Ep 54 - Creating Space Between a Binge Urge
February 20,2025
Do you ever feel like the urge to eat just happens so FAST?
Where you feel the desire for food and next thing you know you’re already done with the binge?
I want you to create a challenge for yourself to PAUSE and create space to come back into your higher brain that knows you don’t really want to overeat.
Today I cover…
What’s happening when you act on the urge to binge quickly
Why sitting with binge urges is the key to rewiring your brain
How to create your own urge challenge
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, confident eaters, as I am recording this today, we have officially come to one year of the podcast, and I first just want to say how truly incredibly grateful I am for each and every one of you for being here. for allowing me to be your guide on this journey to healing your relationship with food.
This has allowed Become A Confident Eater to become in the top 3 percent of podcasts worldwide, which is a huge accomplishment. And I secondly want to ask you that if you have ever gotten any value out of this podcast and hearing these episodes each week, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a five star review.
This helps keep the podcast going for you and helps spread my work to all the people of the world. Who are in the same shoes who want to stop binge eating and overeating just like you. I read each and every one of these reviews and get so much joy out of them, truly. So if you could take a minute to pause the episode, go do that now.
I would highly appreciate it. So for getting into today's episode, we are going to talk about how to create space and pause between the urge and the eating. And we'll discuss a challenge that you can do for yourself this week to actually help achieve this.
So you know when you get the urge to overeat, the urge to binge, and it feels like it all happens so fast.
You get the urge and the next thing you know, you're already starting to eat. You barely even get the chance to think about it. The second the thought of food enters your brain, you feel like you already see the wrappers around you and it just happens. Now the truth is, it doesn't just happen, but sometimes it can feel like it.
It feels like it happens so fast. And we often feel this panic come up when the urge arises. This rush of emotions and sensations. It almost feels like a river of anxiety flows up right. Before we go in and eat like this is something we have to do that We're gonna die if we don't do that, right?
It just feels so urgent which is why we call them urges is because it feels urging us to do something right then. We want relief from this urge. We want that sensation to go away. And so what do we do? We eat. But the food doesn't actually give us true relief from that urge because what comes after? The shame, the disappointment, maybe the physical pain, even more anxiety, really anything that we were feeling before is now coming up at least twice as strong. It only makes our emotions grow and makes our life so much worse, right? When we're feeling all of that pain in our mind and body. So what truly gives us relief from this urge is pausing long enough to create this space and awareness to be able to just move on with our life and not act on the urge, not go to the food.
True belief is that feeling of pride in yourself for showing up in the exact way you want to show up. And so let's talk today about how to expand out that pause. How to make pausing when you get an urge fun and exciting and to actually make it happen. So you don't get caught up in this tornado of anxiety and rush when you get the urge to eat.
Urges do always go away if we let them, but the problem is we usually don't sit in it long enough to let it go away. We act so quickly and we eat. And then the urge goes away because we ate, but it doesn't truly give it the opportunity to go away on its own. Urges actually only last about 90 seconds if we don't resist them, if we don't fight them, if we don't panic when they come up.
But even if your urges do feel longer than that, We can still move through our life feeling an urge. It doesn't have to be the end of the world to have an urge come up. Think about it as just carrying a purse around. You have the power to set that purse down at any time, but it's not going to hurt you to carry it around.
You can still show up to do everything in your life while carrying a purse.
So why is it important to put in this pause in between the urge and the eating, the urge and the action? Every time you do or don't do something, We are reinforcing a brain pathway. So every time you've woken up in the morning and brushed your teeth, you're reinforcing that pathway that this is something you want to do.
And every time you show up as someone who doesn't yell in an argument, you become more of a person who does not yell during an argument because you have built that skill. And that habit pathway in your brain. So think of your actions like putting a green checkmark on a certain side of your brain. as this is something I want to do, or this is something I don't want to do. Where have you been putting that checkmark? If you're here, chances are you were overeating and putting that checkmark to tell your brain to keep doing that. Keep overeating, but you don't want to be the kind of person who frequently overeats.
You want to be a natural eater So we want to put a check mark on the other side of our brain to be someone who listens to our body Which means for us right now that we need to be sitting with and allowing those old binge urges to come Up
now the more time you can put between the urge in the action The more you are going to rewire your brain. So even if you go from acting on the urge normally in three and a half seconds to sitting with the urge for 30 seconds, that is making progress that is actually making changes to your brain pathway.
Then from there, you can work on sitting with the urge for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, 20 minutes, extending it out. As long as you need to get past the urge.
So that is our goal, is just to see how can we insert even mere seconds of a pause into this action and behavior so we can have more and more time to come back to our senses and our higher brain and recognize this is not something we actually want to do. To start to get access back to our logical brain. We are going to start to train your brain to handle discomfort. Why do you want to feel discomfort? Because when you go through the temporary discomfort of an urge, you will get long term peace. Because the urges will start to weaken, Your brain pathway will start to unwire itself and that's what will give you true lasting food freedom.
You want to be the kind of person who can sit with these emotions and move on with your life. That's called emotional maturity. Being able to sit with what is without reacting to it. Being able to feel discomfort is the skill that will give you your dream life. Everything you want. Discomfort is the currency of your dreams.
Whether that's with food or another area and the reason you don't do big things in your life that you want to do is Because you're scared of a feeling so if you can show yourself this week or just today that you can sit with uncomfortable feelings Imagine the door possibility that will become open to you Imagine what else you'd be able to do if you felt safe To feel discomfort in your body.
Would you ask for that raise? Would you set boundaries in your relationships? Would you make that big, scary ask of someone? Would you start that business? Being able to sit with the difficult sensations of an urge is building the skill to do all of these things. So I literally want you to remind yourself, I am building a necessary life skill right now.
Anytime the urge comes up, this is a transferable skill.
Now what makes everything so much more fun and easy is turning it into a game. Okay, so that's what we're going to do now. In order to play this game, all you need is a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil. You can listen to this now find one later and put the paper and pen or pencil somewhere easily accessible.
So maybe in your kitchen when you get the urge, or maybe the bedroom, the living room, somewhere where you have it out.
And what you're going to do is an urge challenge. You are going to challenge yourself to feel the urge all the way through as many times as you need to for as long as you need to for at least 24 hours. Start with 24 hours. You can turn this into a week long challenge if you want. I've also created a worksheet for you on this episode in the show notes to help give you the guidelines for this challenge.
So be sure to get that. And essentially how this is going to work is we are going to keep track of all of these urges that you don't act on. Now I do this with my program. And I help my clients create an urge jar, and I have a full lesson on urges in my Confident Eater program. But this is going to be a very simplified, useful method and challenge of sitting with the urges.
And who doesn't love a good, fun challenge? So what you're going to do is take this piece of paper, and you're going to create a little system for keeping track of the times you don't act on your urges, so you can feel proud of yourself and celebrate yourself when you don't do this. And you don't overeat or binge.
So this could be as simple as making a check mark on the page. Putting a gold star on the page or you can make it a little fancier and add in the time that the urge came up Anything you reminded yourself of when you had the urge to help you get through the ultimate goal of doing this is to give yourself a concrete way of Celebrating yourself for doing what you want to be doing.
You want to be proud as heck of yourself for sitting with the urge because if we can make the experience of sitting with the urge Fun, exciting, and pleasurable for your brain, it's going to want to keep sitting with the urges, which will help you feel better in your life, and will help you get to this ultimate goal of being a natural eater.
I don't care if you have 60 urges a day to eat. Write them down. Put it down. And show yourself, look, I can handle this. These sensations are not going to hurt me. I can get through it. I promise you, I have had that experience before, where I have sat with my urges literally probably a hundred times in one day.
And I survived, I made it out, and I became stronger because of it. I built that skill of sitting with my urges. I was able to move on with my life and get the things I actually wanted to get done that day, done, instead of feeling overly full, stuffed, bloated, anxious, angry at myself for eating.
A visual I've really been loving recently that might help you with this is I want you to think about a snow globe.
A lot of times when we're having an urge, it can feel like we're the shaken up snow globe, that we can't see that everything's blurry, that we're just in this haze. And I want you to imagine that you were the one who shook up the snow globe. And all you need to do is set the snow globe down, set it down, and imagine the snow settling.
Imagine your body, everything going down, calming, becoming softer, slower. And bringing yourself back to the present moment when you have an urge, seeing what you can notice and observe around you, just getting curious about what your experience is like in that moment. And then look at, what is my teeniest next babiest step in my day?
Is it time to do the dishes now? Is it time to get back to work? What am I working on? Is it time to start the laundry? Is it time to rest? Is it time to go to bed? Looking for where do you want to put your focus next, so you don't keep getting wrapped up in this swirly snow globe. Let the snow globe settle literally you can close your eyes and imagine all the snow settling down and keep moving forward with your life Okay I want you to have the best day ever after this because you are now someone who's one more time better at doing the Uncomfortable hard thing and coming out even more comfortable.