Ep 21 -Making it EASY to Stop Binge Eating

June 27, 2024

If stopping binge eating seems complicated, you’re not alone.

While changing your eating habits can take some intentional effort, it doesn’t need to be so hard.

To an intuitive eater, eating is simple and that’s how we want it to be for you too!

Join me today to learn…

• The truth about going back to your childhood and solving every area of your life to stop binging

• How you’re unintentionally making your eating journey much harder

• Why your brain likes to complicate goals

• The only 3 things you need to do as a natural eater

 Hello Confident Eaters, happy Thursday. We are doing the second part of this little mini series. About how to make your eating journey be easier. How to let it be easy.

So last week on the podcast, we talked about how to let it be hard and how to accept that sometimes the journey is just going to be a little difficult and I gave you a little pep talk to let yourself embrace that hard journey.

But today we're gonna be talking about the other side of it. About how to make your journey easier and while it may seem like I am contradicting myself a bit today, these two actually go hand in hand.

It's not the journey's either easy or hard it's up there both and looking at both is so important in your journey to stop binge eating, to become a confident eater and really in any goal you have for your life are going to experience easy and hard.

So self-growth being easy is a foreign concept to most people. We're usually taught that it's hard. That's usually the message we receive from culture and society is that making changes hard, doing something different is hard. And while that's not always true, sometimes it is ,right. Sometimes it is just going to be hard immerse can accept it.

There's also times where we are making our journey harder than it needs to be in our brain. We actively do things that don't need to be done and make it feel like stopping binge eating is harder and we're going to go over some of those examples today. But remember that something being hard or easy is just our perception of it. It's just our interpretation of that thing. There's no such truth that anything is inherently hard or easy. It's a decision we make. And it's based on how we are viewing what we are doing.

I have a sign here on my desk that says, make it fun and easy. As my reminder, whenever I'm doing anything to not let my brain make things boring and hard to actively choose the route that is fun and easy by changing my thoughts, not by necessarily changing my actions. So we don't need to over-complicate becoming a natural eater. We can make it simple and fun.

So why is it so important to let your eating journey be easy in the first place? If things feel hard and they don't feel doable, you're going to feel hopeless and want to give up. And if you're not having fun on your journey, if you're just focusing on the destination and nothing about your everyday actions is fun.

It's not going to feel sustainable. It's going to feel like something that you have to white knuckle your way through for a bit until you get that result. And then you want to totally give up and just say, I can't do it anymore. It's too much work. It's too much effort. It's too hard.

So I heard this idea of like binge eating, stopping, binge eating, being hard, a lot in therapy. I went to therapy for a few years for my eating issue specifically. And just in general. And therapy can be great for a lot of things. I'm very open about my experience with therapy. It's not that I don't agree with therapy or light therapy. I just found it wasn't helpful for me personally around binge-eating. And I think why that was for a few reasons, but there's this common idea that when you're going to stop binge-eating in therapy, you need to get all your ducks in a row in life. You need to figure out all your past history, all of your childhood, and then you need to today make sure that you are never stressed, never anxious, because it could trigger a binge. That you know, the emotions that you're feeling, you just don't know how to cope with them. So you're going to need to binge to learn how to handle that in life, and then you either need to always make sure you're prepared with tools for those stress, or just make sure you're never stressed at all. Which I just found, I felt like I was walking on eggshells that if I made one wrong step I would binge. And so I had to be really careful. I had to make sure everything in my life was perfect. So that way I wouldn't binge.

And the truth is you don't need to do this to stop binge-eating. Of course, it is helpful to have your ducks in a row. And of course it is lovely to have all the areas of your life, if feeling good with your relationships, with your career, with your friends, with your family, but having all those areas solid is not a prerequisite for stopping binge eating.

You don't actually need to spend any time at all, really going back to your childhood to stop binge eating now. The two things you really need to know is when did I start start dieting? And have I continue dieting or have I stopped? And also where did my urges first come from? When did they first develop and what am I doing when I have an urge right now, am I just acting on it and eating, which is continuing the habits that you've created, or am I sitting with my urge and allowing it to pass, which is going to change your brain and rewire it. So you are not a binge eater. So those are really the things we need to focus on is your habit, brain and what, how that's showing up right now versus like your long childhood history and all of your trauma and everything that you went through.

It's okay if the other areas of your life and your child has no was not perfect. My childhood was for sure, not perfect. And neither is my life today. I can be really stressed, but I don't binge because I have learned tools and I rewired my brain so that I don't get stronger just to binge anymore.

Okay. So anyways, how are we going to make the journey easier? I first want you to ask yourself what you actually need to do to get results. So this question means you have to know what results you're trying to get. Like, what do you want? Specifically changed about your life. What do you wish was different about the way you ate?

What do you wish was different about the way you showed up for yourself? About the way you carried yourself through the world?

And once you identify what results you're wanting to create. You need to think what are the absolutely most essential things I need to do to achieve that? Not what is everything I could possibly do to achieve that. But what is the most important, smallest steps I could take to get that result I want.

This is a really good question to ask yourself around time too, during the day, if you feel like I never have enough time to get what I want done, and there's always more to do, I'm always overwhelmed.

Then you can look at how you're giving yourself maybe more than you need to do to get the result done. So maybe you have a project at work, and if you're always telling yourself I need to do this and this and this, when really, maybe you just need to do item one and two, and then it'd be done. And just allowing yourself to do that. Maybe you don't actually need to do all these things to get results.

So, I mean, give you a hint on the three things you need to do to become a natural eater. These three things that's all you need to do to be healthy, to be a confident eater. Is eat when you're hungry. Stop when you're full with mostly nutritious foods and then some foods just for pleasure. Right. That's it. Now you might need to do some specific tools and techniques to do those three things, but really those are the only three things you have to do to be a natural eater. If you do those three things. You're doing what all other natural leaders around the world do.

So second, I want you to ask yourself, where are you over complicating your eating journey. It's so funny how our brains love to complicate things, because even as I was getting ready to record this episode, I kept thinking, how can I add more things without asking myself first, why, what I already had wasn't enough? Like, did I actually need more content for this episode in the first place? The answer is no, I feel like I'm doing great right now. I am funny to stay on this topic, but in that moment, my brain is like, Hm, let's see what else we can add. We need to add more more or more. And your brain will probably tell you this was food too that I need more steps. I need more to do. I need more to think about. I need more information. And that is over-complicating your journey.

Now, getting information is good and getting steps is good, but there can become sort of an obsession with it where becoming a natural eater or before maybe dieting has been your only hobby all your life. And so this is what you spend all of your time and energy thinking about, which probably is over-complicating it.

Also, if you were listening to like 20 different coaches, you're probably over-complicating it and getting confused on like, what is the right step for you? So whether that's listening to me or someone else resonates with you more find someone that you can stick with. So all these methods aren't clashing in your brain making it so much complicated, more complicated than it has to be to stop binge-eating find someone who resonates with you, stick with their method, try it out before you keep adding in more steps and more ideas and more methods.

A good place to look for to see if you're over complicating it. Is it look at what diets have taught you. About what you should and need to do. So a lot of diet rules might be stuck in your brain and some of these rules might be things like you need a certain amount of calories a day. You can only have a certain amount of points or you can only have a certain amount of servings of carbs a day. You could only have one cup of rice, a dinner or a half a cup of rice, or only one slice of bread a day. All of these food rules are making your eating so much more complicated than it needs to be.

Natural eaters do not have food rules like this. They might have guidelines of, I know, I feel best if I don't just have a ginormous plate of pasta, but I have maybe a little chicken with it that helps me feel full and satisfied.

So they might have guidelines that like that but when you have all these rules running through your brain, it gets very complicated when you sit down and eat. I remember he would sit down and eat and I felt like I had 20 different voices, all yelling at me like don't eat the apple. It's too sugary. And in even fruit sugars too much, you should cut back completely or now you're eating the pasta that has way too many carbs and you should instead be eating rice only, or I don't know, whatever the heck they would say like, oh, these rules I'd sit down and they would all infiltrate my brain at once.

Now why our brain complicates things is for a few reasons. It's oftentimes very sneaky. Like we think complicating things makes it helpful. But really, it keeps us stuck in our comfort zone and our brain is trying to do what it thinks, the safe.

So let's look at the first one. If things were complicated, it stalls us from making progress and it draws things out much longer.

If we're stuck in confused, we don't have to try so much. We can just kind of sit back and say, I'm so confused on how to be a natural eater. So I just don't even have to try today. Sitting with her this is so confusing. So I'm just going to eat. I don't even know what to do. Right. The more we complicate things, the more our brain can say, I have a good excuse for not doing this because I don't really know what to do. It's just so complicated. So confusing.

Then the second part where our brain feels like it's keeping us safe by over-complicating things, because it's trying to go through all the possibilities to try to prevent failure, right? If it knows 20 different possibilities, how things could feel, and we give you a 20 step plan on how to make sure this goes perfectly.

Then your brain thinks it's going to avoid failure, which in your brains, mine. Avoiding failure means keeping you safe, but we know like having a binge is not going to make us die and we're actually probably going to learn more from that. Then, if we were trying to avoid every possible option of failure.

So again, all you actually need to do. It's eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full with mostly whole nutritious foods, but also some treats and things just for pleasure, because that's part of being human and enjoying our experience. Those are the only three things you need to do. And that covers the, when of eating. Right. You know exactly when to start and exactly when to stop and also the what, well, what am I supposed to eat? Mostly whole foods with some treats. Like I think we all, not logically know that, but again, our brain makes it so much complicated. Like there must be some answer out there. That's like this magic solution of how I'm supposed to be eating to stop binge-eating. When really it's just, I mean, eat some protein, some carbs, some fat, some fiber and mostly whole forms. And beyond that, like, what else do you really need?

So another big thing I see that keeps people stuck and makes their eating journey so much harder is when they feel really ashamed of their eating habits, where you want to just hide away from them, stuff, it all in a closet, not look at them. And that keeps you stuck because you're not shining a light on your eating habits and actually able to change them.

We need to be aware of our habits if we want to start making shifts and look, I get it. I've been in your shoes. I know how hard and confusing it can be, but at the same time, thinking like I can figure this out on my own, but not wanting to tell anyone about it or not wanting to get any support. So I know it can be hard to admit to primarily yourself not to mention, even trying to mention to another person, but even just saying to yourself, like I'm struggling with food and this is hard for me right now that is important because when you don't do that, You're not acknowledging that maybe you do need help or you do need support, or you do need the steps.

And the thing about shame around food and overeating is that most of the times it's us that is doing the shaming. It is us that is beating us up. It's us that is making us hide and not want to look at it. Which means it can be something you can undo, you can decide to unshamed yourself from this food struggle.

So what you need to do for that then is to choose to believe the truth. Which has all your duty doing is eating more food than your body needs. There is nothing shameful about eating food in and of itself. Right? Nothing wrong with that. You are just consuming food. Sure. You might want to have a little bit less but when you can look at it as just factually, like, this is what I'm doing, I'm just eating food. It allows you to take away that shame bubble and start to take a more curious and observational look at what is actually happening with your eating habits.

So one of the best and simplest ways to make your eating journey easier is to get support. Let it be easier for yourself by getting support. I currently have a few one-on-one spots open for coaching. So I'd love to have you be the one. Who comes and get support. And I want you to consider too that by not choosing to get help, you are choosing to make it harder than it needs to be.

By not getting support your, allowing it to be more complicated and more frustrating and more confusing than it needs to be. And that is okay. That doesn't mean you can't figure it out on your own, but I literally have a step-by-step roadmap with everything you need to know in order on how to become a confident eater. So you can start taking the simplest and most direct path to food freedom.

You'll have the proven action steps that are all laid out for you ready to go. So allow it to be easy for yourself by getting support. There's nothing wrong with getting support. Again, I know that sometimes the shame can come up on. I should know how to do this on my own. Like, I should be able to figure out this eating struggle but if I would have told myself that I would have been stuck for a lot longer than I was, and I am already so glad that I didn't stay stuck any longer. And so I want it to be the easiest route for you to, so it doesn't have to be so hard.

Okay. So I'm going to leave you with two last questions that you can journal on or think about, or just reflect on as you move forward this week.

First is what are you telling yourself right now? That is making this journey harder than it needs to be. So that's looking at the thoughts that you're telling yourself that is making this journey harder than it needs to be. Then second. Where does it feel hard right now in your eating journey? And how can you make it easier? There are always ways to make it easier, whether that's changing your circumstances. Right. So maybe it'd be easier if you didn't have cookies out on your counter 24 7 and you input instead, put them away in a cabinet. Like something like that circumstantially might make it a little bit easier or you can make it easier by changing your thoughts around it and seeing how this journey actually is fun and actually is doable and you are actually capable of achieving your dream eating habits and becoming the natural company eater that you want to be.

Talk to you next Thursday.