Secrets and lies

Music. 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. Music. Develop a more healthy relationship with food. Please follow this podcast to make sure you don't miss a thing.

I would like firstly to thank the person that wrote in asking for this subject. I've called it Secrets and Lies, but it's really about the guilt and the shame and the secrecy that surrounds binge eating. I'd like to start this podcast with a little story. I'm going to tell you two anecdotes, actually. And the first one, I must admit, is something that I did. Years ago, I used to have binge eating disorder. And this is something that I call the Tim Tam tragedy.

For those of you that don't know what a Tim Tam is, all Australians listening to this will be completely understanding of what I'm talking about. Tim Tams are chocolate biscuits that have a chocolate centre and a chocolate coating. And there's sort of two biscuits sandwiched into one. And in the middle is the sort of chocolate sort of, I don't know what you call it. It's not icing, but chocolate sort of fondant-y stuff. And then it's wrapped in chocolate.

For those people in the UK, the nearest you have to a Tim Tam is a penguin biscuit, but a penguin is not nearly as good as a Tim Tam. I don't know what equivalents there are in other countries, but if you're interested, you can Google what a Tim Tam is and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. It's an Australian institution. Everybody here knows about the Tim Tam. So anyway, you can buy these in any supermarket. market.

And years ago, I found myself at home on my own. My husband was out at work. My kids were young then. They were probably both at school. And I was on my own in the house. I had been shopping, I think, the day before, and I'd bought a packet of Tim Tams. So everyone kind of knew that they were in the house. Everyone had probably seen them sitting in the pantry. About, it was probably mid-morning, I decided to stop and have a cup of tea. And I thought, thought, OK, I'll have a Tim Tam.

And I thought to myself at the time, because as I said, I had binge eating disorder. I was carrying a lot of extra weight. And it occurred to me what would be for a normal person, a reasonable amount of Tim Tams to eat. And I decided at that time that two would be a reasonable amount to eat. So I opened the packet and I thought I'm going to eat two two Tim Tams, because then I will appear as if I'm a reasonable person to the rest of my family.

I opened the packet and I ate the two Tim Tams. But of course, it was, let's say, mid-morning, something like that. And I eventually, after about half an hour or an hour, I was craving another Tim Tam. Because I'd opened them, I'd tasted them, I was thinking about them, They were on my mind. So I thought, right, okay, what do I do here? And I thought, I'll have one more Tim Tam because two is what a reasonable person would do. Three, I can kind of get away with.

So I had the third Tim Tam, but by that time I wanted a fourth Tim Tam. And I thought, if I have a fourth one, I'm really gonna have to think through what I do with the rest of the Tim Tams. Now, I think there's about eight in a packet. So up to this point, I think, I decided if I'm going to commit and eat more, then I basically have to get rid of the packet and destroy the evidence that I've eaten this whole packet.

So I did. That's exactly what I did. I got to about Tim Tam six or perhaps seven, and I quite honestly began to feel a bit nauseous. I really wasn't enjoying it anymore, but I had in my head that I had to finish the packet packet because I'd gone from being a reasonable person to the whole situation being unreasonable and I was now in a situation where I had to hide the evidence.

So I finished the packet and I thought okay well what do I do with the packet and also how do I explain the fact that there was a whole packet of Tim Tams there and now it's empty and then I reasoned with myself that I would have have to go to the supermarket and buy a replacement packet of Tim Tams for the one that I had eaten. So off I went. I jumped in the car, went off to the supermarket, bought an identical packet of Tim Tams.

I actually took the empty packet with me to the supermarket so I could dispose of it in a bin near the supermarket, a public bin, so that it wouldn't be found in my own bin at home. And I bought another packet of Tim Tams, came home with them, put them in the cupboard, stuck them on the shelf there. And then a thought occurred to me. And I thought, are they going to reasonably believe that I spent all day at home on my own and didn't eat any Tim Tams? So guess what I did?

And this is where the Tim Tam tragedy comes in. I actually opened the second packet of Tim Tams and I ate two. Remember, that's what I thought a reasonable person would do. So by this time, I'd eaten a whole packet of Tim Tams plus the two to appear as if I was a normal person.

I laugh about this now, but to be honest, it's really common behavior from the people that I treat with binge eating disorder and the people that I treat with bulimia because people with bulimia also have a binge before they have a purge. This is really not unusual behavior. And I wanted to tell one of my many stories. I've got probably hundreds I could tell. But that one to me was just a classic example of the way that your brain thinks while you are doing that sort of eating.

Now, I'll move on to the second story.

And this was not me. This was someone that came to see me many years ago. She had a little bit of a thing for McDonald's. And I call this story McDonald's Madness. And what she used to do, she was a single woman. She lived on her own. She didn't have a partner. She didn't have children. But she loved to binge on McDonald's food. food and she would take herself off to a restaurant, maybe after work. She would stand in the queue and she would have a look up at the menu.

You know, her finger might go to her lips as if she was thinking and she would be perusing the menu. And then the assistant at McDonald's would say, can I help you? And she would go, yeah, I'm just trying to think. I'm trying to think what Steve would like. And then what she would do is make up an entire fictional family for herself. So she would stand there looking at the menu in Maccas. This was back in the days when I know it's all automated now when you do touchscreens and things like that.

But this was back in the days where you actually had contact with a human. And she would stand there and she'd go, OK, Steve, Steve, Steve likes a Big Mac. Yeah, I'll get I'll get a Big Mac for Steve, please. And of course, the question would be, you know, would you like fries with that? And she went, oh, yeah, yeah. Steve's a big man. He'll want fries. He'll want fries. Would you like a drink with that? Yeah, actually, I'll get a vanilla milkshake for Steve. Thanks very much.

Now, let me think. What about Claire? And again, she would peruse the menu and she would say, oh, I think, yeah, I'll get the fish burger for Claire and, you know, no chips for her. No, because, you know, she doesn't eat very much. And would she like a drink? Yeah, let's have a Diet Coke. Let's have one of those for Claire. And then she would make up a son. So she might say, oh, I've got a little boy as well. Let's call him, I don't know, Daniel.

And she would go, oh, just some chicken nuggets for Daniel. Actually, can we have a kid's meal? Yeah, can I do a nugget kid's meal? Because he likes the toy and things like that. And then at the end of the fictitious family that she'd made up and ordered for, she would say, now, what do I want? I'm not really hungry. I'll just have a cheeseburger. Thanks. No chips, no drink. Thank you.

And she would pay for her order. her. She would take what was by this time quite a big bag of food and she would go and sit in her car and eat all the food. Now, she lived alone, so she could have easily taken that food home. But she said, it's almost as if if it was eaten in the car, it didn't count. It hadn't happened.

She would eat all the food in the car. She would feel absolutely awful afterwards, sick, sick disgusted with herself you know stomach very extended very bloated feeling very horrible she would then put the empty bag in the bin in the mcdonald's car park and she would drive home.

And this is something which again, if you've never done this, it might seem like an extraordinary story, but it really isn't. There's hundreds and hundreds of stories out there from people that binge eat every day. And this goes on in secret. We don't talk about this. I was speaking to a patient actually this week, and they were saying how guilty they feel taking in leftover food for for their lunch, because they have things like pasta bakes and curries and things like that.

And she said, I feel terrible because everyone else at work is sitting there eating their salad or having their dip and their chopped up carrots and things. And she said, and I'm the only one that eats like I do. And I said to her, well, hold on a second. You're seeing what they are eating, but you don't know that that's all they are eating. What you're seeing is they're public eating and the public eating can sometimes be very, very different to the secret eating.

Secrecy is the breeding ground for eating disorders. It's there in every eating disorder, to be honest. Obviously, the overeating disorders like binge eating disorder and bulimia, Nobody really talks about the binge. Nobody does this in public. It's a secret behavior. And if someone has bulimia and they are purging in some way, again, that is a secret behavior. They don't do that in public.

Even with anorexia, which you could argue is one of the more visible eating disorders because generally the person with anorexia is very lean, is very low weight. But even then, there's a lot of secrecy around anorexia as well. Sometimes that person in public will appear to eat. They will appear to eat to kind of throw people off the scent. And in secret, they're not eating and they're excessively exercising, for instance. Secrecy is present in every single eating disorder.

So what can we do about this? Well, I think the first step is to start to be honest with yourself. Before you can be honest with anyone else, you have to really admit to yourself what you're doing, because sometimes people lie even to themselves. So honesty is absolutely the first and most important thing. Ask yourself what you're doing and ask yourself, why am I doing what I'm doing? And normally it's with most behaviors, it's because the behavior provides some sort of solution.

So what is the solution that this behavior is performing? It may seem on the surface like it's not beneficial in any way at all, but it always is. Otherwise we wouldn't do it. So every behavior is beneficial to us in some way. Usually with any sort of binge eating, the binge is there to numb our emotions.

So whether we're feeling lonely or we're feeling overwhelmed or we've been through some past trauma or there's something that's going on which is a really difficult emotion to deal with, often binging is a way to just numb that emotion away. Often though, after we've had a binge, we feel guilty. And guilt and shame are emotions which are quite different. Guilt is usually us going back over something we've done or sometimes not done and,

feeling that we failed in some way. So being guilty that you forgot to thank someone or being guilty that you stole something when you were a teenager, it's a review of your actions and then having regret about the way that you acted. And quite often guilt can be useful because it can teach us about our values. It can teach us about our sense of self. Guilt's something that we can often go back and repair because we can go back and apologize to somebody or we can do something to make amends.

So guilt actually is viewed generally as a fairly useful emotion to have. Even though it doesn't feel good, quite often we can make amends and go back and fix something. Shame, however, is quite different. And shame is that sort of internalized feeling where we feel that we're flawed and we're unworthy of love and belonging. So something we have done, rather than us just regretting it, it's actually left us with a sense of being unworthy of connection.

It's also becoming your actions. So going back to that example I gave before, feeling guilty that I stole something as a teenager is different to feeling the shame version, which would be feeling feeling that I'm a thief and there's absolutely no recovery from that. That's who I am as a person. So it's adopting a behavior that you might have done in the past and then regretted and maybe learned from.

But instead of that, you're identifying with that so much and internalizing that, that you actually feel that that forms part of your identity. And shame is a really damaging emotion to carry with you. So step one was to be honest with yourself about what's going on,

what you're actually consuming, try and work out why, what emotions you're numbing down. And the second stage really is to take ownership of your food. So to step up and say, no, I am going to own what I eat. And I'm going to say a sentence now, and I might actually say it twice for dramatic effect because it's really important. The sentence is, you are allowed to feel hungry and eat food regardless of your body size.

Okay, I'll say that again. You are allowed to feel hungry and you are allowed to eat food regardless of your body size. That should not carry with it any guilt or shame. You are allowed to do those things. things. So the first step is to take responsibility for your food. If you are going to eat something, you can own it. You can eat it. There's no rules. There's nothing that says you can't, but you have to take responsibility for it.

Also, learn to eat mindfully. Now, I'm not going to cover the whole of mindfulness in this podcast, but maybe in another one in the future. But a lot lot of people that I see say, I love food. That's the problem.

And then I say, well, describe to me how you eat. And they say, oh, I get this great big plate of food and I eat really, really quickly. And then I stuff it all in and then I feel really bloated. Then I always pause and I say, where's the love? You said you loved food. I don't see love. I see something that you're kind of ashamed of. So you want to get it in as quickly as possible and done as quickly as possible.

And they'll often argue no no no I love it I love it and then I'll say well tell me about the taste then describe it to me describe the texture describe the enjoyment that you get from each mouthful and then they realize actually they kind of can't because they're they're just shoving it in learning to eat mindfully is about loving the food it's about taking your time with the food really experiencing the food.

Because if you say that you love the taste of food, well, the taste disappears when you swallow the food. So why would you not capitalize on the time that that food is in your mouth? Really taste it, really experience it, take your time, enjoy.

And surprisingly, when you eat mindfully and you actually take the time to enjoy the food, the result is you actually eat a lot less because you are taking the time over it and you're giving your body time to recognize that food's coming on board and to send you the appropriate satiety signals. So we're going to take responsibility. We're going to learn to eat mindfully. Also, connecting with your body and checking in on it is really, really important.

A lot of people who binge eat really disconnect from their body.

They seek this numbness. And a lot of the times, especially if people are at a higher weight, they don't actually like their body very much. So disconnecting from it is a really useful tool. all. I want you to try and connect back in because how are you going to hear what your body is trying to tell you unless you listen? Listen to your satiety signals. Listen to what your body wants rather than just giving it what you think it wants.

It's really connecting and checking in with your body while you're eating. Then you can make informed decisions about what you're going going to eat and how you're going to eat and how much you're going to eat. Instead of making split-second decisions that are fear-based, like, I don't know whether I've got any food in the house, so I'm going to eat lots now, or I'll eat lots now because I don't want to ever feel hungry later. Those are fear-based decisions.

The other thing I'm going to tell you is to forgive yourself for any prior craziness.

Binge eating, in fact, any eating disorder, there are elements of crazy in each one. We find ourselves doing really ridiculous things. And I want you just to forgive yourself because it was what it was. It is what it is. However you want to word this, it's not you. You're not crazy. It's just that the behavior attached to the eating disorder order can be. So I want you to be kind to yourself, forgive yourself.

And I'm going to tell you what we did with the McDonald's madness, because this worked extremely well. And it follows those steps that I've just talked about. So with the person that came to me with the McDonald's madness. I told her, first of all, that she has every right to eat food at McDonald's. There's no reason why she should not. And that her body, regardless of its size, is allowed to feel hungry and it's allowed to eat food. But she has to take responsibility for it.

So gone were Steve and Claire and Daniel and the whole fake family. And I challenged her to actually go into a branch of McDonald's, go up to the counter and actually use the words I would like and then order her meal.

I told her there's no rules. She can order as much as she likes, but she must say I would like and then place her order. We did quite a bit of work around this and we worked out what would be for her the optimum meal, what she thought ahead of time would be enjoyable and would fill her up. And she decided it was actually Steve's order. It was Steve's Big Mac and chips and milkshake. She decided that would actually be the optimum order for her.

And if she could eat that and then walk out the door, she would actually be pretty happy with herself and feel that she had done the appropriate thing. So I said to her great you go in you say I would like a Big Mac yes I would like fries with that and I would like a vanilla milkshake thank you very much and you pay but you don't bag it up to go you eat in the premises so you get your tray you walk to a table and you sit and you eat your meal.

I also told her about mindful eating because I didn't want her to stuff the meal in in order just to get out of the door quickly. I said, I want you to enjoy that meal. You've said it's your favourite McDonald's meal. I want you to enjoy it. Actually sit down, experience the tastes, experience the textures, check in with your body as you go. So have a couple of bites of the burger and then check in. How full am I? You know, if I could imagine my stomach, is it half full?

Is it hardly full at all? Am I nearly full? You know, just check in where it is. And I was saying to every couple of mouthfuls, check back with your body. Where is your body? How are you experiencing it? How are the flavours to you? Are they getting better the more you eat? Or are they kind of decreasing and they're not as powerful? Or perhaps they're just staying the same. All these things are absolutely okay. You're not looking for solutions. You're just looking for the experience.

The rules were she has to order what she wants. She has to sit in there and she has to eat it. And then if when she has finished the Big Mac, the chips and the vanilla milkshake,

she's to check in again with her body and ask herself, am I done now or do I want more? And I said, if you come back with, I want more, again, that's absolutely fine. There's no guilt attached to that. You are allowed to eat food regardless of the shape and size of your body. If you want more, you decide what you're going to have and you approach the counter and you start again with, I would like, and then you order whatever it is you like. Maybe she wants an apple pie. Who knows?

You then order your apple pie and you go back to the table again and you eat that apple pie whilst all the time checking in. Am I full? Am I satisfied now? Is that enough or do I want more? So I said to her, there's no rules here. You can eat the entire order that you would have eaten secretly in the car, but you must take responsibility for it. take ownership. Say, yes, this is my food and I'm going to eat it. And that's what she did. She went back to McDonald's. She ate Steve's order,

the Big Mac, the chips and the vanilla milkshake. And I think the first time she went, she said she did actually go back for something else. It may well have been an apple pie. Maybe that's why it's come into my head. But after she'd eaten the next thing, she checked in again and she decided actually she was was very full. She'd eaten a lot and she felt full and she felt satisfied. And she walked out. And the next time when she went back, she said she just ordered what she wanted.

She didn't go up for a second portion. She continued back to McDonald's because she enjoyed it. And I'm not going to put a ban on anybody eating fast food because that just makes you crave it more.

She found that every time she was getting better and better at the mindfulness, gratefulness there was much less guilt and shame around her eating and she was taking responsibility and all those factors combined actually decreased her eating and took it out of the closet there wasn't the secrecy surrounding it so hopefully you take something away from that today there's heaps more to be said about this and I will be covering lots more in future podcasts but that's just a little bit

to get you started if binge eating is something that you have done or you think about doing or maybe you're in the midst of an ever binge eating disorder or you're in the midst of bulimia. These ideas, these skills that you can practice are really important.

And for anybody that has a binge in their behavior, then mindful eating is the most important skill for you to learn, to basically appreciate the food rather than to get it done quickly and in.

So we might cover mindfulness either next time or the time after but I'm going to do mindful eating because for anybody with that style of eating it's the most important skill now just like last time I'm begging please can you follow this podcast it really helps us hugely and it costs you nothing and we would love to send you a reminder each week that a new episode has come up so you don't miss anything.

Having followers for the show and having downloads is so important as far as us gaining momentum and also making the content much better for you so that we can provide something really valuable to you that's really useful. So please follow, please share, please listen, and hopefully you'll be here with me next time. Thanks so much. Bye-bye. Music.

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