How Do I Stop Binge Eating?

If you have yet to listen to Episode 1, where I share my journey with binge eating and what I mean when I talk about bingeing, be sure to check it out.

In Episode 2, I share the top 8 reasons why we binge and why you haven’t stopped yet. This foundational awareness is the first step to change. 

In this episode, I outline what to do about each of the 8 reasons why you binge.

Now you have the basic framework of why you might be bingeing and what to do about it.

In the next 8 episodes I will dive deeper into each item so that you can start to apply new insight and knowledge to your own personal journey.

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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Welcome to Binge Breakthrough, the 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 Pilger, 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 disorders treatment, restrictive diet, and reading all the books, I was still stuck in the on-again-off again cycle of restricting and binging 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 episode three of Binge Breakthrough. I consider you a trusted listener because I trust that you are in the right place to learn something new by listening to this podcast, including how to develop trust with 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. So in the last episode, I reviewed the eight primary reasons why you may still be binging. And if you haven't listened yet, go ahead and press pause right now. Go listen to episode number two first, then come back here. So each of those eight reasons has a corresponding solution. You do not have to stay stuck in the shackles of food prison. There is a way out. In this episode, I'm going to give you a brief overview of each solution. And then in the future episodes, we'll dive much deeper into each one so that you can have the information you need to break through your own pattern of binging. Okay, so let's review. Reason number one for why you may still be binging was shame and judgment about the behavior. So the solution is to understand why you started and why you haven't stopped yet. What's so important about this is that when you can come to a place of understanding, you're able to see the behavior. You're able to see the pattern in a new way. You're able to cultivate self-compassion and curiosity. And these are the emotions from which you're going to be able to come up with new answers and new approaches. Shame and judgment will keep you stuck. Shame keeps you hiding. Judgment keeps you upset with yourself. It's a very forceful negative energy. When we can create self-compassion and curiosity, we open up to more energy. So I don't think that you have to like go back to your past and dredge everything up, but I do find that it's very helpful, helpful to just understand why it started. And then you can say, oh, that makes sense. So if you listen to my first episode where I shared my story, I can now look back and say, oh, it makes sense. I can understand why that was happening. So that understanding is so important. And then you can also understand why you haven't stopped yet. Now, if you listen to episode number two, you may already start to have some ideas of why you haven't stopped yet. If you can see yourself in one of those eight reasons, you're starting to have awareness and understanding of why you haven't stopped yet. And I think that understanding is so important is because we have to have the awareness in order to come to that understanding. And awareness is always the first step of change. So number two, the number two reason why you may still be binging was restriction. And if you remember, we talked about two types of restriction. There was physical restriction, and then there's mental or emotional restriction. There's also intentional and unintentional restriction. So the solution to this, it sounds very simple on its uh in the beginning. It sounds simple. Just remove restrictions. But that's not always as easy to do in practice. But where you can start with this is identify where you might have them. Just get curious where might I be intentionally or unintentionally, physically or mentally restricting myself around food in any way. So I had shared in the last episode, my unintentional physical restriction would come in periods of high activity for me athletically. My mental restrictions would come, they would sound like, oh, don't eat too much. Be careful, don't eat too much. That was one of my kind of unintended mental restrictions. Okay, reason number three why you might still be binging, nervous system dysregulation. We are going to go a lot further into detail about the nervous system in a future episode, but your solution to this is to learn how to work with your nervous system. So this was a game changer for me. I really think that this nervous system regulation was probably one of the last missing pieces for me to change. And the way I can see now that a lot of my binges came from when I was at a place where my nervous system was very highly activated. And what happens is that our bodies, we learn our brains are always looking out for us and always trying to take care of us. So we actually learn that if we have this excess energy, food can and does bring excess energy in your body and in your nervous system. It can bring it down. So this is it's you can kind of understand and see it when you start to understand what your nervous system is, how you are wired, and then you can learn how to work with your nervous system instead of working against it. Some of the patterns of binging can actually resolve on their own without too much focus on it when you really understand what's going on with your nervous system and really taking care of it. So now I know when I'm activated, when my nervous system is activated, I know what those symptoms are, those signals in my body, and I know then how to address them. Sometimes it's just as easy as going outside, being in nature for a while, maybe laying down, taking some deep breaths is enough to drain the energy so that your brain isn't looking for that super quick hit of a um of a draining of that energy. And again, we're gonna go much further into this in a in a future episode. Reason number four, why you might still be binging is disconnection from your body. So the solution, also very straightforward, learn how to connect with your body. This is so important because you can start to understand how your body communicates with you. You can start paying attention to the language of your body. You can start to identify what needs you might be having, physical needs your body might be trying to communicate with you, and then learning how to listen and to meet them. The other thing that is so powerful is learning how to identify and distinguish communication from your brain versus communication from the body. So many people are very focused in our minds, and we aren't really connected with our bodies themselves. So a great solution of that disconnection is to learn how to connect with your body. Reason number five was a coping mechanism. And we talked about the idea of emotional capacity, which is your ability to be with any emotion. So the solution to this reason, if this if you are using binging as a coping mechanism, the solution here is to expand your emotional capacity. So you expand your ability to be with any emotion. The great news is this is a skill. It is one that can be learned, it can be expanded. So even if you do not have this skill now, it can be learned by anyone at any time and at any age. So this is a great thing that you can do, expanding your emotional capacity. Reason number six was an attempt to control where are you trying to control either your body or you're trying to control, you might be trying to control your appetite, what you're eating. So the solution to this one is to develop two-way trust with your body. Now, two-way trust is really important. So the trust happens in two different ways. The first way is that you are learning to trust your body, to trust that your body is going to tell you when it's ready to eat, what it wants to eat, and how much to eat. Your body will communicate this with you if you are developing the communication and the connection with your body. So that's the first way of trust, is you trusting your body. Now, the other way is that the body needs to learn how to trust you and that it's going to trust that it is going to be fed on a regular basis. Those of us who have a history of binging and restricting, the brain and the body doesn't really know, am I going to get fed? Am I going to get fed today? Or is this one of those periods of time where we're not eating and we're more in starvation mode? And when you have done this repeatedly over years, this is why it can be, you can, you can have this experience where it's like, why is it that years ago I was able to go on a diet or I was able to restrict myself for extended periods of time. And now when I try, either I try to go on a diet, I start to restrict myself, all of a sudden, I just can't even do it for days anymore. It's like, oh, or even one day, it's this immediate reaction. All of a sudden I'm binging again. It's because your brain is seeing this as a threat. It's saying, oh no, here we go again. She's going to starve me again, and we're not going to do that. So it goes into this survival mode where it then is going to force you to eat through a binge. So not only is it important for you to trust your body, that your body is going to communicate with you, that you can trust it to let you know and help you make all of those decisions around food, but the body and the brain also have to trust that you are going to feed it on a consistent and regular basis. Okay, reason number seven was a habit. It's a habit. When you have been doing this over a long period of time and you have these connections, certain times, certain places, certain foods where or when you binge, the brain does make these connections. So the solution, very straightforward again, break the habit. So we've heard the concept what fires together wires together. And we can unwire this habit when we do not have these, the connections going over and over again. There again, we'll go much deeper into this in a future episode, but it can't be stressed enough that we cannot just look at this as a habit. If we don't look at these other components also, they all need to happen together. So many people just try to look at it only as a habit. They try to just remove the, okay, I'm just gonna stop eating on my couch. I'm just going to cut out the 8 p.m. snack. I'm going to not eat as soon as I get home. Whatever that pattern is for you, we focus on the pattern itself. But if you still, if you're still trying to control, if you're still restricting, if you're still completely disconnected from your body, any attempt to resolve the habit is not going to provide lasting results. It's going to feel a lot more like willpower. It's going to be harder to do, and it will be very short-lived. Now, the good news is when you have all of these other things at play and you're working through these other solutions, working through the habit of it also becomes a part of the solution. It just can't be the only solution. Reason number eight why you might still be binging is your personal narrative. Again, very straightforward solution. You change the narrative, you change the internal narrative, that dialogue that's always going in the back of your mind. Now, this is also kind of similar, really, to habits because it's neurons. We have another situation here where you've got your neurons firing together and wiring together. And so you may have had years of the firing and wiring together of the negative connotations and the negative language and the things that you say to yourself about yourself, but it can be changed. It takes time, it absolutely takes time, and the it starts with awareness. And then it's all about changing how you think about yourself, changing how you talk to yourself and truly changing your identity about who you are as an eater. So these are the eight reasons and the eight solutions, what to do about it. So I'm gonna go ahead and review and just summarize what are the eight solutions. So in the last episode, we gave you the eight reasons why you might still be binging. Now I'm gonna review the eight solutions, what to do about it. Number one, understand why you started and why you haven't stopped yet. Number two, remove restrictions. Number three, learn how to work with your nervous system. Number four, learn how to connect with your body. Number five, expand your emotional capacity. Number six, develop two-way trust with your body. Number seven, break the habit. Number eight, change the internal narrative. So I would love to be in your head right now and to know what you are thinking. You might be thinking, oh, this is a lot, or that you'll never be able to do all of that. You might also be thinking, you know all of this already. Now, if some of this is new to you, this is such great news because it means there are things you haven't tried yet. If you think you know all of this, I would ask, are you doing all eight of these solutions? There is a huge difference between knowledge and wisdom. I've heard it said that wisdom is knowledge applied. So if you have the knowledge, maybe you're not actually applying it yet to create that wisdom. And that's one of the things that I love to do is I help people turn this knowledge into wisdom. All of these solutions work with each other. None of them work on their own. But together, they provide the answer to the binge breakthrough that you are looking for. So I want you to notice if you have some black and white thinking trying to creep in, black and white thinking is very common for people who binge. This might sound like thinking you have to do it all or you can't do any of it. Invite yourself to get curious. Ask yourself if there's one area where you might be able to make some small changes that could have a big impact for you. I have so much more to share with you on this podcast and in future episodes. I want you to stay tuned as we dive deeper into each of these eight reasons and their corresponding solutions. If you want to get a download of the eight reasons why you binge and what to do about it, go to binge breakthrough.com slash why and I'll send it to you. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to Binge Breakthrough. If you would like to download the eight reasons why you binge and what to do about it, visit binge breakthrough.com forward slash why. That's binge breakthrough.com forward slash WHY. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast so that you don't miss any future episodes that will dive deeper into how to create lasting food freedom. I'll see you there.