Ep #285: Getting What You Want Before You Reach Your Goal

Hi! It is almost time for a new group of people to go through The Stop Binge Eating Group Coaching Program! Registration for the next round is opening up next week on January 25^th of 2024 and I couldn’t be more excited.

I’m excited to meet everyone and to work so closely with them, I’m excited to watch them progress over the next several months, and I’m excited for them to achieve something they’ve been trying to do for years, maybe even decades.

You can be a part of this. Now can be the time for you. We can do this together, me and you, and you can have the support of the other people who will be doing it with you in the group.

And you can do this, I really 100% believe that. So show up for yourself and do everything you can to make it happen. And watch yourself make yourself proud.

Now, you can go to coachkir.com/group, that’s c-o-a-c-h-k-i-r dot com / g-r-o-u-p to join the waitlist so you can get notified via email as soon as registration opens up next week, and then you can get started on the coursework right away once you register, or if you’re listening to this while registration is open, you can go to that page, get registered, and get started now.

There’s a lot of info about the program on that page so read it through and if you have any questions that aren’t answered there, email them to info@coachkir.com.

2024 is going to be your year. You’re going to do it this year.

And I will personally help you do it. Let’s go!

Alright, and now onto today’s episode topic which is, getting what you want before you reach your goal.

When we set goals, we think about what amazingness is waiting for us once we achieve it.

For binge eating, we might think about how when we stop binge eating we’ll feel free and at peace around food, we’ll feel in control, we’ll stop obsessing about food and thinking about it so much, we’ll be able to eat moderate amounts of our favorite foods, we’ll feel more confident, be happier, and have higher self-esteem, there’s so many things that we think will be better once we stop binge eating.

So we keep our eye on the prize, which is a good thing, but, we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that we only get the prize once we get there.

But in fact, we can get, maybe even need to get, some of the prize on our way there. It’s how we’ll actually get to our goal.

Here’s what I mean.

Take feeling at peace and free with food.

You don’t stop binge eating and then feel at peace and free.

Stopping binge eating doesn’t create that for you. You don’t get it once you get there.

You create that for yourself as you’re becoming binge free.

As you become more at peace and free with food, it helps you to stop binge eating.

Before you stop binge eating, you to stop being too restrictive with yourself, you allow more foods so nothing is off-limits, you let go of your fears, you stop labeling foods as good and bad, you eat how you want to eat and become calmer with your eating decisions.

As you do all of those things, you create peace and freedom and that’s what’s going to help you reach your goal of stopping binge eating.

And what about being happier and feeling more confident? That’s something most of us would expect to get once we’ve stopped binge eating, right?

Well, not binge eating doesn’t make you feel happy and confident. You make yourself confident and happier by changing how you think about yourself and about your life. Your thoughts determine how you feel. Changing your eating isn’t going to magically change how you think, you will work on changing how you think.

And when you work on feeling happier and more confident, it can be easier for you to stop binge eating. You do better when you feel better, right?

This is something people sometimes expect from weight loss too, that they’ll be happier when they lose weight and they’re then surprised when they’re not. And they’re not because even though they changed their body they didn’t change their mind.

If you want to be happier and more confident, it’s going to happen when you change how you’re thinking, not what you’re eating.

Now, is it easier to feel happier and confident if you’re not binge eating? I mean, you’ll have one less thing that is contributing to your unhappiness and lack of confidence, sure. But you may still have lingering thoughts about yourself and your life that you haven’t addressed and if you don’t address them, your feelings won’t change as much as you want them to.

So if you want to feel happier and more confident, don’t think you have to wait until you’ve stopped binge eating. Create more of it now.

When you have any success, even the smallest success, celebrate it. It will help you to build confidence because you’ll be acknowledging that you did something well, maybe even something you hadn’t done before or hadn’t done in awhile. It can help to prove that you can do something you need to do to reach the big goal of stopping binge eating.

And you can choose to focus on the good in yourself and in your life. You can find something, and doing that will make you feel happier. And you can choose a difference perspective for certain things. For example, I was talking with one of my group members today about how she thinks about that time of day when she comes home from work. She told me she hates it. That’s of course going to block her from feeling happy.

But then we talked about how she can make that time fun with her kids, in ways that they both enjoy, and she came up with a couple ideas that already started to light her up just thinking about them. And then while she’s doing them, she’s going to be intentional about how she thinks about what her kids are doing and about what she thinks about this time she’s spending with them. She’s changing her perspective of that time of day and now she’ll get to feel more happy just thinking about it and while she’s in it.

And this is going to help her to not binge during that time of day, a time when she more often than not does binge because she’s not feeling happy and uses food to feel happier.

She’s not going to use food now. She’s going to manage her thoughts to create happiness.

And she’s not waiting to stop bingeing to feel happier, she’s working on being happier now, during that time after work, so she’s not eating to fill the time or to avoid her anxious or stressed feelings during that time.

So working on feeling happier now is what will help her reach her goal of stopping binge eating. She’s not waiting to feel happier, she’s doing it now.

And here’s another one people tend to wait for. Believing they can stop binge eating. They don’t believe they can stop binge eating and won’t believe they can until they do it.

That’s actually not going to work.

You have to create belief before you do it, in order to do it.

It can’t be “I’ll believe it when I see it,” it has to be, as Wayne Dyer said, “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

If you don’t believe it can happen you won’t see it come to fruition because if you don’t believe it can happen, you won’t put in effort to make it happen.

One of the biggest obstacles that stops people from being successful with stopping binge eating, or with anything, is a lack of belief that they can do it.

If you don’t believe you can, because you haven’t done it before, then you’re going to feel hopeless and not even try.

But when you believe you can stop binge eating, or at least if you believe you can do some of the things you need to do to stop binge eating and can learn how to do the things you don’t know how to do, then you will feel hopeful, or confident, or optimistic, and you’ll try.

So you can’t wait until you’ve done it to believe you can. You need to believe now, or you don’t need to fully believe, you just need to at least have enough belief to drive you forward.

So like I said, there is so much we expect to get once we’ve reached the goal.

But really, we need to get it before reaching the goal and you’ll get it by gradually building it and creating it.

If you want to feel free around food, you’re going to start creating that now by giving yourself the freedom you’re wanting. And you do that by giving yourself permission to eat those foods you don’t allow yourself to eat. Freedom is having the power to act as you want and the truth is, you already have that power, you already have the ability to eat as you want, and you prove it every time you binge on those foods you don’t allow yourself to eat.

So now, you have to give yourself, in your mind, the power and freedom you already have.

As you do, you will feel freer and as you feel freer, you will binge less because you won’t be building up desire for what you’re telling yourself you can’t have until the desire becomes strong and urgent. Instead, you’ll give yourself what you desire when you desire it and it will be a more peaceful experience without any buildup.

If you want to feel in control with food, you’re going to start feeling that way now. You’re going to acknowledge that you can stop eating, you are capable of stopping, and you just need to figure out why you’re not stopping so you can understand how you’ll get yourself to stop.

When you can understand that you are capable of stopping that’s when you’ll begin to feel more in control and you’ll need to do this to actually try and stop yourself. It’s just like with the belief thing I talked about a moment ago. You have to believe you have control if you’re going to actually try and take control.

You have the power to make it so you feel less urges. You can stop being overly restrictive with your eating so you don’t create intense urges to binge on what you’re depriving yourself of. You can allow yourself to feel your uncomfortable emotions so you’re not urging for food whenever you feel one. And you can bring other pleasures, besides food into your life so when you’re wanting pleasure you’re not urging for food because you have other ways to get pleasure.

You have so much more control over yourself than you give yourself credit for.

If you want to stop obsessing about food, right now, you have to explore why you obsess about it. Is it because you rely on food to feel good? Is it because eating is the main way that you experience pleasure? Is it because you’re hyper focused on what you should, shouldn’t, can’t, or have to eat because you’re hyper focused on trying to change the size and shape of your body?

When you understand why you obsess and get to work on making food less important, then you won’t obsess so much. And when I say less important, what I mean is that food is of course important for life, we need it to survive, and we’re also going to use it simply for pleasure sometimes. But when we are heavily reliant on it to regulate our emotions, to entertain us, and are putting so much focus on eating rules to lose or mange weight, we are putting excessive importance on the food, and that’s why you become so obsessed.

So you can work on being less obsessed, moving toward not being obsessed, and as you do, the bingeing will decrease.

And as I said before, whatever feeling you think you’ll feel when you stop binge eating, confident, happy, whatever, you’re not going to feel it because you don’t binge. You’re going to feel it because you’re going to create it with your mind. Your thoughts cause your feelings so when you change your perspective, your outlook, your opinion, your word choices, your interpretations, that’s when you’ll feel differently.

And working on doing that now would most definitely help you to stop binge eating.

So whatever it is you want to get when you achieve your goal, how can you start creating that for yourself now?

If you want to be more active, what can you do now? What’s doable now? How can you get started?

If you want to wear cuter clothes now, where can you look that might have some that you like and that fit your body they way you want them to?

If binge eating has stopped you from being more connected with people and has stopped you from doing things you want to do, what can you do now to create more connection and to move you toward doing what you want to do? It doesn’t have to be a big thing, it just needs to be something. You can get started with something you feel comfortable doing now.

How can you feel happier now?

How can you feel freer now?

How can you decrease the urges you feel now?

Whatever you want, you can start getting now and you will build upon it to get it in the amount that you want it.

Don’t wait, start now. Start walking down that path toward what you want now.

And as I said at the start of this episode, if you want help with any of this, I offer more in depth help, more personalized help, inside of The Stop Binge Eating Program.

I know there is so much you can do on your own but, we can do so much more together.

So if you don’t know where to start or how to get further than you are, I will help you do it.

Again, you can get all the info and either join the waitlist or register, depending on when you are listening to this, by going to coachkir.com/group.

Alright, start getting what you want today, and I’ll talk to you again soon. Bye bye!