binge and it didn't work for you, please hear me on this. You are not broken. You don't lack willpower. You didn't fail. You just need some more puzzle pieces. We need to find more of those and piece them together.

Recovery is super nuanced. that's where that personalization is so important and why we have hands on support that we offer for individuals that are struggling with binge eating and compulsive overeating because

It's nuanced. There's layers, there's dots that need to be connected in your story that might not need to be connected in someone else's story. So we've got to individualize. We've to address restriction, healing your relationship with food, learning those coping skills, working through emotions, and yes, sometimes separating from urges, that can absolutely be helpful, but it's just one tool in the toolbox. Brain Over Binge only gives you that one tool, but it presents itself as if it's the whole box.

Okay, so if you're listening and you're tired of piecing it all together on your own and feeling lost and confused and you really want that support to answer questions for you, to look into your situation and say, let's try this because we haven't tried that yet or let's try it again because I think there's actually more potential there or whatever. Like you need someone to connect the dots for you, right? So here's the next step. I created a free mini course that walks you through how I help women quiet the food noise, stop binge eating and

finally feel normal around food again, inside you're gonna learn the exact same framework that I use with my clients and you'll see why they're able to stop binge eating in four months or less. They're going from having a gallon of ice cream in less than a day to finding it months later with freezer burn.

not because I've got some magic fixed by the way, but because we use evidence-informed strategies that on a broad scale, they are the most helpful for those struggling with engineering. And then we have personalized coaching to fill in the gaps for where those,

Broad recommendations aren't hitting the mark or they're missing their mark. And we give you extra tools and meet you where you're at as needed.

So if you're curious, I'll put the link to that in the show notes. It's completely free, it's packed with value, even if you don't wanna work with us in a hands-on way, I think you'll still get a lot of value out of the mini course and it'll help to start connecting dots for you. And it's the perfect next step if you're ready to see what recovery actually looks like and you're tired of advice that basically is just don't do it, just don't binge.

That's all for today's episode. this was helpful, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, of course, and share it with a friend who you read Over Binge with.

And if you have an Instagram, please tag me. Let me know that you're listening. My Instagram is @yatesnutrition. I'd love to hear your takeaways and see that you're listening to this episode. Remember binge eating recovery is possible. You're not broken. You don't have to fight food forever. It just takes the right tools.

Until next time, cheers to living, and Nourished and Free.