Ep 31- How to Stop Believing Your Binge Eating Lies

September 05, 2024

Do you ever feel like your brain lies to you about food?

When you get an urge to binge, do you start to think that binge eating will be fun, exciting, pleasurable, and something you want to do?

Yet you finish binge eating only to realize you’re in pain with regrets again.

It’s time to start telling yourself the truth about overeating food.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

• why you keep falling for your lower brain’s lies

• how to decide if you ACTUALLY want the food or not

• a powerful visualization technique to remember how food makes you FEEL

Hello confident eaters. Have you ever felt like your brain lies to you about food, where it tells you that eating a lot of food will be fun, exciting, pleasurable, and that you actually want to binge, you have these thoughts in the moment only to do it, and then feel like you got scammed 'cause you notice how you feel miserable and you're actually in pain. You remember that binge eating is something that you don't actually want to do and you beat yourself up for yet again, failing and falling for those lies that your lower brain told you about the experience of eating a lot of food.

This is what we are going to talk about today. How to stop believing those lies that we can clearly see at the end of a binge aren't true. But in the moment when we get an urge, we have a hard time seeing that they're not really what we want.

I want you to think back in notice. How you have never once after a binge said that was a good idea, right? At least no one has told me that they have thought this before. Always whenever you binge, you get to the end of it and you think, wait a second. That's not what I wanted to do. That was not a good idea. That was not something that was in line with who I want to be or what I truly want.

So we are lying to ourselves about what binge eating is actually doing to us. If we were honest about the effects of binge eating, we probably wouldn't do it. But we get stuck in the cycle because we keep seeing these thoughts as true. We keep hearing our lower brain telling us these excuses and in the moment we say, yes, these are something that I want to believe.

So here's why this happens. Most people who are binge-eating do not tell themselves the repercussions of binge-eating in the moment that they are thinking about the extra food. I'm sure you can relate to this. When, once you have a food on your mind, you're just thinking about it. You're just thinking about the chocolate and how good it will feel to have it melt in your mouth.

You're just thinking about the ice cream and how it's been in the freezer. And it's been there all day long and you've been really wanting it. All you're thinking about is that first pleasurable bite and the taste of it in your mouth. That's all you're really considering is the taste. So you're saying to yourself, things like, I want it. It will taste so good. It will be so delicious. I'll just start with one. It won't be that bad. All of these excuses that go through our brain and what we're not doing either looking at the aftermath of eating excess food when we're not hungry.

Being overly full and having pain from that or physical discomfort is a natural response to overeating. Our body has a lot of systems in place to make sure that we're getting exactly enough food and not more, not less. So it is normal to overeat and then feel really bad. That's what our body is trying to get us to stop doing. It's trying to let us know hello. We don't need any more calories. We don't need any more energy. We don't want to process any more food. So everything we eat is going to have some sort of impact on our body. And it's either going to be an impact that we like. If we're hungry and meet food, it's going to energize us. It's going to give us more fuel. It's going to be a good thing. Versus when we eat food that we are not hungry for. We are going to feel, not energized. We're going to feel sluggish. We're going to feel weighed down in our bodies.

So after a binge, when you see the rappers all around you, and you start to feel this discomfort in your stomach, you start to feel the sugar high, this buzz that we don't really like, because then we have the crash and we're not feeling focused at work. We're not able to concentrate. We're not able to show up as we want to.

We start to realize, oh, this actually is something I don't want to do, but we're only recognizing it after the fact. We're not telling ourselves those things in the moment when we have the urge, which is what we want to be doing. We want to tell ourself the whole story about what happens beginning, middle and end, not just at the beginning.

The truth is you can't actually decide if you truly want something or not, until you consider the whole impact of that decision. The whole life cycle of that desire to eat something when you're not hungry. So you can't just decide, do I want chocolate or not right now, based on how it will taste, you need to consider, well, what is the impact of this chocolate? How am I going to feel in a couple hours from now? Especially if we overeat on it, because this is not to say that you can't have chocolate or any of these foods, but we are often eating them in amounts. That don't feel good to us. And maybe there are some foods that you really can only have a small amount of in order to feel good. I'm thinking about like gummy candies that are like pure sugar, right. Unless we just have like one or two of those. We're not going to feel really good in our body because it gives us such a hit of sugar all at once. And we want to consider, okay. If I eat an entire bag of gummy bears. What's that going to be like?

We do this a lot with our decisions where we just consider the immediate impact of it and not the longterm consequences. So someone who is going on a shopping spree and you just look at something. If you have a hard time saying no to yourself, when you're shopping, you might be at the stores, you're buying all this stuff and that you get home and you check your credit card and you realize that you've spent a thousand dollars. And then you think, oh no, I did not think about how I would feel beyond just the moment of buying something because buying something as fun. We get that little hit of woo. We get something new, we get something exciting. And then once that hit goes away, we're left with the results of that decision. And so we want to think it through fully.

Think of a decision that you think about a lot. Let's say something like buying a house that's usually something that someone considers like the immediate purchase price of, but also the longterm impacts of this.

What's my mortgage going to look like, how long is this going to take to pay off? How was it going to impact the rest of my financial situation? So people usually think of the whole thing through which allows them to make a better decision on whether or not they want to purchase a home.

So you'll start to realize that overeating is not actually a true desire because you don't desire the whole experience of doing it. If you're reading a good book. You don't say it's a good book because chapter one was good. It was a good book because the entire book was good because you liked the twist and turns in it because you liked the storyline because you liked the characters. So the reason you say it was a good book is because it was a good overall experience. That's how we want to decide if our eating experiences are something that we're having fun with and we're enjoying our not by considering the entire chapter one through 10, not just looking at chapter one, I eat the food and it tastes delicious. But what happens in 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 in those chapters, what does that like?

This is why most of us hopefully do not do drugs. We think about the decision in its entirety, including the after-effects. In fact, we consider the after-effects substantially more than the Hyatt might give us. We don't sit around telling ourselves and thinking about. Like, what would that high be like to do heroin? I've heard it's the best high in the world. Why might that P like how much fun would it be? Oh, it sounds really exciting. We're not doing that because we know the long-term impacts it would have. And we're considering who might that make me as a person? What would that do for the rest of my life? What are larger impacts beyond just that moment?

Maybe you're someone who doesn't really drink alcohol that much or used to drink a lot more alcohol. My guess is you don't drink as much alcohol now because you're telling yourself about how it feels. You're telling yourself about how it feels to be hung over and how miserable that is. How you don't want a headache, how you have things to do tomorrow, how you want to be productive. And maybe you're thinking about the drive home, how you want to be sure that you're alert in a week and not over the legal limit.

So you're thinking about, okay, I'm going to have the strength, but what would happen after. And you might say, you know, actually I only want this one drink or I actually don't want to drink at all. So there's lots of these examples that we are already considering. What the entire experience is like when we make a decision yet we're not doing this around food.

So the solution to this is to go be on that first taste. Widen out your perspective and view of what's going to happen.

Space out the movie more play the whole movie. Don't play yourself, the trailer of the movie and how fun it looks and how exciting it looks. Play yourself, the entire movie to see if it's actually something that you would watch.

So, what I'm going to do for you now is take you through a short visualization exercise. Now visualization is a technique that's used by athletes, CEOs, executives, really highly successful people. And it's a really powerful tool. I often use it with my clients in my confident eater coaching programs. So if this is something you love, just know, I do a lot more of this with my clients when we coach. And it's a great idea to save this episode.

So you can come back to this exercise and do it anytime you need it. So if you're able to close your eyes, now you're welcome to do that because it can help you go deeper with this exercise. But this can also be just as effective with your eyes open. So if you are driving or walking, please do not close your eyes. You can absolutely do this with your eyes open. And you'll still get an awesome experience from it.

Okay. So I want you to begin by thinking of a food that you frequently binge or overeat on that doesn't make you feel good. I'm sure we can all think of one.

All right. Got it. This food that you frequently binge on.

So I want you to now imagine the food. As you eat it, putting it in your mouth. What that experience is like for those first few seconds.

And then I want you to very quickly start to imagine after that, what comes next? So imagining the food, traveling down your throat. Into your body, into your stomach. It is now left your taste buds. And now there's a lot more that this food's got to do for us. So imagine as that food has now gone down to your stomach. How does it feel in your stomach? What is it like when it hits your stomach?

What impact does it have on you?

Does it mix well in there with the other things?

Or does it not really mesh well with the other foods you have eaten?

Then you can imagine this food breaking apart. So as your stomach digest it, and what a beautiful stomach we have that is able to digest so much food and do all this work for us. Work so hard all the time. So imagine your stomach working hard, breaking this food apart for you. And it goes into these smaller particles that are going to be distributed all throughout your body. So, how does it feel as this broken down food? It starts to go all around your body.

Does it make you feel energized and give to you? Or does it take away? Make you feel sluggish.

And as this food is continuing to circulate throughout your body. Let's imagine what's next in your day. Are you trying to go back to work? What's it like trying to focus at work. With this extra food in your body. How does that make that experience?

And as you continue on throughout your day, it's time for bed. What is it like as you're trying to go to sleep? I know for me. And anytime I have more than just like a few spoonfuls of ice cream before bed. I sleep horribly.

I can not get good sleep. I wake up throughout the night because my blood sugar is on a rollercoaster. So, what is it like for you as you're trying to sleep with this extra food in your body?

How does it impact you?

Then imagining as you wake up in the morning, how do you feel. How do you feel in your body?

And how do you feel about yourself in the morning? Are you feeling proud or are you feeling regrets?

And you can continue to go on and on with this visualization imagining your day. The next day and the next week. Right. And how does bingeing on these foods? Impact your week.

Now I want you to take this feeling. And these new realizations. About the experience of binge-eating see what you notice now.

And taking what you notice now, I want you to now think about seeing that food.

Noticing what you notice now. As you imagine seeing that food notice how different it is to think about that food. Now notice how little desire you have for it now. Notice how you don't even want it anymore. So not fascinating. It's so cool.

All right. So I want to leave you with a little coaching question for yourself today. And that's to continue to ask yourself. And then what happens? Over and over again until you get the extent of your actions around food.

So the next time you decide to go and eat. Ask yourself and then what maybe the answer will be and then I feel full and satisfied and energized. Or maybe you've already eaten and you're feeling full and satisfied and you get an urge to binge and you ask yourself, I eat it. And then what.

What happens after I binge and what happens after that and what happens after that and what happens after that?

Because that will start to show you the truth about binge-eating. Have a good week talk to you later.