Why Would I Do Something That Makes Me Feel Awful?

Let go of judgment as we uncover the hidden truths about binge eating and out-of-control eating in this episode. Rather than focusing on how to change self-sabotaging behavior, ponder the root cause of the behavior.Join us as we delve deep into the compassionate perspective that separates behavior from intention. 

Learn why you might be asking, “Why would I want to do something that makes me feel awful?”

Explore the powerful role of shame, judgment, and the protective mechanisms behind your relationship with food.

Discover how curiosity can unlock the path to healing and transformation.If you've ever struggled with food, this episode is a must-listen. 

Press play and start your journey to understanding and freedom.Be sure to check out the Binge Breakthrough Blueprint to create your customized blueprint to create peace with food at janepilger.com/blueprint.

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 Breakfast. I help you finally point three. Keep you stuck. Feeling out of control, I'm coaching helper. And I want you to know that no matter how long you've been struggling, what you've tried, we don't need to. I'm able to see it all from a new perspective. Between everything. Each week I will share the strategies, tools, and mindsets 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 will be insightful and impactful on your journey with food. So today, I want to dive into a question that I get a lot. And this question is this why would I want to do something that makes me feel awful? I have a different perspective on this. Some people think that when they binge, when they eat out of control, when they can't stop eating, they think that they're punishing themselves or even abusing themselves. But I really don't agree with this perspective. I don't think that we start out trying to harm ourselves, to punish ourselves, or to abuse ourselves. I don't think we set out trying to make ourselves feel awful. I think that every binge, overeat, out of control experience comes from a very well-intended place. There's a very good reason why you do what you do with food. And it's not to punish yourself, to make yourself feel awful. That's not the intention. So I love this concept that there's a difference between behavior and intention. So what we want to do is we want to separate the two. We want to separate the behavior, what you're doing with food, from the intention behind it. The intention behind your eating is often very protective. It might be trying to meet some needs, certain needs that you have that are not being met. It might be trying to soothe or calm your nervous system. Maybe if you're really tired and you really need rest, it might be trying to get you more energy in your body, energy to continue to do the things that you need to do. It might be trying to get you calories if you simply aren't eating enough food. There's a very protective intention behind every overeat, every binge, every out-of-control eating experience. What I find that happens often is that it's the shame and the judgment about the behavior that lead to the true out-of-control feeling with food. That type of eating that does make you feel awful. I can remember this so well. I can remember eating so much plain granola straight out of the bag, maybe the entire bag, maybe the bag Costco size bag, I would get sores on the roof of my mouth from eating so much. My jaw would be tired from eating so much popcorn. I can remember the pain and the physical discomfort in my entire digestive system. I can remember eating an entire box of Crackland oat bran cereal and the days of discomfort as that processed through my system. I didn't eat a lot of hot foods, like temperature hot foods during a binge, but there were a few times that I did try to eat something hot very quickly and getting blisters on the roof of my mouth. I can remember it taking days to recover from a binge, physically and emotionally. It truly did feel awful. And it did feel like I was doing it to myself. I felt like I was broken, that there was something wrong with me. I did wonder why I would want to do something that makes me feel so awful. But now I can look back on it and I can see that it made so much sense. When I would start eating, I would have so much shame for what I was doing. I would be thinking I was broken and I shouldn't be eating this way. The way I talked to myself about myself and about what I was doing was awful. So of course, I wanted to get away from myself. And the only way that I could do that was by eating more. It was the only way I knew how to disconnect from myself and to get out of my head and my body. Not only the physical pain, but the way I talked to myself about what I had done. And the only way I knew how to delay that was to keep eating. It wasn't even conscious. I wasn't consciously thinking, oh, I have to keep eating. If I keep eating, if I if I stop eating, then the judgment is going to come in, the shame and the judgment and all of this. I wasn't thinking this consciously. What else can I eat? On top of you shouldn't be doing this. Let's get it all over with. You're going to be good tomorrow. Those things. That's what I was aware of thinking, if I was even aware. Many times it was just the lights were off. I was completely disconnected. And what I was trying to do was, I was trying to protect myself from myself. I was trying to protect myself from the judgment that was going to come, from the mental beatdown that was going to come, from the physical pain that was going to come when I actually reconnected. But in doing so, in this attempt to protect myself from myself, I was actually creating even more pain and discomfort. Now, I do think there are some people who get so upset at themselves when they start eating, eating in a way that they said they weren't going to do, eating in a way that they were just convinced they would never do again. Once they start, they get so upset they think they deserve it, or they might as well keep going. But it's coming from this place of shame and judgment. That shame and judgment is behind this behavior. But it's it's that's not where it starts. The shame and judgment starts after we have the sh the after we start that eating experience. What's truly behind every eating experience that feels out of alignment with who you know yourself to be at your core is one of the eight reasons. The eight reasons that I have identified that people feel out of control around food. But each of these reasons is so often a protective mechanism. So let's look at these eight reasons. Reason number one, it's shame and judgment. This is what keeps us in the cycle, thinking that we're broken, thinking that we shouldn't be doing what we're doing, thinking that it's wrong, that there's something wrong with us. Then we want to hide from ourselves. Shame keeps us hiding. So we're wanting to hide from ourselves. We don't want to be judged. Anytime you are judged by anybody else, what do you do? You want to get away from them. So we want to get away from ourselves. How do we get away from ourselves? The only way so many of us know how to do that is to disconnect with food. It's disconnection. We disconnect with food because we don't want to feel that judgment or that shame. That is the number one reason. And it is the reason that we keep going to stay disconnected from ourselves because we are in so much shame and in so much judgment. The second reason is restriction. If you are not getting enough calories, your body will get them no matter what. Your body will make sure that you do not starve. If you are not feeding yourself enough, you will have periods of time where it simply feels like you are out of control, that you cannot stop eating. So often, this is because you are not giving yourself enough food. Or you are telling yourself that there are certain foods that are bad, that are wrong, that you should not be eating. Again, we've got some judgment in there and we've got the mental restriction. So even if you're eating enough calories, if you're mentally restricting food from yourself, your brain is hearing that those foods are in scarce supply. We're creating scarcity. So there might be a real scarcity or there might be perceived scarcity. I'm not allowed to eat this again in the future, so I better get as much as I can now while I can. It's a protective mechanism. Your brain is trying to protect you from scarcity. The third reason, nervous system dysregulation. When our nervous system is dysregulated, when we're in that fight or flight response, when we're in a freeze response, what we need is to regulate ourselves. Many of us taught ourselves very young. We figure out very young before we had tools to learn how to regulate ourselves. We learned how to use food to regulate ourselves. So if we're dysregulated, if we have used food for years to attempt to regulate ourselves, it makes so much sense that the brain would try to use food again to continue that neural pathway, that protective mechanism to regulate yourself. It's a protective mechanism. It makes so much sense. The fourth reason it's disconnection, being disconnected from our bodies. So many of us have learned to use food as a way to disconnect. So when there is that disconnection, when we want to disconnect, either consciously or subconsciously, we use food to do that. So again, it goes back to that shame and judgment. Are we disconnecting because of shame and judgment? Are we disconnecting maybe because maybe there has been some sort of trauma in the past? We go back to the nervous system. Maybe we have just for years and for decades, we have disconnected from our bodies, from the signals in our bodies, the messages from our bodies, because of all of the diets we've been on for years and years and years. So that is often a reason. We're really wanting what we need to do is connect, but the body is trying to protect us for whatever reason, whether it's from a previous uh trauma response, whether it is from trying to get away from judging ourselves, whether it is trying to just repeat neural pathways that have been repeated for years or decades. The next reason is a coping mechanism. We have a low emotional capacity. We simply did not learn how to feel our emotions, how to open up to them. If we don't have a high emotional capacity, those emotions are going to feel like a threat to our nervous system. So we end up then using food to cope, to get away from, to try to hide from our emotions. Now that's not really how it works. We can't really do that, but we mask them, we cover them up with food. It makes so much sense. If the body does not know that the emotions are not a threat and it perceives them as a threat, then we're going to go into a heightened nervous system response. We're going to go into then trying to use food to soothe, to cope. It makes so much sense. The next reason is an attempt to control. We have been trying to control ourselves, our bodies, our emotions, all of these things that we don't really have the ability to control. But we are trying to control them because we think that will keep us safe. We think it will be protective. Again, this is all comes from such a protective place. The intention behind it is protective. The seventh reason is it's a habit. It is something you have done repeatedly over time, over the years. You literally have the neural pathways ingrained over and over. It makes sense. The habit happens. We have all kinds of habits. Our brain wants to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and use as little energy as possible. This habit is something that involves pleasure. And when you've been doing it repeatedly over time, putting anything we do into a habit is how our brain brings in that third piece of using as little energy as possible. So even though an actual like the binge, a binge where you eat a lot of food, it does take a lot of energy. If you think about how much physical and emotional energy it does take to go through not only the process of a binge, but the aftermath, the after effect of that, there is a lot of energy there. But when it's a habit, when it's something you've done repeatedly over time, the brain just likes to put that on autopilot. So it makes sense. The last reason is your internal dialogue. It's what you are saying to yourself about yourself. We can combine this with several of the other reasons: shame and judgment. If you are telling yourself you're awful, you're terrible, you will never figure this out, you're broken. That dialogue, and when it's negative, we're going to want to get away from it. So again, we're going to disconnect. How we talk to ourselves is everything. It may be the last reason, but it's everything. And it does go hand in hand with the shame and judgment. We want to shift into the curiosity, into the compassion, into really figuring out how does it make sense. So rather than for like looking at the behavior, seeing that the behavior is, we're thinking the behavior is bad, it's wrong, what we want to do is look at the intention. What was the intention behind the behavior? How does it make sense? If there really is a protective reason behind any binge, any overeat, any experience with food that is out of alignment, if there really is, if it makes sense, if there's some protective mechanism here, how can I look at the intention? What was the intention? Rather than focusing on the behavior and personalizing, if I do this behavior, then it means this bad thing about me. It's like, oh, how about if I do this behavior, can I really start to see this behavior as a light on my dashboard? It's telling me something's going on. It's telling me I need to look under the hood. It's not telling me I'm broken, there's something wrong with me. It's telling me there's something that needs to be examined. Let me get curious. Let me understand what is causing this light to go on in the first place. So when we look at these eight reasons: shame and judgment, restriction, nervous system dysregulation, disconnection, coping mechanism, the attempt to control, habit, and internal dialogue, these are the answers to why. Why would I do something that makes me feel so awful? It's one of those eight reasons. Now, if you want a deeper dive into each of these reasons, you can go back and visit some of the earliest episodes of this podcast. If you want your own personalized blueprint for how you can take each of these eight reasons and their corresponding solutions and apply them to your unique situation, you can check out the binge breakthrough blueprint. It's an online course that will walk you through creating your customized blueprint to create peace with food. Now, the next time that you eat in a way that makes you feel awful, instead of getting frustrated with yourself or ashamed of yourself, instead of thinking that you're broken or that you'll never figure it out, ask yourself this most powerful question. How does it make sense? How does it make sense that I ate in that way? Reflect on these eight reasons. It's always at least one of them. Often more than one. Now, here's a pro tip for you. If you are in shame and judgment, you won't even be able to get to the rest of the reasons. It's the shame and the judgment that keeps the the the it keeps us stuck. It keeps us from looking under the hood. The eating is the behavior. The eating is the light on the dashboard that tells us something is going on. We want to look under the hood to see what's there. It's likely one or more of those other seven reasons, but shame and judgment will put a weight on the hood of the car, and we won't even be able to look underneath. Curiosity is the key to unlocking your binge eating. So get curious. How does it make sense? It always makes sense. You are not broken. There is a perfectly good reason why you do what you do with food. Once you can understand it, then you can begin to work with it and to change it. And sometimes you can't see it for yourself. And this is where talking to someone else can be really beneficial. We all have blind spots, especially when it comes to something you've been doing for years or even decades. This is what I love doing helping people to see what they can't see on their own, especially when it comes to eating behaviors. This is some of the most powerful work that you can do. And it's work that will have a profound effect in every area of your life, not just in what you eat. It's about who you become as a person. And that will flow through to all areas of your life. All right, that's what I have for you today. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to Binge Breakthrough. If you want to understand why you feel out of control with food sometimes, I've created just the thing for you. Discover the number one reason why and get three things you can do today. Visit binge breakthrough.com forward slash quiz, and you'll have your answer in your next step. Binge breakthrough.com forward slash quiz.