Ep #146: Wanting it Enough

Hi! How are you doing? I’m good, I got my second COVID vaccine shot today! So exciting. So far I feel fine, no symptoms but, we’ll see what happens. Fingers crossed!

Alright, now I have a question for you. You want to stop bingeing but, do you want it enough?

If you haven’t stopped bingeing yet, you may question this.

People question it when they keep failing at stopping. “Maybe I don’t want it enough.”

Now, that could be true but, most of the time, it’s not.

Whenever one of my group members tells me that, I can almost guarantee that it’s not true because they wouldn’t have invested their time and money into a program to stop bingeing if they didn’t want it enough.

You have to really want something if you’re going to do that.

So we look into their reasons for why they want to stop binge eating and I help them verbalize their reasons that are important to them, maybe ones that they just weren’t thinking about or ones that were lurking beneath the surface in their subconscious mind that they weren’t fully aware of.

Sometimes they need help getting to the real reason. Sometimes they just need me to ask them a few questions to help them uncover it.

For them, they do want to stop binge eating enough, there’s no doubt about it. That’s not why they haven’t fully stopped binge eating yet.

And it’s most likely the same for you if you’ve listened to episodes of this podcast.

Most people who binge don’t like that they do it. They might even hate it. They don’t like what it does to them and they image a much better life would be available for themselves if they stopped.

Most people have really good reasons to stop binge eating and their reasons to stop are more important to them than their reasons to continue doing it.

Wanting something enough, especially something that’s going to be challenging to get, is important.

Stopping binge eating is challenging so in order to do it, you have to have compelling reasons to do it.

There’s most likely going to be ups and downs and mistakes and fails along the way.

There’s going to be new skills to develop and consistent practice in order to master them and become proficient in them.

To keep going when those downs, mistakes, and fails happen and when things get hard, you have to have a really important, compelling reason to keep putting in effort.

You do have to want it enough.

Your reasons why you want to stop bingeing are your motive to put in effort and keep going even when times get tough.

So if you’re not continuing to try and you see yourself giving up, then it is possible that your reasons to keep going and put in effort might not be compelling enough.

But, they actually might be, and that’s most likely true, and there’s something else stopping you from continuing on.

It’s either your lack of belief in yourself or you don’t know what to do.

If you’re not believing that you can stop binge eating and that all your hard work will be worth it in the end then you’re not going to do it.

You’re not going to put in effort to do something that you don’t believe you can do.

If you don’t know what to do then you’re just going to sit there without a next step, without direction, confused, and no action gets taken and therefore no movement in your progress happens.

You don’t need to know what the whole process will look like from start to finish but, you do need to have a next step.

And with that, if you do have a next step and it’s not working, you keep bingeing, then you gotta figure out why it’s not working. You gotta troubleshoot, figure out what you’re doing incorrectly or what you’re not doing that you need to do, or what you’re doing that you need to stop doing, find the obstacle that’s in your way.

This is so much of what we do in my program. I give you all the things to do and when you’re having trouble doing them I help you figure out why that is and then we strategize from there.

It’s not always as simple as just, “Here’s what you do,” and then you go do it successfully every time. If it were, everyone would stop bingeing immediately.

I can tell you to allow your urges and to not give in to them but, you might have some obstacles in your way that are stopping you from doing that. You might have fears, worries, hesitations, some thoughts about doing that. You might have resistance, you might be lacking awareness of your urges when you’re feeling them, and whatever it is that’s stopping you from allowing your urges needs to be addressed before you will consistently not give in to your urges.

Wanting to stop binge eating enough is an important part of the process. But so is believing you can do it, taking action on your next step, and overcoming obstacles that are holding you back from taking action on the next step.

Say you want a million dollars in your bank account really really badly but, you don’t have it. It’s not because you don’t want it enough, you do but, you can’t just want it and then sit there waiting for it to come to you. If you don’t have it it’s because you don’t believe you can get it and you’re not taking action to get it.

If you believed you could, you’d do whatever it takes to get it. You’d take the actions whether that be consistently buying lottery tickets or working for it which could mean scaling your own business or creating enough value in who ever’s business you do work in to work yourself up to a salary that would provide you with enough money to save up a million dollars, however you can make it happen.

Wanting it enough is an important part of the process but it’s not the only part.

It’s not the only thing that will get you through an urge.

I’ve had people tell me they think their reasons to stop binge eating aren’t good enough because when they feel an urge their reasons just goes out the window.

But your reasons to stop bingeing alone most likely isn’t going to be enough to get to the other side of an uncomfortable urge.

In that moment your brain isn’t caring about how good you will feel when you stop bingeing forever. It wants to feel good now. That’s what your brain is focused on.

It’s focused on how good the food will taste and how you won’t have to feel the urge anymore.

So although it may be helpful to think about why you want to stop bingeing so badly, what’s going to be most helpful in that moment is you thinking about the immediate consequences of bingeing, and being willing to allow yourself to feel uncomfortable while you’re feeling the urge, without resisting it but instead, being calm and at peace with it, and you committing to your decision to not give in to your urge.

Your intentional thoughts while you’re allowing the urge need to be focused on what’s happening in that moment and what the immediate results will be for you.

Thinking about the long-term results can be helpful too but, sometimes it’s too easy to dismiss the results that are far away when you’re feeling an urge.

So, if you’re not where you want to be in your process of stopping binge eating, first, check in to see if you do indeed want it enough.

Most likely you do. It’s not often that I come across someone who doesn’t.

And if you do want it enough, figure out what it is that is stopping you. Is it your belief? Is it confusion about what to do next? Or do you know what to do but you haven’t figured out why you’re not doing it?

And I will tell you, you can use episodes from this podcast to help you with any of those. I have a lot of episodes about belief and you can pick pretty much any episode that you find relevant to you and work on that one thing.

And if you still have difficulties, join me in my next coaching program in July 2021. You can find all the info about that at coachkir.com/group.

Alright, make sure you do want it enough, if you do, figure out what it is that’s holding you back from making progress and get to work on that.

I’ll talk to you next time, bye bye!