Why Do I Binge?

In Episode 1, I discussed what I mean when I talk about binge eating and I shared my personal journey. Be sure to check it out if you haven't yet.

In this episode you will discover the 8 main reasons why you may be stuck in the cycle of binge eating.

All change starts from a place of awareness and it's important to understand what might be holding you back from your own personal breakthrough.

Be sure to tune in to Episode 3 where I discuss the solution to each of these 8 reasons.For now, listen in to see if any of these 8 reasons might be true for you.

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

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

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 Jane 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 was still stuck in the on-again, off again cycle of restricting and binging 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 two of Binge Breakthrough. I want to emphasize the term trust, calling you my trusted listener, because building trust is at the heart of everything I do with my clients. I want you to trust that you are listening to this podcast for a reason. And I invite you to set the intention to find one new concept or idea that you can implement into your personal journey. As you listen, ask yourself what is one small change I can put into practice today to put this learning into action. So if you missed episode one, I shared my story of over 25 years of binging and how I was finally able to create the peace and freedom around food that I had been dreaming of for decades. And I invited you to find any similarities for yourself and your journey within my own story. I also talked a little bit about the term binging. So if you're curious about that or what I mean by that, check that out in the first episode. But today we're gonna talk about why you binge. So over the years of working with so many women on their binging, I have noticed there are a handful of reasons that people start and continue to binge. One of the things I love to do is to help people understand how it makes sense. If you know why something is happening, then you have the awareness to do something about it. One of my gifts is being able to diagnose what factors are keeping someone stuck in the binge cycle and working with them to unwind their patterns using science and compassion. So in this episode today, I'm gonna give you an overview of the eight factors that might be at play in your binging. What I'm gonna do in future episodes is I'm gonna go much further into each one of these eight factors. But today we're just gonna do an overview and a summary of the eight things that I see that most commonly are keeping people in the cycle of binging. So as I describe each one of these, see if you can identify yourself in it. Reason number one, shame and judgment about the behavior. So shame keeps you hiding. Shame is the voice that says, there's something wrong with me. I'm broken. It is the part shame keeps us eating in secret. A lot of people who binge do so secretly. Maybe it's like I used to do, which I would binge in the car driving around from place to place. Uh, some people will eat in secret at night, maybe after everybody's already gone upstairs and gone to bed, or even just if somebody's in the other room watching TV, they might uh sneak food in the kitchen in that way. So shame, that's shame. Judgment about the behavior. Judgment comes from thinking you're doing something bad, doing something wrong. When we have shame and judgment, we stay stuck. Shame keeps us wanting to hide. So it keeps us hiding with the food, but it also then keeps us hiding through other things. And what I notice is many people who struggle with binging have a low emotional capacity. And what I mean by emotional capacity is your capacity to deal with difficult emotions. And shame and judgment are pretty big emotions. And if we're feeling shame and judgment, but we have a low emotional capacity, we want to keep avoiding those emotions. So then we end up binging. We're already keeping ourselves in that cycle through that. So the number one reason is shame and judgment about your behavior. The number two reason that might be keeping you binging is restriction. So I want to talk about two different types of restriction. There's physical restriction, and then there's mental restriction. So with physical, it's very much like it sounds like it's not eating enough food for your physical needs. That might look like dieting. Um, but here's the other thing that's really interesting with restriction is it can be unintentional. You can unintentionally be restricting yourself. I this was a big one for me. So I am a um a competitive endurance athlete. I love the sport of triathlon. You will probably hear me talk about it and share uh personal stories as we go through future episodes on this. But as an athlete, I have a pretty big energy expenditure. And there would be times where I would think that I was actually eating enough food, but I was unintentionally not eating enough food to fuel my energy requirements. And that was keeping me in that cycle of binging. So it's really important to know if uh that there's two types, that unintentional or intentional physical restriction. Now, the other type of restriction is there's also mental or emotional restriction. This sounds like the I shouldn't eat that. I can't eat that. If I eat that, then I'll gain weight. It is the it is the mental side where we are telling ourselves that we can't or we should not eat certain foods. So a lot of times people will say, but I'm not dieting dieting anymore. I'm eating all of the things of what I'm not restricting. But where that can come in, and this was a big one for me, is the uh that discussion of that voice in your head that says, Don't eat too much. That right there is mental restriction. Thinking, don't eat too much. Rather than trusting yourself, right? It's that don't eat too much. There's a restriction, restriction energy in there. So that's reason number two, restriction. Reason number three, nervous system dysregulation. So this was huge for me and one of the last pieces of my own personal puzzle as it related to unwinding my binging. So I'm gonna go much further into this in a future episode, but basically, within your nervous system, you can have times where you have a lot of excess energy in your body and in your nervous system. So it's like that buzzy feeling that you get before you go into the pantry, or you just have to get in your car and go to the store or go to the drive-thru. That kind of feeling like you just want to come out of your skin. That can be that excess energy in your body. Now, what we'll learn about the nervous system as we get much more into teaching you about this topic is that your nervous system is often the it's the way that you are wired. And also it has to do with your own wiring and your personal experiences and your past. And so, if you generally are somebody who has a lot of excess energy in your body, which was me, your brain figures out very smartly how to deal with that excess energy and that in doing in eating, eating can drain that energy. So it really makes sense. We we very wisely teach ourselves that food can soothe our nervous system. So that makes a lot of sense if we have a dysregulated nervous system. That's reason number three. Reason number four why you might be binging is disconnection from your body. So many of my clients are high achievers, they are very cerebral, they work with their brains and they often push through. Just let's get things done. I've got to do these things. And what happens is when you are working with your brain, but you're pushing through, you're not really connecting with your body physically, and you can end up with a lot of unmet needs, specifically the need for rest. So, this I learned that this was really my um my situation. I would push and push and go and go. I would never slow down, I would not rest. And it's like my body knew, discovered if it wanted me to rest, the only way that I would slow down would be through a binge. After a binge, I would spend hours on the couch just scrolling or looking at social media or probably uh searching what to do after a binge or how to stop binging. It was the only time that I slowed down. And so because I was so disconnected, I didn't even realize what those unmet needs might be because I was operating so much from my mind and my brain. I was very disconnected from my body. So that's reason number four. Reason number five is a coping mechanism. So I talked before about that concept of low emotional capacity. All this means is that you, if you have low emotional capacity, you don't have a very large capacity or ability to be with bigger emotions. Now, this basically it's a skill. It's a skill that many of us, myself included, did not learn when we were younger. What's amazing about it is that this is a skill we can learn, we can expand, and we can grow. So you can think about what you did as a child, either what was modeled to you, or kind of how you figured out how to deal with emotions. So, what was modeled to me in my household was the just walking away, going away. And that's what I used to do when I was younger. I would go to my, if I had big emotions, I got upset about something, I would go to my room and I would slam the door. And what I didn't realize until later, much later, that I made the connection, when I would binge, it was a way of slamming the door on myself. I didn't want to deal with those emotions. I didn't know how to deal with those emotions. So I would close the door, slam the door on myself by disconnecting from myself through the food. So you can think about what you did as a child. And then we kind of figure out oh, if I don't know how to deal with these big feelings in my body, then we learn that food can help us kind of get some distance from it. So again, it makes sense. All right, reason number six, the attempt to control. This is so powerful. What are you trying to control? Often it's trying to control either your body, your weight, or what you are eating, what or how much you are eating. This comes from thoughts like uh I can't be trusted. I can't be trusted around certain foods, uh, I'm out of control. Thinking that your body needs to change in some way. There's very forceful energy behind it. Now, the opposite of control is trust, which you will get to know that I am all about trust. But when we attempt to control ourselves, our bodies, what we're eating, that is a key reason that keeps people stuck in this cycle of binging. Okay, reason number seven, habits. We're gonna again go much more into this in a future episode, but we've all heard the term what fires together wires together. Your brain makes associations and makes connections with all kinds of habits. It might be um what you do when you first get out of bed, it might be uh how you speak with certain people. We have all kinds of habits. Some of our habits are very beneficial for us, some of our habits might take us further away from our goals. But if you think about your own behavior with food, you likely have some very consistent patterns. Maybe it's the day of the week that you binge. Some people binge more on the weekends and not as much during the week. That was the opposite. I would never binge on the weekend. I binged mostly on Mondays, and then I often binged right after lunch. So the brain makes this connection with, oh, okay, it's eight o'clock, uh, the kids are in bed and I'm sitting in front of the TV, or whatever the connection is for you, your brain does make those associations. And so when that time of day comes, or maybe your habit is associated with a certain, it could be with a certain person, it could be a certain place, it could be a certain food. When you make those connections, the brain makes those connections, and either that place, that time, that food comes up, then there may be the brain will send up that desire to wire that eating of the food in that particular scenario. Now, this can absolutely be changed. We have all developed new habits, we have all broken older habits. It can be done. But here's what's key when you only look at this as a habit, you're not going to have lasting success. When all you're doing is trying to change. Okay, well, I'm gonna try to break the uh eating in front of the TV habit. So I'm just gonna stop eating in front of TV, or I'm gonna stop just eating in front of the couch. All you're doing is focusing on one of these eight areas that we're talking about that keep you binging. Well, if this other seven things are still going on, just focusing on the habit is not going to give you lasting success. So this may be something that you have tried before. I know for me, I really just worked on the habit. Okay, uh, trying to break connections. But then think about this for yourself. If you are somebody who has binged for a long period of time, ask yourself this have your binge habits changed over time? So, for example, there may be some very common threads for you, but you may think about like think about the types of foods that you generally binge on. Generally we'll go for the same types of things, but think about if you're somebody who has binged for let's say decades, think about what you binge on now and how that may be different from what you binged on even five years ago, maybe even two years ago or one year ago. How is it different in terms of it could be what you're eating, it could be when, it could be where? So you can see that that the habit, the way that the habit portion of it can absolutely change over time. And, you know, maybe some food that you used to eat all the time you don't really eat anymore. But if all these other things are still going on for you, then it's not just the habit. Everything needs to be addressed. Okay, now for the last reason you might still be binging, it's your own personal narrative. And what I mean by this is that's just the language. What is the unspoken language that runs through the back of your head all day long? Now, this language, this narrative, it's called the default mode network. But here's what's amazing about it it can be changed, it can absolutely be changed over time. But if your personal narrative sounds something like, once I start, I can't stop eating, or I can't be trusted, or maybe I'm disgusting, I'm out of control, or maybe even just I hate myself. I've pretty much thought all of those things. If your personal narrative, if that is, if that is the the dialogue that is happening unspoken, but is there in the back of your mind day in and day out, it's going to keep you in the cycle of binging because you are gonna want to get away from yourself. Nobody wants to hear those things from said from anybody else. We don't want to we don't want to hear that from ourselves either. Okay, those are the eight reasons why you may still be binging. Let's review. Number one, shame and judgment about the behavior. Number two, restriction, physical or emotional, intentional or unintentional. Number three, nervous system dysregulation, number four, disconnection from the body, number five, coping mechanism, number six, attempt to control, number seven, habit, and number eight, your own personal narrative. So do you see yourself in any or all of these? Now, it might feel like a lot, but if you've been struggling for years and decades, you can understand why. There are many pieces of the puzzle. This is not your toddler's 10-piece puzzle, it's a more intricate one with more pieces, but it can be solved. You might have even dealt with several areas already, but maybe you're still unintentionally restricting emotionally or physically. Reviewing this list and gaining awareness is the first step to change. So now that you know why you are still binging, the next logical question is: So, Jane, what do I do about it? Be sure to listen to episode three, where I'll give you the answers. I'll see you there. 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 concepts. See you next week.