Ep #247: Trusting Yourself

Hi! I’m so excited, registration for the next round of The Stop Binge Eating Program opens in two days, on April 27^th of 2023!

And the reason I’m so excited about this is because that means another group of people are going to start changing their lives in two days!

Going through this process of stopping binge eating will open up your life so much, making space for more joy, fulfillment, satisfaction, and true pleasure.

And it will help you turn you into the version of yourself that you’ve been wanting to be. You’ll become the person you truly are without the habits involved with binge eating messing everything up.

You get to be you, who you want to be, doing what you want to do, and I can tell you from experience, it really is awesome to be that way.

So if you’re ready to get started, if you’re ready to finally stop binge eating and change your eating habits and change yourself, go to coachkir.com/group.

If you’re hearing this on Tuesday when this episode is released, or the day after, join the waitlist so you can get notified as soon as I open up registration for the program.

But if you’re hearing this in the days following, you can just go and sign up and get immediate access to The Stop Binge Eating Course before the program officially begins.

Registration will only be open for one week and if you register by Monday May 1^st of 2023 at 5pm ET you’ll also get the workbook bonus where I’ll mail workbooks for the program to your home.

I have no doubt that this round is going to be amazing. I’m going to show up for you as best I can and you’re going to do the same.

Let’s do this together!

Alright, now let’s talk about trusting yourself because you might not trust yourself.

When we struggle with binge eating for a long time, we’re repeatedly doing things that we don’t want to be doing.

We say we’re going to do something and we don’t or we say we’re not going to do something and we do.

So we stop seeing ourselves as reliable. We stop believing ourselves and believing in ourselves.

There’s just been too many times when you’ve said you were only going to have one and you end up having several.

Or too many times that you bring a food into your home and binge on it.

Or you say you’re not going to binge and then you do.

It makes sense that all of this would result in you losing trust in yourself.

Trust is all about believing you are reliable and honest.

And with binge eating, there is so much of the opposite happening.

We change our minds and do what we said we weren’t going to do or vice versa because in the moment, we forgot about our commitment to ourselves, or we decide it’s too hard to not eat, or we get caught up in instant gratification.

And just know that none of this makes you a bad person. So many people experience this same stuff and not even just with food, with so many things.

And I also wouldn’t say that you’re not a trustworthy person either.

You are. You are worthy of all the trust.

You will prove that to yourself and you will trust yourself again and it’s going to happen little by little, bit by bit.

You are going to build trust in yourself and you’ll do it by making small, doable commitments, and following through on them.

You don’t have to bring all your binge foods into your home and not eat them to prove you can be trusted.

You can start proving it to yourself by starting with something small, like deciding what you’ll eat for breakfast and eating what you said you would eat.

Now, I know for a lot of you, you don’t usually binge in the morning and you have no problem eating the breakfast you said you would eat.

And if that’s you, don’t discount it.

It’s so easy for us to disregard the little things like this but, don’t do that.

Instead, use it as evidence that you can do what you said you’d do.

You could also start building trust by committing to not giving in to urges during a time of day when you might feel urges but they’re not super intense.

Again, you might want to discount this and say, “it’s easier then,” but, you’re still doing it.

One of the main purposes of doing this is to get you away from using words like, “always” or “never.”

Because using those words is what can diminish your trust in yourself.

It’s thoughts like, “I always eat what I say I won’t.”

Or, “I always give in to my urges.”

Or, “I never follow through on my eating commitments that I make for myself.”

Or, “I never eat only one.”

Or, “I always eat the whole bag.”

When you start showing yourself that it’s not “always” or “never,” you’re also showing yourself that sometimes, you can trust yourself.

There are times when you are doing what you truly want to be doing.

And that is the beginning of trust building.

Evidence collecting.

So now I want to give you some tips for how you do this and actually follow through on your commitments.

First, whatever it is that you want to be doing or not doing, figure out why you haven’t been.

If you’ve been giving in to your urges, why?

If you’ve been overeating, why?

If you’ve been overly restricting yourself, why?

Let’s get down to the cause of your lack of commitment.

Let’s figure out why you change your mind, why you justify, what your excuses are, and what you think about yourself that causes you to go from committed to uncommitted.

Having this understanding and these reasons why will show you what you need to work on in order to actually follow through.

And then you can prepare yourself for what you expect to come up.

You’ll know what excuses and justifications you need to stop agreeing with. So when your brain tells you that “you deserve to binge,” you can tell yourself “no I don’t,” and also whatever else you want to tell yourself when that thought comes up.

You’ll know what kind of self-talk you’re using that you need to stop agreeing with. So when your brain tells you that, “you’ll never stop binge eating anyway,” you can tell yourself that that’s not true and you will.

And you’re going to practice thinking in this new way, you’re going to rehearse it, so again, you’re prepared when it comes up.

And another thing you’re going to do is to only commit to what feels doable to you.

If you make a decision for yourself and you notice a feeling of dishonesty or disbelief, change your decision. Break it down to something smaller and more doable.

For example, if you decide that you’re not going to binge today and you’re not fully believing that you can do that, what do you believe you can do?

What’s a smaller goal that feels more doable that will help you to not binge?

Maybe it’s committing to writing down your thoughts and feelings if you feel an urge later.

Or maybe it’s taking a moment to acknowledge that you’re feeling an urge if you feel one.

Both can help you to not binge and might feel more doable for you.

And if you hear those and you’re like, “neither sounds doable,” ask yourself, “then what does feel doable? There is something. Explore ideas for yourself.

Another example would making the decision to bring a food you’ve binged on into your house and only eat one serving at a time. That might freak you out a little bit and you might not believe you can. So don’t commit to that.

Maybe instead you commit to having a joy food that you do believe you can have only one serving of at a time. That can prove to you that you can eat a joy food, only have one serving, and not binge on it. You don’t always binge on joy foods and you don’t never have only one serving.

Or maybe you commit to eating that original food with another person if you are someone who will not binge in front of that person and when you do, you’ll show yourself that you are capable of eating one serving of that food without bingeing.

Now, these are all just ideas, you don’t have to do any of them but I just wanted to give you examples of how you can choose more doable commitments, smaller goals, that you will have more confidence in achieving.

And then when you do achieve them, one by one, day by day, the compound effect will happen and your trust and confidence will build as a result.

But there’s something really important that you need to do as well.

If you mess up, if you break a commitment, if you don’t honor your decision, if you don’t do what you said you’d do or do what you said you wouldn’t, do not then make it mean that you’re not trustworthy, that you can’t be trusted, or that you’ve ruined any trust you had built.

None of that is true.

What’s true is that building trust in yourself doesn’t have to happen in a straight line, one win after another after another.

You can still build trust having ups and downs, just like you can stop binge eating even if binges happen in the process of you stopping.

You don’t have to be perfect. You just need to keep working on it.

And when things don’t go as you wanted them to, learn from it and decide how you’ll do better next time.

Maybe you need a smaller goal. Maybe you need to practice more. Maybe you need a different response to your excuses.

You will figure this out.

While you are, focus on your little, and big wins, and learn from the missteps.

You will build trust in yourself.

One decision, one commitment at a time.

And if you want help with this, this is something I work with people on a lot in The Stop Binge Eating Program so if you want my direct and personalized help, join me in this next round. Again, registration is opening this Thursday April 27^th of 2023 and you can go to coachkir.com/group to register or to join the waitlist if you’re hearing this on the 25^th or the 26^th.

Alright, that’s all for today, I’ll talk to you later.

Bye bye!