This is the Breaking Up with Binge Eating Podcast where every listen moves you one step closer to Complete Food Freedom, hosted by me, Georgie Fear, and my team at Confident Eaters. The French Revolution, the Boston Tea Party, and other historical examples wouldn't have occurred if everybody felt relatively well taken care of. If you want to incite a rebellion, you have to make people feel really unhappy. First, what does this have to do with binge eating?
Well, I think it has a lot to do with binge eating. I'm Georgie Fear. Welcome to another episode of the Breaking Up With Binge Eating Podcast. Many people who binge eat use words when they're describing it like Rebel backswing or Boomerang to describe the nature of how their binge eating starts. They recognize that binges don't occur in isolation or come out of the blue. They're more like rebounds, the ricochet of a basketball off of a backboard.
They're unintended consequences of some preceding event or circumstance that left them really unhappy or uncomfortable. One of my jobs as a coach is to help my clients untangle what those upstream causative factors are. If we can lessen those, stopping binge eating then becomes much, much easier. I want to help you understand some of the psychological chain reactions that are involved in disordered eating. With better understanding, we are poised to take back control.
A few episodes ago, I covered some tactics for managing rebellious feelings. I won't repeat them in this episode, but the techniques included ways to lessen feelings of being coerced, forced, or trapped. As you can imagine, those feelings make people naturally want to lash out and exert their autonomy, and when that takes the form of eating, it often appears as a binge or other eating issue. This episode will be about a related but different topic.
Instead of talking about resistance and rebellion, I wanna talk today about how binge eating arises at the intersection of restraint and entitlement. Let me tell you about Marta. Marta is a married mom and her four kids are involved in lots of activities, volleyball, soccer, art lessons, and piano. She wants to encourage them to pursue their dreams, even as varied as they are, but she's also getting really tired of trying to run this race along with them.
While the kids are at school, Marta operates a small business out of her home. She also does all the chores and laundry. And when the kids get off the school bus, she has got to spring into action driving them where they need to go. Not to mention finding lost cleats, trying to pick up groceries or put together a decent meal when she has a gap and get that meal on the table. She says If I get four or five butts in chairs for dinner, I call that a win.
For the record, there are six butts in Marta's house. She herself almost never manages to sit down to eat with the family. She declares that she loves her life, including the busyness of it all. Her kids and husband bring her loads of joy and she's so proud of them. But her eating has been a holdout that she doesn't feel proud of, and she hasn't for a long time. While one kid is at a piano practice, she might grab groceries before picking them up.
She describes to me how she would commonly pick up a rotisserie chicken, garlic bread, and bagged salad for the family. But she'll grab a box of chocolate chip cookies too. She tells herself, well, this is everyone's dessert. At the checkout, it looks like I'm buying a complete meal, but she knows those cookies are never going to make it into her home. She eats them all before she even picks up her daughter from the piano teacher's house.
I asked Marta what emotions she feels while she's out running errands and picking up the groceries. She admitted that often during this sequence of events, she feels angry or irritated. Thoughts like, oh my God, this never ends cross her mind. Or she fantasizes about some future day when the kids are out of the house and she gets to sit on the couch for an evening. But then she feels guilty for that fantasy, like that's not something a good mom would be thinking about.
I asked Marta what she felt she needed to stop these impulsive cookie binges. She said, I'm not sure. Maybe I need to get help to become less selfish or greedy. This gave me some really helpful insight into her perception of what's going on. She sees her eating the whole box of cookies as something she does out of selfishness. I see her eating this whole box of cookies as an aftershock of practicing. Too much selflessness, not selfishness. During the usual daylight hours.
Marta is constantly trying to be more productive, get more done, and be of service to everybody else. Her attention is so outwardly focused on where in the house needs cleaning, what her husband and kids want cooked or laundered or purchased, what client expectation she wants to meet. She doesn't even sense being hungry. She might eat some leftovers for lunch or might not eat anything at all.
She says she secretly likes it when she makes it the whole day without eating because then she has saved calories sometimes she says, I'm so out of touch. I can realize all of a sudden that I need to pee so badly that my bladder is actually in pain. With her physical needs placed so far back on the shelf, I'm sure her mental state and her energy level and her other wants aren't ever on her mind.
Skipping meals, eating only scraps or leftovers, making sure everyone else is well fed, but never sitting down. These are hallmarks of someone trying to get by without needing anything. The reaction to this often feels like a wave of entitlement, a strong burst of where's mine? Sometimes that can be, I deserve this bottle of wine, or raiding the kid's snack pantry after everybody else is in bed, and you can finally have a moment to yourself.
One way that we can recognize this ping pong of reactionary entitlement is by the irrationally strong attachment and possessiveness. That can be part of the problem. For example, if somebody tries to get in the way of having that bottle of wine or they eat your ice cream bar that you plan to enjoy, heaven, help them. It may be the last thing they ever do.
You may be familiar with having a strong attachment to particular foods or eating routines, even the ones you identify as binges, that doesn't make you strange or weird or crazy. We can have strong emotional attachments to the very same behaviors that we detest and desperately want to stop. I see this all the time. Sometimes it's tricky for people to verbalize, but the idea of not ever binging again can sound just as terrifying as doing it for the rest of their lives.
Marta said to me, I don't wanna keep eating boxes of cookies, but I feel sad at the thought of not doing it. I even feel sad if I consider, I just eat some of the cookies. Like that box of cookies or if it's a carton of ice cream or whatever. That's my thing. It's the only thing without it, I don't know. She just trailed off. It feels intolerable somehow. Even wrong to restrain herself in the one last corner of her life that hasn't already been soaked in restraint.
When we've paired away so many sources of fun, freedom, or pleasure in our lives, that eating a box of cookies alone in our car feels like something we depend on and cannot do without. The solution is not taking away the cookies. More restraint is the last thing. Marta needs binge eating, as I said before, and as Marta highlights is always part of a cause and effect relationship.
Rather than seeing binges as a problem, we can see binge eating behaviors in a new light when we consider them as a solution. In her case. The problem is actually the continued use of restraint during the day. MARTA is clearly using restraint to avoid or minimize daytime eating. This is common and it's part of why dieting increases the risk for future binge eating. Restricting food definitely sets the stage for an insatiable appetite as well.
Mart is an example of how restraint doesn't necessarily have to be just about food. She's also using restraint when she wants to rest, but keeps on vacuuming, wiping counters, and folding towels. She's even using restraint to try and curtail her. Daydreaming about future evenings when she might be free from the nonstop parenting duties. Purchasing and eating her bench foods is a compensation to try and correct for Marta's excess restraint.
So to help her, I outlined a plan to gently ease up on the myriad ways she's restricting herself. That includes allowing herself to sit or lay down for a while when she's tired, making herself something to eat for lunch, and allowing her mind to daydream whatever it wants to. There's nothing wrong with looking forward to the eventual end of any difficult chapter in life. In fact, it can help us handle the bumps and bruises of the current phase with a bit more resilience.
Lastly, I included a challenge to do something just for herself for an hour long stretch of time. Marta admitted she didn't know what she would do, which is normal and to be expected when a person has trained themselves to only focus on what others want. So our next conversation will revolve around figuring out what she wants to do if she has some time to flex.
She hasn't really considered what she wants to do to say, to eat, to watch, but I know exploring these topics is going to start Marta down the road to not feeling like she needs that binge eating behavior any longer. Before I wrap up this episode, I want to clarify that not all restraint is bad. Being able to resist impulses is an essential skill. If we tried to live with zero restraint, we would hit a lot of roadblocks in life. We would not be able to reach goals.
We'd have terrible manners, and we'd lack basic social functioning, and the modern environment would easily lead all of us to overeat and overspend. A healthy level of restraint allows us to acknowledge what we want and what other people want, and act in a balanced way so that we don't end up being entirely selfish or too self-sacrificial. In the next episode of breaking up with binge eating, we'll talk more specifically about how food interacts with restraint.
Many times the word restriction is used as a catchall word for food restraint with the underlying message that you better not restrict ever or else you are giving into your disorder. But I have a lot to say on that topic, including why having a history of disordered eating does not exclude you from ever being able to lose weight in a healthy way. We can develop a healthy level of control over all of our food decisions, including eating ones. I'll see you then friends. Thanks for tuning in.