Understanding and Overcoming Binge Eating

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Read the Transcript:

Understanding and Overcoming Binge Eating

Hi there, welcome to the eating habits for life podcast. The reason for this podcast episode topic is first and foremost helping you with understanding and overcoming binge eating, but also I know that times we can hear these terms and wonder if that’s what we’re struggling with. So I’m going to help to clarify this for you.

Alright, so in this episode I will cover what binge eating actually is, plus the science of how it becomes a habit and feels so automatic or uncontrolled.

I will also explain how even though it may feel like something you’re stuck with, there is a solution to this, plus some tips to help you overcome binge eating if you are a do-it-yourself kind of a person.

Now, it is possible to make improvements with binge eating on your own, but you may find that you do need help with this. And binge eating is one of the things that I can help you with as an eating habits and weight loss coach. So just know that there is help available to you.

And I just have a special announcement to make before I dive in. I am hosting a free interactive online workshop on Thursday June 27th at 7:00 PM Eastern Time. During the workshop, I will help you conquer nighttime snacking for more effective weight loss. Sustainable weight loss.

For the first 10 minutes or so, I will teach and then for the rest of the hour long workshop, I will walk you through creating a plan together, so that you can leave with specific steps to take that are personalized to you.

When you conquer a nighttime snacking habit, you will feel more in control, more confident around food, and have a much easier time losing weight. Because unnecessary snacking is a large cause of weight gain and difficulty losing weight.

So reserve your free spot to the workshop with the link in the episode description or by going to https://katemjohnston.com/workshop. Once you’re on the reservation list, you will receive an e-mail with the zoom link, as well as Add to calendar links to make it easy to add the event to your digital calendar.

And then as it gets closer to the workshop, you’ll also receive the worksheet that you’ll print out, that we will create your plan with during the workshop.

Alright, so binge eating is eating a very large amount of food in a specific period of time (typically, within two hours), and feeling a lack of control while eating. Typically, after the binge eating episode, you’ll often feel emotions such as guilt, shame or even distress.

Also, this must occur at least once a week for three months to really meet the diagnostic criteria for binge eating disorder. So you can still be struggling with binge eating, but not necessarily be diagnosed with binge eating disorder, if it hasn’t occurred once a week for three months.

In addition, with binge eating, you don’t do an activity after to try to compensate for the amount of food eaten. For example, with bulimia nervosa, the binge eating episode is followed by purging. So purging and even excessive exercise are not part of the binge eating process in order for it to be classified as binge eating. Hopefully that makes sense.

Very important to note is that there is nothing inherently wrong with you if you binge eat. This is simply a behavior that is triggered by something and then this behavior can get repeated enough times that it forms a habit. I will go through how this occurs and help you to understand the science behind it. So binge eating is just a behavior and not your identity.

It does not define who you are, nor does it mean you’re broken, okay? And once you separate yourself from the behavior of binge eating, it is so much easier to get control of the binge eating.

So, very quick personal story to help you understand what I mean. In the past, probably for a majority of my life, I would always identify myself as an anxious person. My thoughts were that I was just going to be stuck with feeling anxious 24/7 for the rest of my life.

Every year, when I blew out my birthday candles, I would always wish for the anxiety to go away. My parents, my friends, whoever I was with on that particular birthday, had no idea that that’s what I wished for every single year.

Once I learned how your emotions do not define you and are caused by your own thoughts, i was able to separate the anxiety from me. I learned that it was just physical sensations in my body and that I could control that with my own thoughts.

Now of course, I had to put that to the test to see if that was indeed true. And I found it to be true. I started being able to feel that anxiety come on, and then let it just pass through me rather than feel stuck with it all day.

I was able to find the source of the thought that was causing the anxiety in that moment and remind myself that I had full control of the anxiety, because I had full control of my thoughts.

Once I started doing this more and more, the anxiety lessened. I stopped identifying myself as an anxious person during all of this as well, because I knew that that wasn’t going to help.

I knew that I had to remind myself that I was Kate and I was just experiencing some anxiety that I was causing myself to have because of my own thoughts. That felt so much better and so much more empowering.

So for you, just remind yourself that it’s more productive to think of yourself as you who binge eats as a behavior. And most importantly, you can change your behaviors when you’re shown how. Or with someone’s help. It’s less productive to think of yourself as a binge eater that’s just going to be stuck with this problem for the rest of your life.

All right, now for the science behind binge eating. So like any behavior it starts out with an emotional trigger. That’s why we actually have emotions, so that we either do or not do something. Basically, for our human bodies to take action or not take action, there first needs to be an emotion. Often, with binge eating, it’s a negative emotion, meaning one that doesn’t feel good.

As humans, we want to feel good, so a lot of times we will do something quick to make ourselves feel good. That’s a very normal human trait or function. Food is a very quick and easy way to feel good in the moment. That’s because, our brains were created two desire and enjoy eating food. We needed to in order to survive.

So you have your negative emotion, the quick solution of eating, and then the reward of feeling better. This is only temporary though.

Now with binge eating, the behavior is that a large amount of food is eaten at once. And it may feel good in the moment, which is the reward, but then afterwards, you might have thoughts about what you just did leading to feelings of shame, guilt, disgust or something else.

Which can prompt more eating.

Let me just give you a specific example, to make it easier to understand. Let’s say you’re a Physician Assistant and you come home from a really long day at work, where you got annoyed at a colleague, Had an urgent situation with a patient, and were an hour behind schedule with patients. You were planning on cooking dinner, but when you get in the door, you’re feeling so stressed that you order Chinese take out.

Everything looks good, so you order a lot. You’re hungry, it tastes so good, it’s making the stress feel a little bit better and so you eat all of it, relatively quickly. Then you feel overly stuffed, and then feel badly that you just ate all that food. Maybe even a little bit embarrassed and disappointed with yourself, because you really wanted to try to lose 20 lbs and this is not helping.

So how is this different from emotional eating? It is emotional eating, but it’s also binge eating because the volume of food was very large, leaving you uncomfortably full, and there were negative feelings after.

Now, when any trigger, behavior, reward is repeated enough times, and it often is repeated, it become more automatic. It’s turned into a habit or you may have heard the term habit loop. Another term for this is a neural pathway.

Basically, your brain finds the most efficient way to make sure that this behavior is done quickly whenever you have that trigger. It’s just trying to save itself some energy.

Unfortunately, that makes it feel very uncontrolled for you. And that doesn’t make you feel very good.

The good news is that we now know that we can break habits, meaning we can break up this neural pathway, or habit loop.

The way to do this, in a nutshell, is increasing awareness and being deliberate. So basically once that binge eating becomes automatic, becomes habit, we need to do the opposite to break it. Instead of quick, we need to slow it down.

Instead of trying to avoid the negative emotion that was the trigger in the 1st place, we need to address it and feel it. This is the same for emotional eating as well.

Now, I’m going to give you some actionable tips that you can start doing on your own if you’d like to attempt this on your own. If you’ve already tried, or want the most direct way to solve this and want my help, let’s meet up over Zoom for a free consultation to talk about your specific challenges with eating habits.

Then I can explain the specific solutions in more detail. You can do that with the link in the episode description or at https://katemjohnston.com/consult.

Alright, so my first tip has to do with awareness. I’d like you to grab a little notebook or use a notes app on your phone and every time you think you might be binge eating, identify the emotion that you’re feeling to the best of your ability.

If you have a tough time identifying the emotion, look for any type of trigger. We’re just looking for clues here. You’re playing detective in a way. Any data that you can get is good.

Once you’ve identified the trigger, which is often going to be an emotion, just tell yourself that it’s just an emotion, it’s just uncomfortable sensations in your body and you can totally do uncomfortable sensations.

Just reassuring your brain this, helps to make it a little bit less likely that it’ll resort to seeking out that food to get that negative emotion to go away ASAP. It might sound a little silly, but it’s true. I can even tell you first hand from the anxiety I used to experience.

You can even write this down in your journal. Like literally write down “I’m feeling stress right now, it’s just uncomfortable sensations in my body and I can totally do uncomfortable sensations.” Or however you want to word it.

You’ll likely notice that just telling yourself this or writing it down makes you feel a little bit more at ease, a little bit of relief, a little bit of peace.

Now, if you’ve read up on binge eating before, lots of resources say to try to do a healthy activity instead. But as you know, this can be more challenging than it sounds. That’s because your brain really really wants that food.

Which again, is completely normal, because food is a quick and easy way to escape a negative emotion and get that little bit of pleasure. And our brains were created to desire food.

So if you feel that you can’t do a healthy activity instead, such as some deep breathing or going for a walk or 5 minutes of meditation, that’s perfectly OK. What we will have you try to do instead is just slowing down the eating a little bit.

Meaning, think mindful eating. Try to increase your awareness of the food itself as well as the activity of eating. Observe what the food looks like, what it smells like, chew it for a little bit longer. We’re slowing things down and increasing awareness. We’re making it more deliberate, to counteract that quick automaticity.

And you may feel like you’re failing at first, and that’s OK. After you do this several times or at least attempt to do this several times you will notice that you are starting to slow things down a little bit.

Alright, so I’m leaving you with those things to do as homework. Sure to reserve your spot to the free workshop on conquering nighttime snacking for weight loss. And if you want and need help with binge eating, or transforming any of your eating habits, let’s talk via a free consultation.

I give you plenty of time to tell me all that’s on your mind, I ask you specific questions, and then I will give you those more specific solutions.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you and I can work together to get that all accomplished, you are welcome to ask about that during the consultation.

Thanks so much for listening, take care and I’ll talk with you soon.