Ep 35d-Using Mindfulness to Stop a Binge: Day 4

October 06,2024

Listen to the 5 Day Mindful Eating Challenge to Stop Binge Eating!

Today you’ll learn how to use mindfulness to stop a binge- a surprising technique that works.

Today we're going to be talking about how to use mindfulness to stop a binge. This is going to be a surprising technique that I am sure you have not heard before, but it is one that works and it is one that I wish I had in my journey. I wish someone told me that this was an option because it would have saved me from so much overeating.

Now, what we are essentially going to learn is how to have a binge, but how to do it mindfully. And I know this seems counterintuitive, but it's really going to help you slow it down and create so much awareness that wasn't there before, and it's going to be a much more productive way to binge than how you are binging now, just super zoned out, super mindless, super all or nothing, just It's just, you have an urge, you do it, and you don't even remember any of it.

So a 2017 study in the Journal of Consulting in Clinical Psychology found that participants who practice mindfulness during binge eating episodes reduced both the frequency, so the amount that they did it, and the intensity of their binges. So they binge less often and in less amounts. So when you bring your awareness to your eating, you can literally rewire your brain to make healthier choices.

So let's go to that feeling right before you're about to binge. You have an urge. An urge is this feeling of over desire. It's too much desire for something. We all have a natural level of desire for food. We're supposed to want to eat, but when we have an urge to binge or overeat past our comfortable level of fullness, that is over desire.

It's too much desire. For most of us, a binge tends to feel very Sorry. An urge tends to feel very urgent and frantic and out of control. It feels overwhelming, like we just can't stop. We can't handle ourself. And most people's current strategy around urges is willpower. Let me know what you're trying to do for your urges right now.

How do you handle it when you get this strong, overwhelming desire to eat? Willpower looks like just saying no to it or don't do it. So it's holding on tight and saying, don't binge. Don't binge no food, no food. And this doesn't work a lot of the time, because if we are at the end of our day, we are depleted of willpower.

We are tired, so the willpower doesn't work. And it's really hard. This is where people just give up, because they're like, I just can't keep doing this anymore. It's not sustainable. So I'm going to teach you a no willpower approach, and I cover a lot of urge tools in depth in my Calm Footy Eater program, where we have an entire pillar on how to handle your urges.

But today you are going to learn what to do even if you don't have any urge tools right now, or if you get urges that just feel so strong that you end up binge eating automatically and right away. Now, we never actually have our urges happen automatically. We never go into a binge automatically, but sometimes it can feel that way because we act on them so fast.

So we need to learn how to put space in between these urge thoughts in our action. Most of the time when we go into a binge, we're in screw it mode. We're just like, F it. I'm just gonna eat everything in sight. And we go into this eating frenzy where we hardly remember What just happened? And we don't even enjoy the food.

I used to get to the end of a binge and be like, Why did I even eat that? I didn't even want that food. It wasn't even that good. Why did I just do all that? Or sometimes I would binge on so many different random things that I would literally have no idea. Like, I could not tell you what I binged on. I could tell you, well, I start by eating three chocolate raisins, and then after that, I had a hundred other things that just started snowballing and snowballing.

So this lack of memory around our binge is important because that impairs our ability to learn from it. So the three step solution to have a mindful binge is this. First, you want to acknowledge what's going on. So take a deep breath in, and put a name to what's happening. I always love to use this thought of, I'm experiencing an urge that's not necessary to act on.

Reminding yourself what the true nature of an urge is. It's just this automatic suggestion that has come up habitually, because after many and many times binge eating, your brain now thinks you need to binge. in order to survive. We know logically that's not true, but that is what you've trained your brain to do.

So we want to remind ourself that we don't actually need to eat all this food. We're refueling ourself. We're eating properly. And I also love this thought of I'm feeling an emotion that food will not solve. Telling yourself that no matter what you're feeling in this moment, if hunger is not the problem, food is not going to be the solution.

You are going to be feeling the exact same, and usually ten times worse, if you use food to try to heal an emotion. And if you're going to do, go into the binge, you at least owe yourself the truth about what you're doing. So you want to acknowledge that if you're going to a binge, you're literally going to tell yourself, I am choosing to binge right now, even though I know this will not solve that emotion.

I am choosing to binge right now, even though I'm not hungry. I am choosing to binge right now, even though I know I would be 100 percent safe just sitting with this urge. Because that's giving you the full, entire truth. And you're honoring what you're going to do. You're not trying to hide from yourself.

You're stop lying yourself. And when we can acknowledge that, okay, we're actually going to go into this binge now, we're going to get valuable data that's going to allow you to assess what happens later. So if you decide to binge, make a clear decision. I'm going to do this. Don't just let it happen to you.

Make it a choice that you're making, because it is always a choice that you're making. We have this part of us, our higher brain, that includes our prefrontal cortex, and our higher brain is the part of us that is our CEO. It is the part of us that makes all of our, decisions around motor movements. So the reason we don't hit someone when we're angry is because our higher brain says, that's not the kind of person I am.

That's not something I do. But we are actually choosing to binge in that moment, even if it doesn't feel like it, because our higher brain has the power to make us act. Which is the good news, because that means we also have a choice in not acting. So we want to say, if I'm going to binge, I'm choosing this.

And that's okay. No guilt, no shame to say we're choosing it. Which leads me to our second step of having a mindful binge, which is giving yourself full permission to do it. Again, I know this sounds weird. Why am I giving myself full permission to binge? I know this isn't something I want to do. But this is a strategy for when you're like, You've already decided.

I'm going to binge. It's already starting to happen. When you give yourself full permission to binge, there's going to be one condition. You're giving yourself full permission while you do it slowly, mindfully, and with full awareness. So giving yourself permission to binge is not saying, okay, now I get to go sneakily eat and eat my 10 cookies standing up as fast as I want.

No, we're saying, you know what? I'm going to give myself permission to binge. But the only requirement is I must be sitting down and I must do this mindfully. You can still binge as much as you want. So what you're going to do, what this actually looks like, grab a plate or a bowl, something to put your food in, and plate however much your brain tells you it wants.

Yes, even if you would consider that way too much, even if you're like, I never actually want to humanly choose to eat this much, put it all out because this is going to give your brain the visual cue of what you're eating. We have a hard time. remembering what we're eating because we're eating it like this.

We're putting it boop, boop, boop. We're popping it in our mouth one by one so we don't actually even see what food we're consuming. So you're going to see it out. So if your brain is like, I just want to binge 10 cookies right now, just ready to binge every cookie in the house, put those 10 cookies onto a plate.

If you want to binge an entire bag of chips, get a big bowl with the entire bag of chips and put it all in there. You can always put, if you stop earlier, you can always put the extra chips on top. back in the bag seal it away, put it back in a Ziploc bag. There's always option. But we're going to do this because chances are you probably were going to eat the whole bag anyway.

You probably were going to binge on like those five cookies anyway. So let's at least make a conscious decision and show our brain that visual so we know how much we're eating. Once you have it all plated out, then you're going to sit down in your dedicated eating spot, sitting, not standing, and start eating as slowly as possible with all of your taste buds involved.

Again, giving yourself full permission to eat it. No judgment, no shame. This is a decision you're choosing to make. This does not make you a good or bad person, a better or worse person. You're just making a conscious decision to eat extra food than your body needs. And this is still going to be a win because you're choosing to pay attention to what you're doing, which you don't normally do.

I know it will feel weird to celebrate in a binge, but you're not celebrating the binge itself. You're celebrating binging in a different way that is more productive. Now, because you are so If you're slowing down and you're eating this food with full permission, you're going to be in a much calmer state.

Most of the times when we get an urge, it feels a lot like anxiety. And so if we are sitting down, we're taking some deep breaths, and we're eating the food, even if it's, like, feels a little bingey, we are gaining access back to our higher brain. When we're in this anxious, stressed, fight or flight mode, our higher brain, our logical part of our brain, starts to shut down a little bit, Because stress is interpreted by our brain as we need to survive.

So it's going to our survival instincts to make sure we're okay. Now, obviously, we are not running a bear when we are having an urge to binge. So we want to have access to our higher brain, and we need to be in a calm state in order to access that. Once we can start thinking with our higher brain again, that's when our logic comes back.

That's when all of our, like, rational thoughts of Wait a second, I don't actually want to binge right now. Wait a second, I don't want all this food. Huh, this food isn't even that good. That's where all those logical thoughts come back in because you're actually paying attention to it. Now, what you'll notice will happen is when you do this, your binge will be much smaller.

Most likely, and you'll actually enjoy the food you're wanting to enjoy and taste. Right? A lot of times you're like, I just want to eat because the food tastes so good. Well, are you even tasting the food when you're doing a standing up frantic binge? Probably not. And even if you end up eating all of the food that you plated, You at least have done it in a different way, and you actually enjoyed it, right?

You wanted to enjoy the binge, so at least you got the enjoyment from it this time. Then your third step is to celebrate the heck out of yourself. Okay, you are now one step closer to stopping a binge. Even though it wasn't a full stop to your binge, it was in that direction, and that's what's important, right?

We've all heard this quote, your direction is more important than your speed. It's not important right now. That you completely eliminate binge eating overnight, but that you're taking the steps towards doing that. You have now just created so much more awareness and curiosity than you would have in a normal binge.

So I really do not care if you just ate the whole entire bag of chips over a course of 30 minutes. It's better than eating the whole bag of chips standing up in the course of three minutes. Also, your digestion is going to be so much better. You're not going to have as big of a stomachache after, and you will have gained so much awareness that it's going to be immensely valuable to you in your learning than when you were zoned out from your thoughts.

When I work with people and when we coach, we often talk about, okay, let's deconstruct this binge. Let's break it apart so we can start to see where needs shifting and where we can make that happen. Now, if you're zoned out. You're not going to know what happened. And so a big thing I work on with people is teaching them tools for how we can slow down this moment so you can say, Oh yeah, I had this thought, you know, this old thought that I'm not going to get this food again.

And that's why I binge. Or, Oh, actually I was overly hungry, but I wasn't paying attention to my body. And so I thought I was being bad for eating, but I was really just hungry. And then all that guilt is what turned into the binge. That's the kind of awareness you'll gain through this exercise. Now, in my Confident Eater program, you are going to get a whole entire host of habit interrupters.

These are tools that literally stop a habit in its tracks so you can gain access back to your higher brain and make the logical decision around food. As well as that, you're going to get an in depth lesson around urges. Urges are my third pillar of my Confident Eater program, so we go so much in depth with that in them.

You learn what they are, where they are coming from, how to sit with them in a stress free environment, free way which is the key to rewiring your brain. Once you stop acting on your urges, you're going to be able to stop getting urges because your brain learns this isn't something you want to do anymore.

And you'll be amazed at how quickly your brain can learn. I've had people completely eliminate their urges within a month or two after they've been having urges for years. So I only have three spots left to work with me one on one in this private method in my company eater program. And one on one coaching is truly so fun because you and I get to become besties and you're really getting your hand held through the entire way with an expert in this field.

You're not going to go at it with just a therapist who learned this in a book or a personal trainer who really only knows about how your muscles work. I have been there. I have been in your shoes and I know how hard it is. I literally tried it all, I went to therapy for years, I tried intuitive eating, I worked with other coaches, I worked with weight loss coaches, and nothing worked until I started learning about the deep psychology of our brain, which is what I'm going to teach you.

Because I know how overwhelming it can be to try to go at this alone. So I can help you in the same way I've helped countless others. There'll be a link below where you can go to my website to book a free consultation call with me on this consultation call. We'll talk about where you are, what your goals are and then we'll create a custom plan of, okay, how are we going to get out of this?

How are you going to become this confident natural eater? And then I'll tell you all about the Confident Eater program, the investment, and really how this is going to be an investment in your future. This is something that's going to save you so much time, money, and energy down the line. And imagine having to never worry about food again.

That is my life now. I think about food pretty much never. I mean, sometimes because I do this as my job and I teach about it because I love sharing this information with you. But really, I just eat when I'm hungry and I stop when I'm full, and that too can be possible for you. So if you have any questions for today on how to binge mindfully, put them in the comments.

Otherwise, your action step for today is the next time you think about having a binge and you say, you know what, screw it, I'm just gonna do it. I want you to do it mindfully. See how much you can slow it down. Pause. Literally make it a competition with yourself of how slowly can I eat this? How long can I make this food last?

If I want pleasure from these 10 Oreos, I'm going to make this the most pleasurable 10 Oreos of my life? Pause. By slowing down so much that it lasts me a hundred bytes. So make it fun for yourself. Give yourself a challenge and just see what you notice that's different. I'd love to hear how this challenge goes for you and what your experience is like.

And I will see you tomorrow for our last and final day of the five day challenge. We're going to be talking about overcoming obstacles. So some obstacles you might be running to on this journey are feeling overwhelmed. What if you want to watch TV or a movie? What do you do then? What happens if you get distracted when eating with others?

And what if you know what to do, but you're just not doing it? Those are all the things we're going to cover tomorrow. Talk to you then.