What Comes After Awareness?

I often say that awareness is the first step to change: you can't change what you aren't aware of. While it is an important first step, awareness alone won’t show you how to change your life.

Tune in to discover the 5 steps to change yourself in a way that you can sustain. Step 1 is awareness, but on your journey to unwinding your binge eating, you will encounter all 5 steps. 

In this episode, I will help you uncover which step you are on and how to change your life when you feel stuck there so that you can create peace with food.

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Binge Breakthrough, a podcast designed to help you finally break through the barriers that keep you stuck, feeling out of control around food. I'm Master Certified Coach Jane Koker, and I want you to know that no matter how long you've been struggling or what you've tried, food freedom is possible. And I'm here to show you how. After years of therapy, eating discourse treatment, restrictive diet, and reading all the books, I would still stop in the on again, off again cycle of restricting imaging until I was able to see it all from a new perspective that changed everything. Each week I will share the strategies, tools, and mindset that allowed me to overcome my decades-long battle with binge eating. Your journey to body trust starts now. Let's dive in. Hello, trusted listener. Welcome to Binge Breakthrough. I consider you a trusted listener because I trust that you are listening to this podcast for a reason. I trust that you are going to hear something today that is insightful and impactful on your journey with food. So I want to talk today about awareness. If you've been listening to me for a long time, you have probably heard me talk about awareness is the first step to change. But I often get the question, okay, great. I'm aware. I've been listening to you. You're asking me a lot of great questions. I'm really starting to get more curious. I am aware, but what's next? What comes after awareness? That's what we're going to talk about today. Now, awareness is so important. It is the first step. We cannot change what we're not aware of, but it doesn't stop there. Awareness isn't everything. It's the first step, but it is not the only step. So, for example, as you start this work, depending on where you were in your journey with binge eating, when you started kind of listening, if you've been listening for a while, if this is the first podcast you've listened to, you may not have a lot of awareness, or you may have through listening to other resources, through doing your own work, you may have some level of awareness. But at some point, you probably had no awareness. So I remember for me, the uh the example that I always think about is my very first binge. I literally do not remember that binge at all. All I remember is after the aftermath. I remember sitting on the floor. I remember being surrounded by all of the miniature candy bars that were in this box that was sent to me as a college care package. The box was on the floor, and there's just wrappers everywhere. And I remember looking around and looking at all of these wrappers and thinking, oh my goodness, what have I just done? I had zero awareness while I was binging. It was like essentially almost like a blackout moment. And this is so common for so many people. We often use the binge as a way to disconnect from ourselves. That's exactly what we're doing, is we are disconnecting from ourselves in some way, in some fashion. I used to use the example or the the visual that the binges for me, the binges were like my way of turning the lights off on myself. It's like, I don't want to see this, I don't want to be with this, I don't want to experience this. Maybe it was an emotion, maybe it was a physical sensation, whatever it was, it was just like uh no, it's a no. But I didn't, because I couldn't get away from myself, I essentially taught myself how to disconnect from myself. Now, a lot of us do this in other ways. Those people who don't really understand binge eating often have found another way to disconnect. But for those of us that binge eating is a challenge and a struggle, one of the reasons that we do this is to disconnect. It comes from a very, very protective place, but there really is in the beginning, there's no awareness. It's like, well, lights are off. And I love that analogy or that visual that, like, nope, the lights are off on myself. And if the lights are off, I don't, I don't want to be aware. I don't want to see, I don't want to feel, I do not want to experience this. When I was younger, uh, when there was dissension in our family, arguments, whatever, basically, we didn't really, we didn't talk about them. What I did was I basically would just go to my room and I would slam my door. That was the extent of it. Now, I wish I could remember what I did when I went into my room, but I unfortunately I can't. But that's what I would do. I would just slam the door. And the next morning I would come out of my room and it would be as though nothing happened. We would not talk about it, we would not try to figure things out. It was just as the, you know, just kind of like we would just go back to regular. And I came to realize later that my binges were like a way of like me slamming the door on myself. So again, it's like, nope, disconnect. Nope, I don't want that. I don't want to be aware. So awareness is the first step. We want to kind of create some awareness. So this can look like becoming aware during a binge. If you are somebody who are like, you know what? I really don't have any awareness of the binge itself. All I know is after the fact, when I like look around and I'm like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe I ate that much food. So we want to bring awareness in during. So the questions we can ask are like, what do I notice? What's happening? What's happening during a binge? While I'm eating, what am I thinking about? Can I connect with anything else in my body? So once we've gained awareness about something, the next step is to make sure that we aren't in judgment. Now remember, shame and judgment are the 50-pound weight on your hood. And if you don't know what that means, I invite you to go listen to last week's episode, Knowing Your Warning Signs, where I talk all about this. But here's what you need to know for now. You won't be able to learn anything if you're in shame and judgment about yourself or your behavior. So we have to shift into curiosity. Otherwise, we're just gonna stay stuck. All right. So step number one is awareness. Always step number one is awareness. Step number two is understanding. The very simple question to get to understanding is this how does this make sense? We can't change what we aren't aware of. But we can't change something if we don't know why it's happening in the first place. Now, this understanding of why and how it makes sense often comes after the fact, after the binge. So many people they don't want the binge to happen in the first place. It's like, no, I just don't want to binge, period. I hear you, but that's not how it works. There are going to be binges on your journey to unwinding your binge eating. And that's okay. We want to really look and see afterwards, after a binge, we can start from the end. We can examine what happened from a place of curiosity. So from the end, afterwards, we shift into curiosity. We get really curious. Then we have so much data to learn from. And I do this with my five-point inspection tool that I use with my clients. We'll go back. It's like this is the after. We do this inspection afterwards. What happened? Let's look at these five points. Let's really figure out how this makes sense. We're looking under the hood to figure out what's making those lights go on in the first place. The lights are your binges. Under the hood is where we figure out why, where we get the understanding under the hood. Okay, so step number one was awareness. Step number two is understanding. Step number three is choice. So the choice is this. Do I want to keep doing this? Why or why not? You have permission to make any choice you want. You can absolutely continue or you can choose to change. Now, what we want to do is be very careful of the shoulds. I talked about this a lot in episode 39. Are you shoulding on yourself? Well, I should do it this way, or I shouldn't be doing this. We want to be really careful of that when we're answering this question. Do I want to keep doing this? But what we want to do, either answer is fine, but you want to know your reason and like your reason. So when we have awareness and we have understanding, now we get to shift into choice. What's so powerful about choice is it's different than compulsion. We're shifting from compulsion to choice. You know what compulsion feels like. Compulsion feels like there's no choice. I am compelled to do this. I have to do this. But if we're in this place of awareness, we're in a place of understanding, we're not judging ourselves, we get to choose. So that's step number three. Step number four is we experiment. So if you have decided you want to choose something different, it's really a matter of experimenting with different approaches to lead you to the choices that you want to make. There's literally so many different things you can do. But if we're doing it from this place of choice, from this place of openness, awareness, understanding, now it's like, all right, let's try new things. Let's just experiment. So that's step number four. And in step number four, where we experiment, where we come up with all of these different things to try and really understanding, if we understand why it's happening in the first place, we have all the data we need to create our experiments. This is the work that we do together, is we together figure out how does this make sense? And then we figure out what are the experiments that we want to try. Based on all of this information, here are some experiments. Here are different things that we can do. This is the power of change. Step number four, experiment. Step number five, learning. As you experiment, some of the things that you try are going to work, and some of them aren't. If you stay in curiosity, you will be open to the idea of adjusting and adapting and seeing what works and what doesn't work. As you see what doesn't work, you start to get curious, huh? What if I shifted this? What if I tried it this way? There's so many. If you are in openness and curiosity, your options are limitless here. But there's a few things that you want to watch out for, a few things that will kind of potentially keep you stuck. Number one, this is huge for most people who struggle with binge eating, is all or nothing thinking. Another thing to watch out for is considering it a failure when something doesn't work. The last thing to watch out for is making it personal when something doesn't work. So not only are you considering it a failure, whatever you tried that didn't work, but then you're considering yourself a failure because something doesn't work. So those are going to be the top three things you really want to watch out for as you're experimenting and as you're learning. All or nothing thinking, considering anything that doesn't work a failure, and considering yourself a failure, making it personal when something doesn't work. So let's expand a little bit on the dashboard analogy. The dashboard analogy is what I talked about in detail in last week's episode when we talked about knowing your warning signs. So the analogy is your binges are the lights on the dashboard coming on. You don't think that your car is defective when the lights come on, when your warning lights come on. In the same way, you don't want to think that you are defective. If you are experimenting and you're trying something and you do end up binging, that doesn't mean that you are a failure or you are defective. It just means, huh, that didn't make the light go off. I guess there's something else we need to look at here. There's something else that we need to try. So you know that you need to address these lights. If you don't address the lights on the dashboard, things are likely going to get worse with your vehicle. It's the same with all of this. As we experiment, as we learn, if you have lights that are still coming on, we need to keep addressing them. Because if we're not addressing them, things will get worse. You know this. If you've had kind of like um times or cycles where your binging gets worse, this happens. It's like the car that's just driven and driven and driven while all of these lights are coming on. We need to address it or things will get worse. Okay, so all of these steps happen one step at a time. Even as we experiment, as we learn, as we start understanding what's going on, it's all one step at a time. This is not a huge shift. This is not something where you just wake up and overnight, all of a sudden, you are completely changed. Now, sometimes you can absolutely hear one thing, you can hear one concept that does change everything for you. But still, the changes take place over time. The changes that you make might be very small. In the moment, as you're making these changes, it may feel like it's not enough as you're experimenting with different things. But if you make these changes consistently over time, this is what will lead to the big lasting long-term results. There is no magical moment where we just arrive and we never have another negative thought about our bodies, or we never have a moment where we eat more than might feel good in our bodies. So rather than focusing on the future and how far you are from where you want to be, put your focus on today. What can you become aware of today? This will increase your awareness. Remember, that's where it starts. As you increase your awareness, then increase your understanding. And as you increase your understanding, then you increase the number of conscious and intentional choices that you make. And as you do this, be open to experiment and try different things. And as you do this, you will learn what works, what doesn't work. What do you want to repeat and do more of? What do you want to do less of? Do more of what feels nurturing, supportive, and sustainable, and less of what doesn't. Repeat this over time, and you will get to where you want to go. So yes, you do have to do more than just become aware. But you can't get anywhere if you aren't aware first. So it's an important step, a crucial step. Awareness is a crucial step, but it's not the last step. So step number one is awareness. Step number two is understanding. Step three is choice. Step number four, experiment, and step number five is learning. So my question for you is this which step are you on? If you think about your own journey and where you are right now with food, which step are you on? Where would it be helpful for you to spend more time? Now, some people have a really hard time with the understanding part. I don't know why I binge. I don't know why it happened. I can't figure it out. I think it's just a habit, it's just something I've done for a long time. I've tried, I've tried these things, I'm not really sure. Maybe I have some ideas, but nothing really changes. Sometimes it's hard to see these things on your own. And this is where working with a coach or someone else can be really powerful. Often you can't see what is making your dashboard like come on. I actually consider this one of my superpowers. I can talk to someone about what they're struggling with, and I can tell pretty clearly what is happening. So what I do is I help with the understanding piece and seeing them, helping them see how it makes sense. Now, of course, we don't ever just stop at understanding because understanding is important after we have awareness. Yes, we want to get to understanding, but we don't just stop there because if we, if we're like, oh yeah, that makes sense, and then we do nothing else, well, that's not going to lead to change. We have to then go into the next steps, the choice, the experiment, the learning. So awareness is first. Then we go into understanding. And what I love about the piece of the puzzle is with the understanding is I feel like this is where so many people they start with like, I have no idea, I have no awareness. Then they get this awareness. It's like, okay, I'm aware. Now what? Okay, well, let's figure out how does it make sense? I don't know. I don't really know how it makes sense for me specifically. So this is what I love to do is help people see how it makes sense. It's such an important piece of the puzzle. Of course, it's not the last piece, and we don't stop there. But if you haven't figured out why you binge or how it makes sense, I can help you. Schedule a call with me and I will help you with the understanding piece. I've had so many conversations with people where they say, wow, I had not even realized that before. But yes, that makes so much sense. I can help you see what you can't see on your own. You can't change it if you can't see it. And sometimes you can see it, but you can't understand it. And I will help you do both. I will help you see it, I will help you understand it. And from there, I will help you figure out the experiments to put into place so that you can create the peace and the ease with food that you desire. And as we experiment and we get the learning, we adjust, we adapt. This is how change happens. So schedule a call today. We'll make sure you get well on your way to eating with ease. It's these five steps: awareness, understanding, choice, experiment, and learning. All right, that's what I have for you today. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to Binge Breakthrough. You can find the show notes and any resources mentioned at binge breakthrough.com. If you like this episode, subscribe to have future episodes delivered to you each Wednesday. And remember, your five star rating and review will help others discover these life changing contents. See you next week.