Understand Why

Episode 2 outlined the 8 reasons why you binge.

Episode 3 covered the solutions for each reason, highlighting the 8 things you must do to stop binge eating.

Join me today where I dive deeper into the #1 answer on how to stop - understanding why.

I believe it's important to understand why you started and why you haven't stopped yet. Creating awareness is the first step of any change. We don't have to live in the past, but it can provide helpful information for our future.

This is how we start to discover how it all makes sense.

Stay tuned for a deeper dive into the remaining 7 solutions on how to stop binge eating.

If you would like to download the 8 reasons why you binge and what to do about it, visit www.BingeBreakthrough.com/why 

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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SPEAKER_00 0:00

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 James Hilker, 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 disorder treatment, restrictive diet, and reading all the books, I will still stop in the on again-on-again cycle of restricting imaging and how 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 episode four of Binge Breakthrough. I considered you a trusted listener because I trust that you are in the right place to learn something new today by listening to this podcast, including how to develop trust in yourself. I want you to start right now by setting the intention to take one idea or concept from this episode and put it into action in your personal life today. Remember, change only happens when you apply what you are learning. You can listen to podcasts all day long, but if you don't apply what you hear into your own personal life, change will not take place. So in episode one, I shared a little bit about my story and I talked about what I mean when I talk about binging. So if you haven't listened to that, I highly recommend that you go back and check that out. And in episode two, I highlighted the eight reasons why people binge, the eight things that I see that are pe keeping people stuck in the cycle of binging. So that's episode number two. And then in episode number three, I gave you what to do about it, the eight responses, the eight answers to those eight reasons why you binge. So if you haven't listened to those already, you can get that big picture overview by listening to the first three episodes of this podcast. And today, what we're gonna do is we're gonna dive in to the very first reason why you might still be binging. And this topic is key to everything. That reason is shame and judgment over the behavior. So let's talk a little bit about shame and judgment. Shame sounds like this. It sounds like uh thinking I'm broken, or there is something wrong with me, or I'm a terrible person. Shame is very personal. We make it very personal that we are broken. We are wrong. Judgment is sounds more, it's more like criticism, disapproval. So sh judgment sounds like I can't believe I did it again. I have no control. I have no willpower. I'll never figure this out. I'm disgusting. Both of these, shame and judgment, are so common amongst people who binge or who feel out of control around food. I know I felt both of these feelings very, very deeply. I had so much shame over my behavior that I kept it a secret. I did not talk about it for years. I did not want anybody to know what I was doing or how I was behaving with food behind closed doors. I was just certain that people would not, uh, they would not approve of me, they would not love me, they would never see me in the same way. And the judgment, I had so much judgment towards myself over what I was doing. I felt like I was out of control, that I was disgusting, that I uh would never be able to figure it out. I was so critical of myself every time I did it. Now, this is very common. It's very common to experience shame and to experience judgment. But here's why it's the number one problem. Because if we have shame and judgment about what we're doing with food, long-term change is very unlikely. So I want you to think about children. And if you don't have your own children, chances are good you've been around kids enough to know how they respond best. Do kids respond well to judgment or disapproval? No, they shrink, they shut down, or sometimes they even act out. We are the same way. And many of us still have a very young part of us inside that will respond to shame and judgment in that same way. So when I was younger and when I felt judged, I basically responded by going to my room and slamming the door. That's how I dealt with judgment that I perceived. And later on, I actually realized that my binging was actually me slamming the door on myself because I didn't want to be on the receiving end of that judgment that I was inflicting upon myself, of that criticism and the disapproval for what I was doing. And with shame and judgment, so often we don't even realize that we're doing it. It's become this practice for so long, we don't even have to think about it. It's just part of how we respond. Those thoughts are on autopilot every time, often, even when we start eating in a way that we might not want to eat, we start eating, we start judging ourselves, we start criticizing ourselves, and often we end up eating more and longer just to get away from that judgment and the criticism that we are heaping upon ourselves. But even if we have been doing this for a long time, and even if it feels like it's on autopilot, change is still possible. No matter how long you've been judging yourself, you can choose a different path. So, how? That's the question, right? How do we change? Change always starts with awareness. So I want you to just start to notice how often you judge your eating behaviors. And that can sound like, oh, I'm being so good, or oh, I was so bad. Judging really is looking at something as good or bad, right or wrong. So just start to notice how often you judge your behaviors around food and what it sounds like internally. And so the best way to shift out of judgment is by getting curious. And so this is where this, what we're gonna do about shame and judgment comes in. So the number one thing that keeps people in the habit of binging, or in the pattern, I should say, of binging, is shame and judgment about the behavior. And what to do about it is to understand why you started and why you haven't stopped yet. Now, we don't have to dig deep into our past and to stay there, but personally, I find that it's really helpful to understand why you might have started binging, secret eating, uh, or just turning to food in the first place. So I want you to get curious. Can you remember either your first binge or when you started eating, uh, eating food, sneaking food, using kind of turning to food for something else? Can you remember that time? Now, some can remember a very specific situation, and for others, it's more vague, just kind of more of like, you know, I think it was about this time in my life. There's no right or wrong answer here. There's nothing, uh, it it's it's it doesn't mean anything if you can remember something very specifically, and it doesn't mean anything if you can remember if you can't remember something very specifically. This is just an invitation to get curious. So for me, I have a very specific recollection. My first binge was my very first semester in college. I had received a care package of a box full of Halloween candy, and I opened that box and I proceeded to eat the entire box full of um Halloween candy. And I remember sitting on the floor surrounded by rappers and just being just terrified and not terrified, but mortified, I should say. There was shame, there was judgment. I thought there was something wrong with me. I had no idea what was going on. I can really put myself in that place. Then what you want to do is get curious. What was going on at that time? So for a lot of people, there might have been a significant event. Maybe there was a move, uh, maybe even uh a death, death in the family, death of a loved one. There could have been something big going on, like abuse. For others, maybe it was a parent taking you to Weight Watchers or withholding food, telling you you couldn't eat as much as your siblings because uh you were the fat one. So as you start thinking about this, ask yourself the question, as you think back on this time when you started turning to food kind of in a different way. Ask yourself this question: how does it make sense that I started turning to food or sneaking or binging at that time? For so many people, it was a brilliant solution in that moment. It was what their brain figured out to do to take care of them. And this is what I realized for me. It made so much sense. I was away from college, I was away from my from my family, from my friends for the first time. The secure connections that I had were no longer there. I did not know very many people at college when I went away. I also didn't know how to deal with the big emotions that were coming up for me. I did not have that skill. So for me, then I can see, oh, it makes so much sense. I also had been undergoing some pretty restrictive dieting. So when I put all of those things together, oh, yes, it makes so much sense. So so many people find relief just in this exploration because they can see that they aren't broken. Now, this doesn't solve the pattern today, but it does help you understand why it may have started and also to start to have a little compassion and awareness for yourself. Okay, so we talked about judgment and curiosity is the answer to judgment. When we see ourselves in judgment, we can get curious, start to get curious. That is the answer to shifting away from judgment, as we shift into curiosity. But we're also talking about shame today, shame and judgment. And shame is going to be a little bit different in terms of how we want to respond to shame. And I love looking at the work of Brene Brown. So if you haven't heard of her, she is a brilliant shame researcher. She has a lot of amazing things to say about this. Um, and one of the quotes from Brene that I love is this she says, if you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. I love this so much because it tells us shame cannot survive in the light. It grows and it thrives in the darkness. So she says in this quote, it means shame needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. We've been talking a lot about judgment today, and what we can see with this research and with with this quote is that judgment increases our shame. So one of the ways that we work on shame is by also working on our judgment. Because if we can decrease our judgment, the shame is naturally going to decrease. But the other two factors that are exponentially going to increase shame, in addition to judgment, are secrecy and silence. Think about this. How many of you eat in secret? I know I did. I never ate the way that I used to eat when I would binge. I never ate that way in front of anybody else. Never to this day. To this day, I never ate that way in front of anybody else. I can remember a couple of times actually catching a glimpse of myself eating, binging in the mirror, and almost being shocked at what I was doing. It's that secrecy we don't want anybody else to see, we don't want anybody else to know. The silence, we don't want to tell anybody else what is going on. So if shame cannot thrive in the light, and in this quote also, she tells us that when we douse shame with empathy, it can't survive. This means that in order to work with our shame, we need to bring it out into the light. We need to talk about it. So this looks like finding somebody, a safe or a trusted person to talk to and sharing your experience. So many people have never talked about it with anyone because they're so afraid of what others will think. All of the judgment they have about themselves, they are sure that others would feel the same way. This was me. I didn't tell my husband about my eating, my binging, until we had been married for a couple of years. And I was so sure he wouldn't love me anymore. Now, that didn't turn out to be true, but I had so much shame about it. It took me so long to be able to talk about it openly with my husband and even with my best friend. It used to take me hours, sometimes even days after a binge to be ready to even talk about it. But the more I practiced talking about it, the more and the more I was met with love and compassion when I did talk about it, the more I was able to see that it was really all okay, and that I wasn't the awful, terrible, broken person that I thought I was. And I got to see that I could still live a very meaningful life, even if I was preoccupied, preoccupied with food and my weight a lot of the time. And the more I talked about it and the more I worked to understand why it was happening, instead of beating myself up for it, the less frequent the binges became. And I was able to learn from them, to understand why they were happening and what I could change and adjust to prevent them in the future. This did not happen overnight, and I am not here to tell you that I am now a magically perfect eater because I don't believe that a perfect eater exists. But I am what I would consider to be a normal eater. I'm a peaceful eater, I eat what I want, I stop when I'm satisfied. I try the seasonal foods and the sweets that sound good to me, but I no longer need to eat them frantically all at once while driving home from the store, not really tasting anything. I eat in a way that I enjoy and that gives me energy for the things I love to do in life. And my days are no longer consumed by food and thoughts about food. Food does play an important role in the energy that it gives me, but it's not the leading role in my life. This type of food freedom is truly available to anyone so long as your basic needs are being met. And I really emphasize that that your basic needs need to be met in order to be able to truly grasp onto this food freedom. Because one of the ways that this shows up for people that can be really challenging to really capture that food freedom is through food scarcity. And food scarcity can be real or it can be perceived. And I'm gonna talk a lot more about this in the next episode, which is reason number two why you may still be binging. So stay tuned. Be sure to stay tuned for that. I have a lot more to say about this. But for today, here's what we're focusing on. The number one way to stop binging is to remove the shame and the judgment. Notice when they start to arise, what they sound like, what are the sentences that create the experience of shame for you? What are those sentences that create the experience of judgment for you? And commit to a different response. Get curious, shift from that judgment to curiosity. See if you can find any empathy when you're feeling that shame. Or can you find someone else who can provide that empathic ear for you? If you have never talked about this before with anybody else, I want to invite you to consider that there may be somebody in your life that you can talk to. If that's it, whoever that might be. I have some resources on this. I have a masterclass about how to talk to your loved ones about your secret eating. You might consider listening to that. If this is something that you've never done before, I will walk you through the process of what that looks like. And we understand why you started. Get curious about what was going on for you when all of this stuff with food kind of started taking place in your life. And then we understand why you haven't stopped. Now, you may not understand exactly why you haven't stopped just yet, because we are just, we are just starting this exploration in this podcast. The next several episodes, we are going to dive much deeper into each of the eight reasons that I outlined in episodes two and three about why you haven't stopped yet. So keep listening so that you can further understand why you haven't stopped. But just this step today, if you're creating some more awareness, some more realization, some more insight about how it just might make sense why you started. Now, you may not have the answer right away. For some of you, you might be feeling a lot of relief already. You might have made a connection today that you never realized before about why you started. Some of you might also be thinking, I don't, I still don't know. It doesn't make any sense. I don't understand why. I just invite you to just keep the exploration and keep the curiosity open. Sometimes this comes to people right away. Sometimes it comes as we kind of open up our brain to the idea and open up to the curiosity. Sometimes we'll get just kind of new insights and new realizations over time. So you might find that even as you're just kind of thinking about this, maybe in a day or two, maybe in an hour or two, you might realize, oh, you know what? I didn't put it together before. But XYZ, this was kind of happening at that time. I wonder if maybe that could be part of the reason. Again, we're not solving today's pattern by looking at why it started, but we're understanding why it makes sense and how it makes sense so that we can start looking at ourselves in a different way. We can start removing some of the judgment, we can start removing some of the shame so that then we can really get to work on all of the other reasons that you might still be binging. This step alone can be crucial to your journey. And I want to say, I don't believe you can fully overcome binge eating if you don't remove the shame and the judgment. Because it keeps you wanting to hide and it keeps you in that pattern. So in this podcast, together we are breaking through your binge eating patterns, and this is step number one. Tune in next week where we'll talk about the second reason you might be binging: restriction. I have a lot to say on this, so you won't want to miss it. I'll see you then. Thank you for listening to Binge Breakthrough. If you would like to dive even further into these concepts that will help you break through your barriers to food freedom, come to my next masterclass. I take the ideas you learn about on the podcast to the next level in a way you may have never heard before. Sign up at bingebreakthrough.com. I hope to see you there.