Ep 52 - What Are Binge Urges?

February 06,2025

You know that voice in your head that seemingly yells at you to “Eat now!”?

These strong cravings are your urges, which are a feeling of love desire for more food than your body needs.

While you might feel out of control around your food urges, the truth is you are in charge and have much more power than you think.

Today, I’ll cover…

• What urges to binge are and what they are NOT

• Why you get urges to binge

• How the binge eating habit loop works

• What to do when you get an urge to binge

TRANSCRIPT:

 Happy a Thursday confident eaters. Today's topic is going to be a core concept that you're going to want to revisit over and over again. And that is what our urges. I realized that I have never actually formally defined or just for you and urges are something that are a core concept that I teach in my confident eater program, but really just a super important thing to know in order to stop binge eating  And how to rewire your brain.

Before I knew about this concept and what our binge urges, I thought I was just crazy around food. I just would have these out of body experiences where I'd feel like a ghost outside of myself and I just remember feeling like I was so out of control. I didn't feel like myself. I would just get to the end of a binge and wake up and be like, what the heck just happened. Why was I craving this food so dang much and I would get so scared of when the artists would happen. And would panic the second I felt one. Because I thought it was a declaration of, well, now I have to binge. I thought that urge is equaled binge-eating and we'll learn throughout this episode that that's not actually true. All urges are our suggestions to binge eat. They don't actually force you to do anything.

But right now, urges might feel really confusing and overwhelming, and even a little bit of shameful. If you don't fully understand what they are and why they occur.

Now I take the approach of looking at these urges with curiosity and patience, instead of shame or frustration. And I want you to take this approach with them to as we're investigating what they are throughout this episode.

So let's define an urge to binge. Urges are a feeling of over desire. They are too much desire to do something. Now we can get urges and other areas of life.

If someone has struggled with drinking before you might have. Over desire, urges for alcohol.

There is a normal level of desire for lots of different things in our life just based on how our brain operates in the modern world. We're going to desire things that give us a high dopamine hit, but urge is when we have too much desire for food. It's more food that our body actually needs.

Urges and hunger are not the same thing. This is really important. We might get hungry and it's kind of feels like an urge. We also might get mild cravings, which feel a lot gentler than an urge. They're a lot softer.  They don't feel as urgent as urges do.

Urges feel like this overwhelming drive that feels almost impossible to resist in that moment. Hunger on the other hand is something that will feel like you want to act on it and you'll have desire for food. But hunger is always accompanied by physical sensation in our body. Something is usually happening in our stomach, letting us know we need nourishment and it occurs after a few hours without food.

So, if you weren't sure if something isn't urge or hunger. The first question I would ask yourself is when did I last eat? If you ate 30 minutes ago and you had a decent meal that was actually filling. Chances are it is probably an urge. Now, if it's been five hours, since you last ate food, You're probably hungry and it can start to feel like an urge, but get some food in your body and in my guess it will go away.

And urges can be a bit more predictable. So we'll talk about creating awareness around urges in a second. But if your urges happen at the same time every night, Where every day after dinner, you binge. You can pretty much guess that that is going to be the urge you're going to get. It's not actually true hunger.

Now. It's important to remember that you need to be eating enough in order to work on your urges. If you are restricting right now and how I define restriction is not giving yourself enough food for your physical hunger. Then working through your habitual urges is going to be virtually impossible. So make sure you're getting an adequate nourishment throughout your day.

First.

Now we can also know something as an urge if we know logically, we would never want to do it. So, if you would not put binge-eating on your to-do list, it's probably an urge you might put though eat lunch on your to-do list, you might put include in a cookie. That might be something that you're great with doing. Would that you are feeling good about doing.

And if we have some sort of desire for something small, like a cookie, that's not necessarily an urge, not every single food craving outside of hunger is going to be an urge.

It's really this overpowering type of feeling where it feels very frantic, very fast. We usually want a very large quantity of food. So like, if we have the desire to binge a whole tin of cookies, probably an urge. It feels a lot like anxiety. And urges do feel a little bit different to everyone. But to me, I've always felt urges a lot in my chest. And in my heart. The sensation feels very fast and hot. Uh, charged with energy and it almost sounds like in my brain, someone's yelling at me to eat now, eat now. My urge voice sounds a little grumbly.

And so it can be helpful to define what that sounds like and feels like to you.

Now we have two parts of our brain for simplicity purposes. First we have our lower part of brain. This is also known as our primitive brain or animal brains. The part of us that was first developed. And this part of our brain is responsible for survival instincts. It's the part of us that's in charge of letting us know if it's too cold out and we need a jacket.

And our goal of our lower brain is to make things easy and simple for us. As possible by forming habits by making things automatic. We don't have to think about when we get in a car sitting down and putting on her seatbelt and checking our meal or. And backing out and putting the keys in because those things have all become automated in our brain.

So it makes it really easy for us. It's a good thing that we have this part of our brain. It's not a bad thing.

But it also means that this part of our brain is not logical. It's just repeating things like a computer system.  All our lower brain wants to do is seek pleasure and avoid pain. So it's going to do everything in its power to make sure that happens. Now on the other end, we have our higher brain also known as our logical brain. And this is the part of us that does know what you truly want. This is the part that plans ahead makes decisions and says, Hey, you don't actually want 20 cookies.

It's the part of us that's thinking about.  We do want to stop binge-eating it's the part of you that decided to hit play on this podcast. So you could learn a way out.

So our urges are always coming from this lower part of us. The part of us that is going automatic and habitual and instinctual. But the good news is our higher brain always gets to decide our higher brain is the CEO of us. You get to choose. Do I want to binge or not? Do I want to listen? To these suggestions coming from my lower brain.

When your lower brain tells you, Hey, it's cold out. Maybe you should put on a jacket so you can stay warm. You could decide not to put on a jacket. You're not forced to go in a store and buy a brand new jacket. The second you get cold, it's something that you have to actively decide.

Now it's important to know what urges are not. Urges are not a sign of failure or weakness. Urges or just a learned brain response, which means they can be unlearned.

This is good news. And Ernie is, are actually signed to be really healthy brain. That's doing its job. It's trying to help you. It's just not doing it in the way that we want it to. Urges are also not necessarily a sign of something deeper happening. I do not believe that all of your urges are coming from a deep trauma or a deep emotional response to something that you absolutely need to change in your life.

It can be at times, but the majority of times. Urges are just this habitual loop. That is just going on autopilots. And so they don't actually need to be dove into that drastically. As therapy tells us   they do. We don't need to investigate our urges for years on end, trying to find the root cause of them from when we were five years old, because sometimes there isn't sometimes the root cause of our urges are just from dieting. And let's talk about that.

Why do we even get urges to binge.

Think back to if you've ever died at a restricted your food  In any way. Sort or for. This will be your root cause of your binge-eating because when you do not eat enough, your brain sees this as a threat to your survival. It thinks you're in a famine. So it ramps up your desire for food. And this is why you might suddenly find yourself obsessing over the exact foods you're trying to avoid. Y, you might find yourself watching food porn and looking at new recipes on the internet because your brain thinks, oh, I better figure out how to get more food in.

I better send an obsession about it to make sure we're getting it. But over time. As you've acted on this extra desire for food from dieting, it gets turned into a habit. And this is what happened to me. I started eating more and I was not dieting anymore, but I was still getting urges to binge. And it was so confused on why that was happening because everyone just told me, I just need to eat more. And she needed to get out of all or nothing thinking. Which are great things to start, but if you don't understand your urges, you're not going to get that permanent change that you want to make in your brain to become a natural eater permanently.

So how this habit loop works. Is first we get triggered. So there's something that starts this loop. Maybe this is you see a certain food that you've binged on before. So if you always binge on Oreos and then you see Oreos, you might feel triggered and get the urge. Because your brain is having a memory in that moment.

It is remembering, Hey, last time you were around Oreos. You binged, would you like to binge? You got it. And it makes that suggestion. I like to call these foods trigger foods. And I have a full trigger food process and my confident eat our program that we go through because there's a lot of foods out there that you might've been touched on before that your brain has memories of that might trigger us. Other triggers might be the time of day.

Like when you get home from work at 5:00 PM and then all of a sudden you feel like I want to binge you walk in the front door, you see the cabinets and that urge comes up. Or when you end up. A work meeting. You log off of zoom and then you're in this empty space in between your schedule. And you go into the kitchen and the wallah. The urge to eat comes up.

Or you're in a situation, for example, you're at a party and you see a large food spread.

You're looking at that large food spread and your brain goes, oh my gosh, look at that abundance of food. Normally when there's an abundance of food, we like to eat the abundance of food. And so it sends out an urge.

So once the trigger happens and once we get that craving, that urge, then we go into our behavior.

So this is when we go into the full binge itself, or if you're not going to the full band, you at least go into this type of eating that happens quickly, mindlessly zoned out. And then you get the reward. This is temporary relief from the urge. The urge goes away. And you get the dopamine hit from the food, but it is truly temporary.

We need to remember this, that temporary relief from the urge only lasts like what five seconds. And then we're feeling guilty and ashamed. And then we feel really bad in our body. And we're feeling unenergetic and sluggish the rest of the day.

But the reward is enough for reinforcement. So that completes the habit loop. Your brain learns that binge-eating solves the problem. Of the urge of whatever you're going to food for.

And so it strengthens that urge. The next time you encounter a similar trigger. So this loop becomes automatic over time. The more you do it, the quicker this loop happens. And that's why sometimes. You'll say, I just feel like it happened so quickly. I don't even feel like I recognize when it's happening.

How do you remember saying that to have?

I just, I don't even notice that.

But the good news is this pattern can change because our brains are neuroplastic. They are not static. Once you form a habit, doesn't just stick their habits, come and go. Every second of every day. The length of time, you've struggled with binge-eating. Does not determine your ability to recover. You can retrain your brain.

You don't need to binge in order to get rid of these urges urges can and do go away on their own.

If we let them. The problem is you've never even given yourself the opportunity to let these urges go away. So it feels like they don't go away. Or you're using techniques that are outdated and that don't really work. And so you're actually making your urges stronger unintentionally. And making them bigger. So of course you act on them  Because now you're making your life harder. The good news is your heart doing this in your life?

This skill of sitting with urges. For example, you see a cute t-shirt when you're out shopping and you feel desire for it. You're like, Ooh, I really want that shirt. Then you decide, I don't really need it. And so you allow yourself to feel that over desire, that urge for that shirt, but you just put the shirt away, you just don't get it. You just let that desire be there until it goes away. Then you leave them all.

You go home, you drive in your car and you forget about it. Unless it's something you absolutely need. And that's a good point. Like if you are absolutely super hungry and  You keep trying to dismiss urges. They're probably not going to go away cause you actually need food. Which is why we always need to make sure we're fueling our body and not starving ourself. Same thing.

If you see like a really cute shirt and you're like, no, I genuinely need that shirt. It's going to be hard to say no to it, because you're like, but I need it. So making sure if you actually need the food, you're giving it to yourself. But most of the times we don't actually need it. Right. We're just telling herself we need it, but that's a lot.

So, what should we do if you get an urge to bench? First that what I want you to do is to create a ton of awareness.

The more aware you are of when your urges happens, what they're like, what that experience is like for you, the easier we can make your experience. So learn what your triggers are. When do you feel like you've been to the most? What situations are you in? What time of day? What foods are you around? No, we are not looking for our triggers in order to avoid them.

This is also common advice. I see. That like find your triggers and then just hope you never run into one of those again.

Totally revamped your life. So you never have to be stressed again, or you never have to be around Oreos. But that is a big mistake because we literally need to feel triggered in order to change our brain. So a little bit of brain science for you right here.

When we feel triggered that neural pathway in our brain is lit up. And when that pathway is lit up, it is flexible. It's like opening up a Google document and being able to make edits to it. So when we are triggered, we are actually in a really good position. To change that brain pathway and take a new route. Just like when we opened up a Google doc, we can delete sentences.

That's what we're going to be doing. Deleting the sentence of your brain a binge-eating now there's maybe a lot of sentences in there, so it might take a little time. But we can't change the sentence in the Google document until we open it up. We can't go to a separate Google document and say, I hope to change this sentence and we can just avoid Google docs forever.

We have to open up that document in order to make that change. That's what we have to do. We literally have to feel triggered in order to change.

So we are learning our triggers, not to avoid them, but to prepare for them so that there are not a surprise. The two worst things we can do when we get an urge to eat is to be surprised and get angry with them. When we do that, the urges grow. You don't want to be afraid of our urges because fear puts us in even more of a fight or flight state than we're already in, which makes it harder to access our higher brain and wisdom.

All urges are temporary sensation or thought that's coming from your lower brain. It's not a command that you have to follow. Reminding yourself.

This is just my lower brain sending a false alarm. And again, how you know, it's an art is by asking yourself what I put this on my to-do list today. If the answer is no, it's the nurture. You don't actually want to do it. Because we wake up after the whole thing and we say, oh my gosh, I didn't want to do that.

Why did I just binge that's our higher brain turning back on.

One of the biggest aha moments in my journey is when I learned that thoughts are not facts. Just because you think something doesn't mean it's true. Got to say that I got, write this down and remember it forever. Just because you think something doesn't mean it's true. Just because your lower brain is telling you, you need to binge right now does not mean you actually need to bench. You have food, food is available to you. You can eat again.

You don't need to eat right now.

So just because you get this urge doesn't mean anything about the necessity of doing it.

So once you created a ton of awareness, then you can move forward. When once you get an urge dismissing it. Calling it junk. I literally like to think of urges as junk mail. It just like something that entered my brain that I don't really need. I just need to press delete your urges, have no significance or meaning of what you truly want. Think of dismissing an urge or allowing an urge as surfing a wave. Right.

The wave is coming and you're going to ride that wave. It might be a little bumpy at time.

I might toss you around, but you were going to ride that wave until it passes and it will, or just always pass. If we give it the chance, I promise you. No one has ever come to me on a consultation call and said, Amber, I have felt an urge every single day, 24 7 for the last five years of my life. And I don't know what to do.

No, it comes and goes and comes and goes. But the reason you keep getting the urges is because you keep acting on them. That's why they keep coming back. Is because you act on them and your brain learns, Hey, this must be something you want to do. You're giving it that reward. So we're going to notice that urge without acting on it. Then I want you to describe the sensation of it. So, for example, I feel tightness in my chest or my blood feels racing. Breathe into that sensation. Remind yourself, you can handle a sensation of tightness in your trust.

You can handle the feeling of blood racing.

The urge will fade. The sensation will not be here forever. Your job is just to ride it out, just to be present with it, to get curious with that. And I want you to challenge yourself. How could you actually enjoy the ride? How could it actually be super fun and exciting to sit with an urge? Like arenas are exciting.

They're a wild ride. How could you make that a challenge of. What can actually be enjoyable here about sitting with an urge. And I can tell you one thing that's really enjoyable. It's how you're going to feel after when the urge passes and you get to celebrate the heck out of yourself and you feel  amazing in your body. And you have energy the whole rest of your day, and you can actually focus at work again like that is what is so fun about sitting with an urge.

Urges can only last 90 seconds on average is what science says. Emotions last, if we don't resist them. Now, because most of us don't have a lot of practice with urges and allowing them the same thing with allowing emotions. I would say your urges are typically going to last 10 to 20 minutes. But that time will decrease. Over and over. If you don't act on them, it will start to only last five minutes and then four minutes and then two minutes.

And then all of a sudden the urge will just pop up in your head and it will just go away almost instantaneously. The first few times you tried to sit with an urge. It might feel uncomfortable. And that's okay. But again, over time. Urges will become less intense and less frequent. Ours are not forever. And while your binge urges may feel automatic right now, they're not permanent. When you stopped acting on the urges, your brain learns that bingeing is no longer necessary or rewarding. And over time, the urges will fade and become weaker. This process is called extinction in psychology.

Now. You will still have a part of your brain that desires food. People often ask me if I still get urges. Do I still get these strong cravings for food? And my answer to that is I still get desire for food. I can never. Take away that part of my brain. That enjoys high sugar, high calorie, high carb things, because to your brain, that means better survival.

When we were out in this African safari. We needed those types of food in order to survive. That's how our brain is wired. So yeah, sometimes I'm eating a food and my brain goes, oh, this is so delicious. You should have more. But what I do now is I just see those thoughts and I go, that's so interesting. And that's okay that you want more brain, but I'm not going to act on that. Because I want to feel good after this meal. So I can now sit with that desire and that's, what's going to start happening to you too.

So my final tip for you is I want you to get my current free gift, which is a guided urge audio.

So at the end of every episode, I tell you to go to the show notes and get your free gift. Have you gotten it yet? Have you forgotten about it? You can always sign up for it again. This urge audio is a seven minute audio that will walk you step by step. On how to get through an urge to binge without eating. It uses my favorite techniques from psychology and neuroscience. It will help you give your brain a blueprint of how you want to be. Instead we go through some visualization techniques. It is so powerful. It has helped hundreds of other people, just like you stop binge-eating and re. Why are there brain, so make sure you go get that free urge audio in the show notes.