Ep #1: Why You Binge Eat

Hello! And welcome to The Stop Binge Eating Podcast.

My name is Kirstin Sarfde and I’m so excited to be here creating this podcast for anyone who’s struggling with binge eating and is looking for real, long-term solutions for how to stop doing it for good.

If you feel like you’re out of control around food, if you think about food and eating way too much, if you find yourself feeling ashamed and embarrassed about how much you eat or about how your body looks, then you are in the right place.

If you’re not quite sure if you binge eat or just overeat, I do want to say that there’s no hard and fast rule about how much you have to eat in order for you to consider it a binge, I’ve had people come to me with all kinds of binge descriptions but, if you feel out of control while you’re eating, experience a lot of negative emotions afterward, and eat way beyond fullness, then I say you can call it a binge.

So, throughout this podcast, I’m going to cover all things binge eating. That means I’m gonna break down why you binge and how to stop doing it, I’m going to also talk about emotional eating, because that can be a big piece of it too, and I’m going to touch on tons of topics you didn’t even know you wanted to hear about that are related to binge eating. My mission here is to help you get your ideal eating habits and to stop having the negative effects of binge eating affect your life. I want you to feel confident, in control, proud of yourself and I’m going to do my best to help you make that happen.

I have so many things I want to teach you and I’m excited to dive in with our first topic today, but first I’d like to share with you a little bit about myself so you know who the heck is talking to you right now.

Again, my name is Kirstin and the reason why I care so much about this topic is because I myself struggled with binge eating for over 10 years, probably around 12 or 13 years.

My story in a nutshell of how I started binge eating begins with the not so great eating habits I had growing up which got me to my highest weight by the end of my freshman year in college. I remember seeing a picture of myself at the end of the school year and thinking I desperately needed to do something. So I put myself on a diet and during my sophomore year and I lost 40 lbs.

But there were some problems losing the weight the way I did.

One of the problems was that I never really overcame the eating habits I’d been living with for most of my life. For some reason during that time I was losing weight, I was able to buckle down and stick to my calorie goal and lose all the weight but, when I was done losing weight, and wasn’t so focused on it anymore, all my old eating habits that had gotten me to my highest weight crept back in. I never really worked on them so they came back.

Another one of the problems was that the diet I was following, which was one I put together with all the information I was reading in magazines during my long gym cardio sessions, was too restrictive. So not long after I stopped dieting, I started bingeing.

After all that time of eating very carefully to make sure I stayed within my calorie goal, I started caring less and less and was overeating more and more. It didn’t seem like a big deal at first, stuffing myself to capacity here and there, but it sure ended up turning into a huge deal. At first it seemed like a fun, pleasurable thing to do, but then it became a compulsion that seemed uncontrollable.

Throughout my decade-plus of bingeing, there were a few times when I did do well and I thought the problem was gone, but most of the time, I was struggling. I just could not figure out why this kept happening to me and the emotional impact it had on me was awful. I felt frustrated because I knew what I should be eating and I knew that I shouldn’t binge, but I just couldn’t get myself to do it. I felt embarrassed because my weight was all over the place, up and down so many times. I spent years trying to get back down to my goal weight that I’d reached in college but I could never get there.

There was one time I did get to my new goal, which was a little bit more than my lowest weight in college, but my bingeing ruined it soon after. Any progress I’d ever made, I’d ruin with bingeing and end up right back where I started. I was constantly trying to lose weight and I hated that people could see my losses and gains. No one ever said anything, but I would just imagine what kinds of judgments they had about me.

Needless to say, it was not a fun time for me.

But thankfully there is a happy ending to this story. I stopped the bingeing and when I did, I wasn’t even expecting it. There were definitely times when I really thought I was going to have to deal with it forever, that it was just a part of me now, but thank goodness I don’t and it’s not.

I ended up finding my solution through coaching which I hadn’t even known was a solution. I went through a life and weight loss coach training and certification program so I could embark a new and exciting career and throughout that training, I learned the most amazing tools and insights that helped me get out of the binge cycle and realize my self-control.

It completely changed my eating habits and my relationship with food has changed immensely. Does that mean I eat perfectly all the time? No, of course not. But I don’t feel guilty after eating like I used to, I don’t feel out of control with food, I’m not afraid of any foods, and I don’t feel like food has power over me like I used to think it did.

So I’m here because I know your struggle and I want to help you. Any story you could tell me I can most likely relate to because I feel like I’ve done it all when it comes to unhealthy eating habits and I want to teach you everything I’ve learned that helped me because I want you to have the same success that I had.

Throughout this podcast I’ll be sharing many more stories from my binge eating days, but that right there is the gist of my story. So now that you know a little about me, lets get into today’s topic – why you binge eat.

I wanted to talk about why you binge right up front in episode one because knowing the cause is so important.

You have to know the cause in order to come up with a real solution. You have to know what needs to be fixed before you can fix it.

You can try to just eat differently, which is what most people do, but you’ve probably already tried that and it didn’t work. Because, how you eat is really a symptom of something else. There is a reason why you eat how you eat.

So instead of working on just changing your eating, let’s work on what’s causing the eating.

Have you ever finished bingeing and thought, “Why did I do that?” and then just fall into a big shame spiral without ever answering the question?

I know I have!

Or if I did come up with an answer, either it wasn’t the right one, it wasn’t an answer that was going to help me change anything, or I did have the right answer but then I didn’t know what to do with that information.

A lot of the time I thought it was just how I was, that I was a person who binged and there was nothing I could actively do about it. I even sometimes thought that there wasn’t even a cause, that it was just something that happened to me. Maybe this behavior would just go away on it’s own or maybe something would just click one day and I’d stop doing it.

But waiting and hoping is not the best way to deal with this. There is a reason why it happens, there is a cause, and there is a solution that can be actively worked towards but not until you find the cause.

So what’s the cause? Why do you binge?

You binge because you feel urges to do it. Urges precede bingeing.

If you didn’t feel urges to binge, then you wouldn’t binge.

What an urge is, is a really strong desire and it makes you feel compelled to binge. It makes eating a lot of food seem very urgent and necessary. It can feel like it overcomes you and there’s no way out unless you eat.

Does this feeling sound familiar to you?

I remember there were so many times I’d just be sitting there, minding my own business, and this overwhelming urge to binge would come over me and I thought I just had to binge. So the next thing I knew I was eating as if I had no choice. I thought I had to eat and had to keep going.

Or, sometimes I’d start eating for emotional reasons, I’d eat because I didn’t want to feel an emotion I didn’t like, like loneliness, boredom, stress, or nervousness, and as I was eating, the urge would just show up and my eating would transform from emotional eating to binge eating. I’d go from eating a little here and a little there just to avoid a feeling, to then feeling the urge to keep going, and feeling out of control, like I couldn’t stop.

So it’s these urges you feel that are causing you to binge. They might appear while you’re eating, or before you eat, but whenever they do, they are what drive you to binge.

Now you might want to know why you feel those.

Not everyone feels them, right? So why do you?

Well, there’s two main reasons.

One is because you’re overly restricting your food. I’m going to be talking about this topic a lot in future episodes of this podcast because there is so much to say about it and why you do it and why it can be hard to stop doing it, but I’ll touch on the basics today just so you can have an understanding of why you binge.

So, you could be overly restricting your food in one of two ways.

One way you might be doing it is if you’re under eating.

So, you’re not eating enough food to properly fuel your body.

You might not eat when you feel hungry.

You might stop eating at meals even if you still feel hungry.

And you’re likely doing this because you’re trying to control your weight.

You might think that if you eat when you’re hungry or if you eat until you feel full, then you’ll gain weight, or that you won’t lose weight.

Or, you might be honoring calorie goals rather than your body’s hunger and fullness because you trust the calories more than your body. But the amount of calories you’re eating might not be enough.

Then, in your attempt to control your weight by doing this, you’re not giving your body adequate fuel that it needs.

And if you’re not nourishing your body properly and aren’t giving it enough fuel, your brain is going to get concerned.

Your brain’s main job is to keep you alive, it’s main concern is survival, and if it thinks you’re not getting enough fuel, and are going to starve, it’s going to urge you to eat as much as you can when you can.

The longer you go without eating enough for your body to function well, the louder your brain is going to scream at you to feed it.

It’s going to urge you to eat more.

So if you’re under eating, your brain is going to send you urges to eat a lot.

So what you’ve been doing to try and lose or not gain weight can actually backfire, and this is what happens to a lot of people when they go on diets that are too-low calorie. It causes this back and forth between not eating enough and eating way too much.

The second way you might be overly restricting your food is if you’re not allowing yourself to eat the foods you like and want to be eating.

You might think that certain foods are bad, or that if you eat them you’ll binge or gain weight, so you make them forbidden or off-limits.

This can be another way you’re trying to control your weight.

So many diets have told us that you can’t eat certain foods and lose weight or that you will gain weight if you eat certain foods.

So you start becoming afraid of them, or you simply just don’t allow yourself to eat them anymore.

You tell yourself that you shouldn’t eat them, or that you can’t eat them.

And when you keep denying yourself of what you want, your desire for it is going to grow. You’ll want it more. Your desire will build and build, become more intense, until it becomes an urgent desire – an urge.

You go from “I want that” to “I need that.”

So what ends up happening is that you go from excessive restriction to excessive eating.

You go from one extreme to another.

You go from never eating those foods to eating all of those foods.

And, not only are you urging to eat what you haven’t been allowing yourself to eat, but you’re likely going to tell yourself that it’s “just this one time,” because you’re going to go back to restricting those foods again tomorrow.

So now, since you’re taking those foods away again, you want to eat as much as you can while you can because this is your only opportunity.

You’re feeling an urgency to eat them all now before you tell yourself you can’t again.

This is what happens to a lot of people right before they go on a diet. They get in their last hurrah before they don’t allow themselves to eat certain foods.

So there can be an urge to binge on what you haven’t been allowing and an urge to binge on what you won’t be allowing.

So if you’re doing either of these types of being overly restrictive with your eating, whether it’s under eating or under allowing, either can lead to you feel a strong urge to binge on what you’ve been denying yourself of – whether it’s fuel for your body or foods you like to eat.

And this is a normal reaction.

There is nothing wrong with you if this is how you react to excessive restriction. Your brain is working just fine.

It’s having a normal reaction to excessive restriction.

So again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with your brain.

And you can prevent your brain from reacting this way by not being overly restrictive with food.

If you’re not being overly restrictive, you won’t create those urges that are a response to excessive restriction, and then you won’t feel driven to binge.

Being overly restrictive is one way that you might be creating urges that drive you to binge.

Now, the second reason why you could be feeling urges is because you’re trying to control your emotions with food.

Now, not everyone who binges does this but, it is a very common cause of urges to binge.

When you feel an uncomfortable emotion, you might be very eager, maybe even desperate to escape, avoid, numb, change, or distract from the emotional discomfort.

You might want to change how you’re feeling, so you can feel better, and you try to feel better by eating food.

And you might think the more you eat, the better you get to feel and for longer.

So you start eating to change how you feel, to feel better, and you keep eating to keep the emotional discomfort away.

So basically, it goes from just emotional eating, to binge eating as the eating gets more excessive and possibly faster and you start to feel out of control and like you can’t stop.

If you are someone who is resistant to feeling uncomfortable emotions, or is scared to, and if eating is how you handle your emotions, then when you feel uncomfortable emotions, you’re going to urge to get out of that emotion, to change it, to make yourself feel better, and that urge is going to show up as an urge to eat since eating is what you know to do to feel differently.

And the more intense your emotion, or the more intense your desire to change it is, the more intense your urge will be and the more you’ll feel driven to eat.

So using food to regulate your emotions could be a reason why you feel urges to binge eat.

So, those are the two main reasons why you feel urges to binge.

Because, you overly restrict your food or because you use food to control your emotions.

So if you want to stop feeling urges to binge, so you can stop binge eating, then you’re going to need to stop being overly restrictive and stop controlling your emotions with food.

Now, in future episodes of this podcast, I will be going into detail about how to do those two things, what can make it hard to do those two things, and all things restriction and emotions and binge eating, so that’s coming attractions.

There’s so much to be said about them that I just can’t fit it all into one episode.

So I’ll be sharing bite sized chunks with you in each episode.

But for now, I hope this has helped you to understand what is causing you to binge eat and to see that there is a way out of it.

It’s not just happening to you.

And there isn’t anything inherently wrong with you.

You’re just doing things that are causing you to feel urges to binge and those things are absolutely changeable.

Okay? So, that’s what I have for you today. Make sure you subscribe to or follow this podcast so you can keep on learning how you can end this binge eating cycle that you’re stuck in and if you have any questions or requests for future episodes, send an email to info@coachkir.com.

I’m so excited to get started with this podcast and I look forward to talking to you next time. Bye bye!