Break the Binge

Music.

And welcome to Change Your Relationship with Food, the podcast hosted by me, Kyla Holley. With many years experience as an eating disorder and bariatric therapist, I know exactly what it takes to help you break free from your diet history and develop a more healthy relationship with food. Please follow this podcast to make sure you don't miss a thing.

This podcast is not specifically about eating disorders, but I think it's worth mentioning binge eating disorder today because it's the most prolific of all the eating disorders and probably the least diagnosed. More people have binge eating disorder than all the other eating disorders put together. In fact, about three times as many people have binge eating disorder.

So the reason I wanted to talk about it today is because it is so much more common than the other eating disorders, which I think in kind of popular culture, there's more awareness around things like anorexia and bulimia. And I think people take them very seriously. Whereas binge eating disorder, I think a lot of people have this feeling that people can just stop binging, that it's not a proper eating disorder. And even the people that are living with binge eating disorder often think that way.

I know I lived with it for many, many years, completely unaware that I had an eating disorder and all the time believing that it was my own. Stupidity, I suppose, that led me to binge eat and that I should be able to stop it, but I didn't feel I could stop it. And I took that as a sort of personal fault, a reflection on my personality or my resolve somehow.

And a lot of people do the same. So let's look at what binge eating disorder is, first of all. And it's basically eating a large amount of food in a short period of time. And I know that's a little bit vague and a little bit subjective, but let's keep going. So it's eating a large amount of food in a short amount of time, and it's doing that regularly.

So the diagnostic criteria for binge eating disorder say doing this at least once a week for three months is the requirement for an official, if you like, diagnosis of binge eating disorder. It's also feeling out of control about what you're eating. Some people eat in a kind of frenzy and some people are just the opposite. They eat in a sort of trance-like state. They almost check out while they're eating.

But there is that underlying feeling of lack of control, control whether it's a trance like lack of control or it's a frenzied lack of control and it's also feeling a certain amount of shame guilt or remorse about what has happened and often with binge eating like a lot of behavior and eating disorders this is done secretly so So people don't tend to binge in front of other people. This is a solo behavior.

And what tends to happen, because if you can imagine you're doing this, let's say the minimum for diagnostic reasons, if you're doing this once a week for three months, quite often people are consuming a huge amount of calories in the process of binging. And that's the minimum criteria. Some people might be doing this every day or might be doing it three times a week, something like that. So the amount of calorie intake can go up considerably.

People tend to binge on combinations of fat and sugar. I often joke that no one binges on cabbage and cucumber and things like that, but that's not entirely true. So I've got to stop making those jokes. But generally, the sort of things that people binge on are cakes and biscuits and lollies and sweets and chocolate and, you know, the sort of stuff that is that combination of sweet and fat that we find so satisfying.

Satisfying and so these are the binge foods and what also happens is those foods tend to carry along with them a lot of calories. So the inevitable result of this sort of behavior in the longer term is weight gain. So what will happen that person will start to find themselves gaining weight and of course what do people do when they start to gain weight? They tend to go on a diet. So this for a lot of people is the start of that sort of roller coaster of dieting behavior.

And the problem is that dieting actually makes it worse because what we do then is go into a mindset where we're saying to ourselves, right, I need to restrict my calories. I need to reduce my calories. I've got to say no to certain foods. So we go into this with a lot of resolve, a lot of motivation. And.

We try very hard. And what happens is at some stage, we can no longer maintain that sort of extreme behavior of often sugar cutting, calorie cutting, deprivation, feeling really sorry for ourselves. And then we tend to go the other way. And to make up for that deprivation, we go into a period of overindulgence. And of course, for those of us that have that binge binge eating behavior, that sends us straight back into a binge.

So dieting makes it worse, if anything, because it actually kind of is a springboard for that binging behavior because we've had that period of deprivation beforehand. So it can send us into this ongoing cycle of deprivation over indulgence, deprivation over indulgence, all the while feeling worse and worse and worse about ourselves that we can't seem to take control over our relationship with food. It just spirals more and more out of control.

And then for a small percentage of people, this is only about 8%, it can actually develop into bulimia nervosa. The reason is that people become very frustrated at their lack of control over their weight and their relationship with food and they look for other ways to control it and that can lead them down the way of compensatory behaviour. This is one of the many reasons that we should treat binge eating disorder very seriously because it can certainly lead to other disorders as well.

So why do we do this? And the reasons are so many and varied that I can't begin to cover them all in one podcast. But essentially, the reason we binge is that we want to change the way we feel in this moment. So that's either mentally or physically. It's having this level of discomfort, something that we can't tolerate, a situation that we can't tolerate or a feeling or a thought that we can't tolerate.

And our solution in that moment is to kind of bury that feeling or that thought in food, numb it down, get rid of it, cover it with food. And I often say to people who have any sort of binge in their behavior, and that includes people with binge eating disorder and people with bulimia nervosa, because that involves a binge and a purge rather than just a binge on its own.

So anybody with any sort of binge eating behavior, I always say to them, there's probably something that you want to say or some emotion that you want to release. And instead of being able to do that or feeling safe enough to be able to do that, that you're burying it in food instead. You're just crushing the food down on top of whatever you want to say or whatever emotion you want to try and get out.

So how do we move past this? Well, there's lots of different theories, lots of different therapy modalities that could be relevant to it. I personally don't necessarily see the value in talk therapy in that talking about our past often doesn't actually solve our current problems, especially if we're dealing with trauma. Often just sitting there and talking about a trauma can actually make it worse because people can start to relive the trauma that they went through.

So you've really got to look look, not just kind of using the past as a lens to understand the present, that can have value. But if you're just literally talking about the past and what happens without that leading anywhere and finding some solutions around how the past is affecting the present, it's not entirely valuable on its own. I would look more about now and what situations we binge in. And try and find a little bit of a common denominator.

So when you have a binge, try and look back at what preceded the binge and try and look for patterns there. So before we did the behavior, the binging behavior, what was happening before? How were we feeling? What were we thinking about? What had happened during that day? What was going on in your body? How did you feel in your body? And try and work out what these patterns are that actually lead us into the binge eating behavior.

Because generally, it's those feelings of discomfort that we've got to learn the skills to be able to tolerate in greater detail. At this stage, people often say to me, but I don't want to actually tolerate them.

I want to get rid of them altogether help me do that and that's actually not possible because when you think about it how can you erase memories how can you stop thoughts coming into your head you simply can't so what we've got to learn instead is how to tolerate them and manage them in a better way rather than reverting to the behaviors that we've become accustomed to in order to deal with them.

Once we've become aware of what precedes the binge and what leads up to it, we then have to look at what the payoffs are. So again, people struggle with this sometimes because they think, well, there are no payoffs. It's all behavior that I want to get rid of. It's all destructive behavior. It's all negative. However, there has to be some sort of payoff and we have to realize what that payoff is.

Is so the payoff could be to a binge that it helps you escape the feelings that you were having sometimes it makes you feel a little bit better because the sort of foods we tend to turn to as i said before those combinations of fat and sugar often help us actually feel better we get a little bit of a serotonin release with it so there's a real benefit to us for a little while at least feeling comforted, feeling better, escaping from the thoughts and feelings that we were having beforehand?

And also, how does that behavior somehow validate what we think about ourselves? So sometimes the binge is almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy in that if we feel that we're out of control, if we feel that we are a disaster and that we are a failure, then it's almost like binging confirms and reinforces all the things we believe about ourselves in that moment. If we believe we're out of control, it's a demonstration of being out of control.

If we believe that we're a failure, it's a demonstration of being a failure. I hope you kind of understand where I'm going with that. So in some way, there has to be a payoff to the behavior. Otherwise, we simply wouldn't do it. There's very little in human behavior that we do that's just destructive. It always has to have a payoff, even though the payoff on the surface of it may seem like a negative payoff.

So once we've established the trigger for the behavior and the payoff for that behavior, we then have to consider, is this workable for us going into the future. We need to recognise and validate the payoffs, not judge them, but just kind of see how the behaviour in some way has a benefit to us. And it's recognition of that in a kind of really realistic, non-judgmental way that helps us move forward.

Then we have to kind of go, okay, so there are payoffs, there's benefits, but on the other side of it, what are the costs to this behavior? What's it costing us? How is it benefiting us? And it helps at this stage to sometimes just get a blank piece of paper and literally just write all the else, cost benefits. It's just what we call a functional analysis of what the behavior is actually doing.

So once you've got your list of what it's costing you, which inevitably is that feeling of shame, perhaps, it's reinforcing those feelings of failure. It's reinforcing those feelings of being out of control, which in one hand is a benefit, in another hand is a cost. And we've got to weigh these up to sort of say, is this a behavior that we want to keep doing? Do the benefits actually outweigh the costs?

And normally, once we get to this stage, if we bothered doing all this, we've already come to the conclusion that actually they don't and that we want to change.

Change so then we've got to have a look at what are the alternatives to this behavior and developing a new set of values perhaps that we want to live by and how can we behave differently that aligns with these new values that we've set for ourselves and then if we have a list of new values and new behaviors that we're going to engage in then perhaps do a little bit of analysis around them as well.

What would be the benefits of this new path that we're choosing and what might be the costs of the new path that we're choosing? Just so we go into the behavior change really fully informed of what we're setting ourselves up for. Also now look at the practicalities of where we're going with this. Is it doable? Is it something that we can actually. Put in place in our lives? Or is it just something that we would want to do, but we haven't actually got the skills to implement it?

And we may have to learn those skills. So it's a really good analysis of where we've come from, where we would like to go, and what skills we need in order to get us there.

And sometimes we might need help with this. And hey, that's why people like me exists therapists that you can go to who will help you sort this out for yourself so you have the power to make these changes but sometimes with all of us we need somebody to coach us through them somebody to see the behaviors and have their skills in order to upskill you in these areas that's pretty much all we do as therapists is give you the skills to be able to make the changes you want to change.

We are not the font of all wisdom. We are not people that can wave a magic wand and make things better. And I get that sometimes. I often get people that come to me and they sit there quite passively with this attitude that sort of do it to me, you know, do your magic. I will sit here and you can say something miraculous that will change my life and the penny will drop and I'll suddenly go, oh, that's it. That's what I needed to hear. Thank thank you very much and I'm done.

And it doesn't work like that at all. We simply give you the skills that you need in order to make the changes that you want to make. So in summary.

If any of this chat today has resonated with you on any level, and there's any part of it that you think, yeah, that might be me, I really encourage you to invest some time and effort into resolving the binge eating issues that you might have in your life. I ignored mine for decades, believing that I was just somebody that needed to find the right diet for me. And I spent probably, I'm just totting it up in my head, over 20 years trying

to find the right diet. and there was no right diet because I had an eating disorder. And what I actually needed to resolve was the emotional context that was the basis of that eating disorder. Once I managed to find some answers in that area and to resolve that side of things, which in my case was past trauma and the effects of it for many years, once I began to get on top of that and make resolutions in that area, then I was able to tackle my out of control eating.

And the way that I tackled that was not to go on a diet. Dieting was not the solution for anybody that's dealing with this sort of issue. So have a think about this. Have a think about what you do with your food. Have a think if binging is any part of your food behavior. And if it is, I really encourage you to take a a good hard look at it and work out how you're going to resolve this. Because trust me, finding peace with food and finding a resolution is life changing.

And it's something which I really, really encourage you to seek. Thank you so much for your company today. I would also love it if you could follow this podcast. It really does mean a lot to me. Also, we have a six week online change your relationship with food course that you can take, just visit www.acfeb.com and click on the ACFEB and me courses link. There's also a journal and a workbook available on Amazon, and you'll find that link in our bio.

I really hope you can join me again next week. Goodbye. Music.