Ep #3: What Happens After You Binge

Hi! How are you? Welcome back, I’m so happy to have you here, and I hope you’re happy to BE here! Today, I want to talk to you about what happens after you binge.

As you go through the process of eliminating binge eating from your life, there are going to be missteps. You’re going to make mistakes.

You’re probably going to binge.

So when you do, what will you do after?

Or maybe, not what do you do, but how will you treat yourself? How will you talk to yourself?

After I’d binge, I used to tell myself that what I did was disgusting or that I was really disappointed in myself or I’d just get frustrated with myself.

How could I have done that to myself yet again?

So many people do the same thing, they beat themselves up about it. Because they binged, they make it mean that they’re worthless, a failure, that they’re weak, that they’re disgusting.

They tell themselves that they hate themselves, that there is something wrong with them, that they ruined everything.

But what happens when you do that? What happens when you think that way?

You end up feeling emotionally awful on top of all the physical pain you feel. You feel self-loathing, shame, guilt, frustration.

Then what happens when you feel those ways?

Most likely, you’ll soon eat again to comfort yourself.

Or if you’re not eating, you’re definitely not doing something that’s going to help you feel better. Maybe you’ll punish yourself by restricting your food the next day or by doing an intense workout that you don’t at all enjoy. Maybe you just isolate yourself, lay around your home, and wallow in self pity.

Negative feelings lead to negative actions and the reason why you feel negatively is because you’re thinking negatively about yourself and what you did.

It’s our thoughts that cause our feelings.

It’s not the binge that makes you feel bad about yourself, it’s how you think about what you did and if you start talking negatively to yourself, it’s going to lead you down a negative path that you don’t want to go down.

You want to feel better, you want to not self-sabotage, right? Neither of these will happen if you’re feeling bad about yourself.

Now, you might be thinking. “But I am a failure. I did ruin everything. It was disgusting.”

My question back to you, is why would you choose to think this way?

Yes, choose. You can think however you want to think about yourself. Really, you can.

Your thoughts are optional. You are not required to think these thoughts after you binge. You can choose to think differently.

The problem is that you’ve practiced thinking these negative ones about yourself so many times that you’ve gotten really good at thinking them and now they’re your default thoughts. You’ve programmed your brain to automatically think these thoughts when you binge.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t override them with different, more useful thoughts.

And I use the term “useful” on purpose here instead of “positive.”

I’m not going to tell you to think positively about what you did. “I binged and that means I’m awesome!” No, let’s be realistic here.

Instead of making yourself feel bad and wanting to comfort yourself with food, comfort yourself. Comfort yourself with useful self-talk and then there is no need to look for food to do that for you.

Be kind and compassionate.

This doesn’t mean you excuse what you did or you disregard it, you accept the fact that you did what you did and decide to not beat yourself up about it because that’s not at all useful.

Beating yourself up is not going to change what happened, nor is it going to stop you from doing it again.

How many times have you beaten yourself up for binge eating? And how effective has that been? Not very I assume.

You can’t beat yourself out of bingeing.

The more beaten up you get, the worse you will feel and the worse you’ll treat yourself.

But if you are kind to yourself, you will feel okay and treat yourself well.

After you binge, what kinds of things do you say to yourself? These things matter.

It’s these thoughts about yourself and what you did that make you feel so terrible. Any feelings of shame, guilt, regret or frustration are all caused by how you talk to yourself after you binge.

Remember, it’s your thoughts that cause your feelings.

So look for ways you can think so you can feel compassionate.

Speak to yourself like you would the people you love the most.

If someone you love just binged you’d want to feel compassionate when talking to them, right? Do that with yourself.

You wouldn’t call them names and be mean, would you? No. You’d want to comfort them and be accepting of them no matter what they did.

You’d want to be loving and caring with them, so be loving and caring with yourself.

We all make mistakes, we mess up.

You binged, it happened, and now you get to decide how you want to think and feel about it.

Negative self-talk isn’t going to make things any better, it just makes things worse.

You always have the option of being kind to yourself, so try it out and see what a difference it makes in how you feel and then of course what you do.

If you want to put yourself on the path to stopping binge eating, talk nicely to yourself.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have less negativity in this world? Start with you. I’d love to hear what kinds of things you’re going to choose to say to yourself from now on and I’m sure other people would love to hear them too. Share them in the show notes at coachkir.com/3. Talk to you next week.