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Binge eating and emotional eating keep millions of people from living their best lives. If you're one of them, this podcast is for you. Hosts Georgie Fear, Christina Jodoin, and Maryclaire Brescia share insights and key lessons from their wildly successful Breaking Up With Binge Eating Coaching Program. Their methods integrate Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, nutritional science and change psychology -- but what you'll notice is that it works and feels good. Step off the merry go round of dieting and binge eating and into a healthier, happier body and mind.
Research Update on BED and EE
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Christina: [00:00:00] Hey there and welcome to the breaking up with Binge Eating podcast. I'm Christina, one of the confident eaters coaches. In today's episode, you're going to listen in on one of our coaches meetings.
We get together once a month to discuss recent research related to binge eating and emotional eating so that we can help our clients best. The first paper we talk about is all about self-control. And the good news is if you're someone who struggles with self control around food, this is an attribute that we can learn to develop and strengthen. One of the things that comes up from this discussion is the positive impact that being part of a group can have on your binge eating recovery. It turns out that there's a lot of evidence-based reasons to not go at it alone when you're trying to build up yourself control. If you want to learn more about our breaking up with binge-eating coaching group or how you can become a part of one of our accountability groups, check out the link in our description or visit confident eaters.com to find out more. The second paper we discuss is all about understanding the impact that cognitive coping [00:01:00] strategies has on our emotional eating. We love to learn about emotional regulation tools, not only for ourselves personally, but also for our clients so that we can teach them the skills that they need to maintain their recovery and continue to progress, even beyond our coaching relationship. We hope that you enjoy this episode and without further ado, let's get started.
Georgie: This is the Breaking Up with Binge Eating Podcast where every listen moves you one step closer to Complete Food Freedom hosted by me Georgie Fear and my co-coach Mary Claire Brescia
self control training. Yeah. So there's actually a review article. And it was just published this year in 2024. In the journal behavior analysis in [00:02:00] practice. And so the title caught my eye because I'm like, well, self control training. Well, that's awesome because one, we know higher self control can help us in a lot of ways.
And two, I think it's really tempting to think like, Oh, I have high self control or I have low self control. And well, it's me sort of, it's easy to get into like that fixed mindset. So I'm thinking, you know, in the line of work that we're in, Yeah, if we can help people develop their self control, like, yeah, let's think about how we can do that.
So they analyzed, really all the available findings on self control training, what sort of interventions have been done to help people exert self-control. so if we're talking about like what actually is self-control, well, we'll make choices all the time where we have to decide between a smaller immediate reward or a larger reward down the line.
So I can have the candy bar now, or I can have like a healthier body. at some poorly defined time in the future. Like clearly that's better, but this is now. So it has a little [00:03:00] more incentive to it if it's immediate. And so when we talk about this sort of choice, the researchers refer to that smaller immediate gratification as being the impulsive choice.
And that larger delayed one is the self control choice. So Certainly, this is relevant to binge eating, which is why I wanted to cover it. It's also important in the context of substance use disorders. You know, how do we teach people to like, just say no and resist their temptations or urges. Same with gambling.
A lot of this research is used in behavioral addictions and then just overall healthy eating. Even people who don't have binge eating are still trying to, you know, choose the salad over the cookie for life. One of the things I noticed that was interesting in this research was that people with developmental delays ADHD or traumatic brain injuries are more likely to make those impulsive choices than you're sort of like representative sample from the population.
So self control training may be especially helpful. And I know we've, I think all of us have [00:04:00] had at least one client who's identified like, Hey, I have ADHD and I don't know about you, but I think, okay, what do I adjust for that person?
Maryclaire: Right. Right.
Christina: Yeah.
Georgie: So, lower levels of self control is harmful in a lot of ways you can probably imagine. Not only to their health, but impulsivity can obviously harm relationships, it can impact somebody's ability to succeed at school and work, and it can make it a lot harder to manage financially, if you make a lot of impulsive decisions. So, I think it's pretty fascinating, but maybe it's just me, that, We can train our self control to be stronger, and we aren't stuck with if we have lower self control, we're not stuck with that forever.
So they've actually, this has been something that's been studied for quite a while, and since the 1980s, they do a fair amount of research, With animals, and I didn't get into the animal experiments because I wanted to focus on the human ones. I don't know how they tested the self control of the animals.
With humans, they tend to do stuff like offer them $1 now or $3 if they wait two minutes, and a lot of people will choose to wait the two [00:05:00] minutes to pocket more cash. It seems, you know, pretty, it's a pretty heavy skew if the time delay is really short. And so with kids, they tend to offer them things like a box of five crayons now, or like the deluxe box of 24 crayons, if you can wait a little while. And the longer that we lengthen that time gap, then the more people will go for the impulsive choice. More people would be like, Oh, just, just give me the $1 now, if they have to wait like three months to get the $2.
So the longer the wait, the less likely people are to make that self controlled choice. So when researchers study, various interventions on self control they call it successful if whatever the intervention is causes more people to choose the self control task or fewer to choose the impulsive one.
In the real world that can translate into fewer binges and overeating episodes. So were interested in what they found works. So, what works? One method is called progressive delay. I love how there's like a technical term for everything.
Maryclaire: Yeah, people [00:06:00] like to hear a technical term too, right?
Georgie: Totally.
Can you see, like, the scientists sitting around the table? Like, what should we call this? Should we call it, like incremental waiting? How about progressive delay? So, in the context of binge eating recovery, it might look like waiting 30 seconds. Before you get up to get that food package. Then if you waited 30 seconds, maybe next time you try and wait 45 seconds, then maybe you try waiting a minute.
So the progressive delay is start with something that's very small, so that you feel willing to do it, and then gradually lengthening that amount of time. So this sounds like, of course, that seems relatively self evident, but in the real world, This is so rare among people who have, you know, binge eating difficulties.
What typically happens and the coach in me has seen this so many times that people in the wild tend to go all or nothing. They're going, I'm going to binge or I'm not, and they're not thinking, well, this is an opportunity where I could practice progressive delay and improve my self control. Or [00:07:00] they're sort of telling themselves like, no, no, no, must not, must not.
And then they have what we call a self control failure. Which is when they cave and do it. So if we explain this to people, then we can talk about these things. Like, yeah, this makes sense. What you're going through is if you're telling yourself, no, no, no, no. And then you have a self control failure. We can improve upon that pattern by say, instead of saying, no, saying, let me just put in a little wait and that's okay, and then I can gradually build that weight, it's always easier to tell yourselves you can have it in a minute rather than no.
Maryclaire: Mm hmm.
Georgie: So if we can explain this to clients and they sort of see the logic in it, then I think they can appreciate it.
Maryclaire: So we have the delay, you know
Georgie: exactly!
Maryclaire: Lesson, right?
Georgie: It sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?
Maryclaire: Yeah, I guess I'm just wondering, you know, maybe that just highlights the idea of shortening it if, you know, That's helpful to people, you know, we say it, but maybe just kind of highlights that, yeah,
Georgie: maybe we'll include it in the initial delay distract decide method would be like, we're all going to start [00:08:00] with a short delay because you just want to create that gap because as we know, there are people that are not willing to wait 20 minutes.
Maryclaire: Yeah,
Georgie: you know and they have their reasons. so we may be able to have more success with people in our 3d process. If we talk about let's all start with 30 seconds.
Maryclaire: Well, some people will talk about an all day struggle, right? Like it was on their mind all weekend. And they're just like, in that, and it gets a little trickier than like this. Oh, I was, I was walking, I was doing this. I went out of the house and never went away. I don't know if anything addresses that, but that's just something that I've seen come up.
Georgie: Right.
Christina: Yeah.
Georgie: You've had that too, Christina?
Christina: Yeah, definitely.
Maryclaire: Yeah.
Georgie: So, one thing that we do know about cravings or urges is that when we give them more attention, they tend to persist. So you know there's a section in Give Yourself More where it talks about like, your craving is not actually there all day. Because, even experienced meditators can't keep their mind on [00:09:00] one topic all day.
Okay. It's in, it's out, it's here, it's there, it's the itch, it's the this, so it's recurring throughout the day, but it's not constantly on your mind all day long. And that may sound like a trivial difference, but it is a difference. Because if you tell yourself I've been fighting this all day, it feels like this epic battle, it's like I'm so exhausted from fighting this and it's like, no, not really, actually, you just want to dismiss it every time it comes up and not feed it with another technical term, cognitive elaboration, the cognitive elaboration is like, Oh, that pizza from Jamie's pizzeria is so good. And like, Oh, I don't know where they get that mozzarella. And it's just like, so hot and stringy. And I could actually swing by there. It's on my way home. when you're doing that, you're just fanning the flame and like putting more wood on the fire of that craving.
So I think using that delay distract May look like every time it comes up
Maryclaire: I think of that cognitive elaboration fusion, right. Cognitive fusion where you're kind of locked into it and you're just, you know
Georgie: Yeah.
Maryclaire: [00:10:00] feeding fuel to the fire and you're struggling as opposed to, you know, saying, let let the storm go on and I'm gonna put it on the chair next to me.
Yeah. I guess it just occurs to me now that diffusion would be helpful there.
Georgie: It totally does. Yeah.
Maryclaire: Yeah.
Georgie: Like, oh! I'm noticing a craving.
Maryclaire: Yeah. Or, you know, you hear these people that put cold plunges on their face.
Georgie: Right.
Maryclaire: Take your face and put it in a bowl of ice water. Ways to soothe yourself when you just feel like you're in a struggle, right? Like when you're struggling all day long.
Georgie: Yeah. Maybe you need a pattern interrupt. So the idea of progressive delay, definitely one that we want to use, and you may need to use it repeatedly. If that craving or the idea, temptation, whatever you want to call it, comes back, you may need to step away from it again, or wait 30 seconds again. So, nothing's to say it's going to be like a one and done. So I mentioned earlier how sometimes. One of the areas people go wrong is that they're telling themselves, no, no, no, I must never do that.
I must not do that. Which basically is saying, okay, there's an [00:11:00] interminable delay. This is forever delay. And that makes a person more likely to have a self control failure, i. e. binge, than if they said, Just give me a few minutes here. So another place people go wrong is that they put in a delay until an actual time point.
Like, I'm not going to eat sugar until after my vacation in two months. But that's such a long time to wait. That they're not willing to wait. So it's important if somebody wants to use this strategy to build self control, start with a really, really short delay between the urge to get food and actually getting food.
And then as you gradually lengthen that, what can happen is eventually that length of time is enough for the emotions to sort of moderate on their own. The urge to weaken and that prefrontal cortex to come online and help us with our decision makings that we're not just deciding emotionally. So on the coaching front, I think this is also why it's helpful for us to help people focus on the positive outcomes of [00:12:00] not choosing to binge that they can enjoy relatively soon.
Because many times the foremost reasons for not binging in people's minds are those like really long off things, the slimmer body next summer and other physical changes that will take weeks to months to materialize, but it can be. more convincing if we point out that like that very night you could feel more proud.
You could feel so empowered if this urge was the first one that you won over, that you stood up to. You can immediately have a sense of strength. It's also okay to focus on The negative short term things that they will experience if they binge, because that actually is a very real thing that people tend to ignore.
I was just actually relooking at give yourself more this morning for something else. And I spotted the piece in there when researchers ask people with binge eating habits, what impact it has on their mood. They say, it makes me feel better. It makes me feel comforted. It's a [00:13:00] relief. It's an escape.
But when you do actual in the moment ecological momentary analysis, which means like asking people throughout the day, and you ask somebody who's actually just binged, how do you feel? They don't say, I feel relaxed, I feel happy, I feel like I just got a little vacation. They say, I feel worse than before.
Maybe there's some temporary relief, but my mood is actually worse after the binge than the level of distress that I was in before it. And so not forgetting that actual reality can be really helpful in breaking the pattern. Anything to add there either, you guys?
Maryclaire: Right, because that brings it up as a choice, you know, you're choosing between the good feelings and the bad feelings, right?
And now they're clear, like, I can feel proud, I can feel like I'm acting in line with my values, I can feel good about what I'm doing, or I can feel You know, crummy afterwards and disappointed and physically not well. And so that you have a real choice there and there are some after effects. If you can bring them into the moment of choice, then [00:14:00] they, like you said, the longer the delay, right, the less effect they have, but if you can somehow make them real to you at the time of making the choice, I was just talking to, I think in the group about, I once did this myself. I left a party where I ate a bunch of cookies, like way too many, I was kind of really annoyed at myself. And so I took out my phone and made a recording and just said, listen, Maryclaire, you know, I know this seemed like a good idea, but that was awful and I feel terrible. And it just is not worth it. You think it's worth it. You think, Oh, these are really good. I'm really enjoying this. But believe me, when you leave here, you're gonna feel like crap. Don't do it. Don't, you know, don't fall into that trap. And somehow I made it real. And
Georgie: I love it.
Maryclaire: The next time I was at a party, I was thinking about it and just thinking about the recording.
that voice became real to me and I could make that choice so much more easily because that future me was brought into the present. And yeah, I knew I didn't really truly want to, you know, eat a bunch of crap. And yeah, so it's along the same lines.
Georgie: Yeah, yeah. I love that you did that.[00:15:00]
That's so cool. I've tried to convince clients to make a recording or write themselves a note, just a bit, or post a slip up. I don't know how many of them have like, just yes ed me and not actually done it, but I do think a few have actually done it.
Maryclaire: Yeah, I suggested it today. We'll see what happens.
Georgie: Nice, okay. Yeah, so we can say to clients or, you know, listeners, you can say to yourselves, if I use my self control here to resist this, I'm not going to pay that penalty of the stomach ache. I'm not going to have that bloated feeling. I'm not going to have that emotional fallout.
that's pretty substantial reinforcement. Like there's a lot to be gained right now today by not binging. So the other thing the research tells us we can do to strengthen our self control is to use an intervening activity. Doesn't that sound familiar?
Maryclaire: Yes. Distraction maybe?
Georgie: Right, right. So if you're practicing building up the time that you're able to use self control, like you start with 30 seconds of not grabbing food, you can help yourself by spending those 30 seconds doing something else.
You might play [00:16:00] cards, talk to a friend, take a walk, any other activity, not just simply focusing on the passing time. And again, the research is done in laboratory settings. so they see, like, where do people break down where they run out of patience before waiting for something? And, and they can, measure it.
If they give people cards while they're waiting for something, they're willing to wait longer before they hit a breaking point and get frustrated. So in experiments where they combined progressive delay and intervening activity, self control capacity improved in 95 percent of the applications. So it's really powerful.
It's really consistent that we can do these things together. So progressive delay and intervening activity really does sound familiar because it's what we do in the 3D process. Another thing that we can do here that I thought was interesting, because it's not necessarily something that we highlight in the 3D process, is Working within a team or group, or simply being in a group, increases our self control capacity.
People can [00:17:00] withstand greater challenges when they're part of a group who's all trying to do the same thing. And when we're part of a team, our pain tolerance is higher than if we're in a solo sporting event. And our self control is higher than if we're alone. So if you can, consider reaching out to somebody and letting them know what's going on in the moment when you're trying to maximize your self control power.
Also, obviously being part of a group on a longer term basis, like one of our coaching groups, or any other sort of support group, close family unit, or circle of friends, can all help you. So there's lots of evidence based reasons to not try and go it alone while you're trying to build your self control.
So what does not seem to help that has been tried in research is also sometimes really interesting. They also had a term called signaled delay, which means that giving somebody a clock or a timer to watch so that they can see how the delay is passing does not make them any more willing to wait.
It does not ease the process of waiting to watch the clock [00:18:00] countdown. So I think that backs up with what we routinely say to people, which is don't focus on just sitting there and waiting it out. Like, go do something else, distract yourself, engage yourself elsewhere.
Maryclaire: My one thing I've noticed people have brought up is, let's say they literally set a timer just so they do the full 20 minutes of their trial, assuming that was the goal, right?
Is that when the, when the bell goes off, it makes them think about eating again. So, you know, one idea like along those lines is, Aim to go do something generally for the amount of time that you're intending. It doesn't need to be exact. I mean, you could set a time or at least look at the clock, not having that.
signal that it's over, where you think, okay, I wasn't thinking about food, but now I am again, because the thing went off.
Georgie: Interesting. Yeah. I was just thinking, like, can you set a timer without it making a noise? Not sure if you can, but you could.
Maryclaire: Yeah.
Georgie: You know, write down, like, okay, right now it's 3. 30 p. m.
So 3. 50 is my goal time, like, write it down.
Maryclaire: Yeah, I think you just look at the clock and, you know, add some amount of time [00:19:00] and get out of the room.
Georgie: Yeah.
Maryclaire: Look at something else.
Georgie: Leave the scene.
Maryclaire: Leave the scene.
Georgie: So intervening activities are a lot more helpful then the information about the passage of time. So before you set up a countdown calendar to help you tolerate some waiting period, consider if you're just better off placing your attention on a different activity. To me, I see like, there's this parallel between how some clients are driven to use frequent weigh ins and body scans and circumference measurements and progress photos, almost like they're watching a timer or watching a clock, they're sort of counting down the centimeters or counting down the inches as if this information is going to make it easier to get through the delay between changing their behaviors and seeing long term results.
I really don't find that it helps. And I wonder if it's related to the reason that timers don't help people.
Maryclaire: Even that sense of a streak. You know, I've gone 10 days without binge eating doesn't seem to help. I, I did read somewhere that it said, when you look at something like that, like [00:20:00] success, if you have some level of success, it might actually lead you to have a lapse because you think, okay, I've already kind of met my goal.
Yeah. And if instead you view the effort you're putting in as evidence of how much you care about this, like, wow, I'm doing this work and so far it's been working well for me, but that just means this is really important to me. So I really want to continue this as opposed to something where it's like, okay, I did what I planned to do and now I can kind of kick back or, you know, I made it eight days.
Georgie: Yeah, I know. I've heard about Dan, John talking about exercise, training and people say the program's working so well, I'll stop doing it and do something else. So if anybody finds themselves hungering for, you know, that sort of information try to resist.
If you can turn your attention to more meaningful things in your life, it might help actually improve your results by boosting your self control. So the last technique that I wanted to mention is another technical term here. They call it a [00:21:00] commitment response. So a commitment response one of those.
Terms that definitely needs explaining. This is an option that researchers would give participants to choose the self control option ahead of time, and it rendered the impulse choice non available. So let's say the experiment involved choosing between going to a concert this weekend or doing an extra credit assignment that would boost your grade just enough and save you from retaking a whole semester of organic chemistry.
So the concert is the impulse choice. It's fun, you can enjoy it really soon. The self control choice is stay in, do the work, boost your grade. In the long run that's a better prize. A commitment response would look like telling your friends on Wednesday when they're going to get the tickets, I'm just not going to make it to the show, I'm staying in to get work done, don't get a ticket for me.
You're like removing that option so that at the last moment you don't change your mind and bail because you see your friends getting in the car and going. [00:22:00] Or another example of this commitment response would be if you knew you were going into the movies this Friday and there was a choice between an unhealthy, but really tasty snack or a healthier snack.
You can only have one. And so if you have the opportunity to go online and pre select your snack before going to the movie theater, that would help you be more likely to make the choice for your desired course of action or the healthier snack. If you wait until you walk into the theater, there's a higher choice that you'll go, you know, that actually looks really good and you'll take the more tempting one.
So in real life, there aren't that many ways that we can remove an option from ourselves ahead of time. So you can look for this sort of thing. I think realistically we often deal with convenience and making stuff more or less convenient, as opposed to being able to completely obliterate one choice. we can sort of leverage the convenience of where our healthy food is, leverage the inconvenience of where we keep the [00:23:00] snacks that we tend to overdo it on. If you want to stop eating large bags of chips, for example, you can stop buying large bags of chips. Like, you are actually removing the option to a great extent if you just don't buy the food in the large package. Also another term that we've used before is pre deciding.
So I feel like this is really similar. If you decide ahead of time what you're going to order at the restaurant or what you'll do after dinner tonight, you're more likely to do that. And then if you're like, oh, I'll just wing it in the moment. So to me, I read, you know, the description of commitment responses and how effective they were in research like, it's basically pre deciding with removal of a choice.
if possible. so pre deciding might be worth considering if you're, used to scrolling on your phone and instead of doing things that would actually help you get to sleep, if you wake up in the middle of the night, you might set up an app on your phone that cuts you off from using it at a certain time.
Okay. So in real world contexts, See what you can do to reduce the impulse choices from being really convenient. I have [00:24:00] another example. If you want to stop buying things from the vending machine at work, you can stop carrying your wallet on you, which can really, really help. You could leave your phone at home if you want to make sure you don't look at it too much while you're on a date.
So things like that. You can also increase your commitment by putting your attention in writing, telling people about it, putting it into your calendar, or making the associated purchase ahead of time. So if you can like pay for your meal ahead of time and, you know, buy something for the plane ride, like, Yeah, you can actually do that one.
So to recap this first review paper, self control is an attribute that we can develop. It's like building a muscle. It takes time and you have to work on it. Unfortunately, we can't just wish for it. So to build better self control, we want to use progressive delay, starting with itty bitty. Time chunks, gradually increasing the duration of the time.
And we want to use intervening activities. So obviously this sounds a lot like the 3d process that we talk about. If you haven't [00:25:00] heard of that, you may want to scroll back to the early episodes. Listen to the one on the 3D process for getting past a binge urge. And remember, your self control is strongest when you're part of a group or team.
So don't isolate yourself when you want to improve in this area. You might even consider signing up for one of our group coaching or accountability groups. And when you can, pre decide or pre commit to choices that support your long term goals. Yay! We made it through the first paper.
Okay, number two.
This one's pretty interesting. the title was, From Thought to Plate. Understanding the Impact of Cognitive Coping Strategies on Emotional Eating. So I was all over that one. I was like, Oh! What's that? We got coping strategies and emotional eating? I'm all over it. So this is a January 2024 paper, also a really new one, and the researchers sought to understand how do cognitive coping strategies associate with emotional eating?
So cognitive coping strategies refer to the conscious things that we do to manage and process [00:26:00] emotionally stimulating information, which sounds kind of wonky, but I'll give you some examples and you'll be like, oh, that's what it is. So emotional eating, we probably know what that part is. It's eating in response to usually negative emotions.
It's also really common. I have a stat here that approximately 38 percent of adults reported engaging in emotional eating over the past month. And that was 2014 research. Well, it's 10 years old by now, but if you think 38 percent of American adults emotionally ate in the last month. It's a good amount.
It's not unusual. It's not rare by any means. And so emotional eating is associated with higher weight, increased disordered eating symptoms and poor mental health. So it makes sense that people would want to reduce their emotional eating, and that researchers would want to know more about how can we help people reduce their emotional eating?
So one of the main theories that practitioners use to understand this is that individuals who can't use [00:27:00] the helpful emotion regulation strategies may use food. Because they don't have another option when they're in emotional distress. So the researchers in this paper, they point out that the research that we have on emotion regulation is focused on a really small number of strategies.
Basically, there's research on rumination, suppression, and reappraisal. And so I remember when I was working on my book, Give Yourself More, I actually did this incredibly exhaustive research review. In fact, Google Scholar kicked me off repeatedly because they thought I was a bot. And yeah, that was what I was finding circa 2015.
I found lots of stuff on rumination and suppression being bad. An expression and reappraisal, on the other hand, being good. But there's a lot of other things that people do to regulate their emotions, so luckily more current research is giving us some more things that we can work with. So there is a research group, Garnefsky and colleagues, and they outlined [00:28:00] nine possible coping strategies and how each one is associated with depression and anxiety.
So again, we're interested in binge and emotional eating, but this group did some really great work on depression, anxiety, and conveniently we can use their list of nine things. So they describe five strategies that are adaptive or helpful. And those are acceptance, positive refocusing, focusing on planning, positive reappraisal, and putting into perspective. Oh yes, those all sound like mature, developed, evolved ways of handling emotions. And it's true that those are the ones that they identified as being reduced risk for depression and anxiety, if you handle your emotional stress in those ways.
So the four maladaptive strategies were self blame, rumination, catastrophizing, and blaming other people. so this research paper, the new one that just came out in 2024, the researchers looked at these [00:29:00] nine strategies and how do they relate to emotional eating. Would we find that some of them were positive and negative?
seems predictable. So this study used 398 participants all over the age of 18, and they filled in a questionnaire about the frequency of their thoughts following a stressful life event. So the Rather than asking somebody like, how much do you engage in positive reappraisal? Because people would be like, what the hell is that?
It gave them, normal sentences like, I feel like I'm the one to blame for it. Or I think that I have to just accept that this happened. And people rate how frequently they would think that from one to five. So I think it's interesting to look at the frequencies. first, like, which of these is the most popular? When we look at how these relate to each other, we can see that catastrophizing is one of the strongest links with emotional eating.
And we can also see that self blame is one of the really strongly linked ones with emotional eating. So if you're [00:30:00] not familiar with what these things are, catastrophizing is a thinking pattern where we have a tendency to interpret and magnify everyday events or situations as Overwhelmingly dire or catastrophic.
So people who engage in catastrophizing tend to have an exaggerated perception of how bad things are. And this leads to higher levels of anxiety and worry. And then they may be more inclined to engage in maladaptive behaviors such as emotional eating. So catastrophizing has this strong positive correlation with emotional eating that we see in this paper.
And the researchers also point to another paper that catastrophizing has a strong positive correlation with the severity of binge eating disorder. So people who have more severe cases of binge eating, more extreme frequency and more impairment of their daily lives due to binge eating have higher levels of catastrophizing.
I can see this because emotional eating [00:31:00] can serve as a potential trigger for people who have binge eating. You know, a lot of times a common pattern is that somebody will experience a difficult emotional state and then eat something emotionally and then catastrophize how awful it was that they ate off plan or emotionally and that proceeds to lead to a binge.
So I think if we explain this pattern to our clients that you know, EE, emotional eating, arrow, catastrophizing, arrow, binge. We can point out that breaking this pattern does not mean, like, you never EE, you never emotionally eat. We can break it here at this catastrophizing piece. So I came up with the example that if you trip on the sidewalk, And then you think, like, I'm so awful for tripping, and you roll around and, like, slam your hands and feet on the pavement.
The way to improve that isn't to say, okay, I am never going to trip again, because that's not realistic. We're all going to trip. But we can change the perspective that tripping really isn't a big deal. [00:32:00] So the thoughts that might look anti catastrophic would be, okay, one dessert is not huge. Whoops. I'm a bit over full, just a little mistake.
I think the, the mantra here might be no big deal. Maybe we'd all benefit from a little more, no big deal on our own mistakes.
Maryclaire: This has been coming up in the group as well. People are talking about just getting back to normal, like more quickly, I guess it's more of the outcome, but just saying, you know, one mistake doesn't need to become days.
Right. Knowing that it's so valuable to just just bring yourself to normal and kind of like turn the page don't need to stay on it where it's not beating yourself up continually. It's like, that's fine. I can just move on and do better now. And that seems to be really helping people.
Georgie: Totally. I always think of like like figure skaters and how like they wipe out, they get up, they continue.
They're on with their program. They're still on the music or gymnasts on the beam like they don't have music but like they fall down what do they do they get back up i've never seen anybody at a [00:33:00] high level of gymnastics hit the mat scream cry because this was her dream you know like i can see myself doing that they're so composed because they've trained this you know what do you do you get back on the beam and you keep Keep doing the rest of your routine.
So I think it helps us also when we want to communicate to people what the recovery trajectory looks like in binge eating. You don't go from binge eating to perfect eating in one step. Like, Oh, I made a mistake. And so I binged. I got to stop that. Like that's, that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen that way.
You're not going to stop making mistakes. What happens is people go from regularly binge eating to To regularly emotional eating, but not proceeding to the binge. And then the emotional eating can get less and less frequent. Few of us will ever reach perfection.
Maryclaire: Perfection is not the goal.
Georgie: Perfection is not the goal.
And clearly 38 percent of people emotionally eat at least once a month, according to that survey. So, you know, it's okay if you can just reduce [00:34:00] the frequency.
Maryclaire: Who knows what the rest are doing.
Georgie: That's how much they fessed up to it so the other one that we found was really linked to emotional eating from this research is self blame.
I was like, oh, when I read that, because yeah, I think this is something I personally can continue to work on. Self blame is the tendency to Attribute the consequences of an event or situation to one's own actions or their character. And I think we do see this quite a bit in our conversations with clients.
People will say, I was so stupid, blank, or it's all my fault, blank. And because we're the neutral observer, we can hear that and go, it doesn't sound like it was her fault. Or what if it wasn't because you were fat that somebody was rude to you or mistreated you? Like maybe they are just somebody who mistreats people.
And it's not in any way, shape, or form related to you. So the finding that self blame is linked to emotional eating is not all that surprising. It has [00:35:00] also been written in research papers that it predicts the recovery of binge eating disorder over the long term. So I saw that line in the research paper that says self blame improvement has been shown to be the most important factor in binge eating recovery.
And I was like, I have to look up that paper. Like, this is why it goes down the rabbit hole. So when I looked up that paper. This is a sentence from that paper. Results suggested that the only significant predictor of diagnostic remission after nine years was initial levels of self blame. So that study looked at recovery over a really long time course.
People who are in recovery from their eating disorder for nine years. And they said the biggest predictor in their data set was how much this person self blamed and how much they were able to let that go and improve it.
Maryclaire: Well, I think a lot of people, you know, tend to use self blame as a way to motivate themselves. I think that's the key. Like if I'm really hard on myself when I make these [00:36:00] mistakes, I'm going to really be motivated not to make these mistakes and not realizing it's actually setting themselves up in a worse situation. we talk about this too, like when people recover, there's this emotional shift.
And one client described it to me as. Not caring as much, like, cause she identified, I think, self blame as caring. Like, I'm really committed to this, I really care about what happens. And she had a lighter attitude about it, not realizing that actually was a key to the change. It's the type of shift we see where people are not beating themselves up when they make a mistake, and they're not so stressed out over every choice. It's what we look for.
Georgie: Yeah, definitely. I also, when I was reading that, you know, paper about like the long term recovery rates, I think it's really valuable because there's so little data on long term recovery from these. And I can understand why different programs have different recovery and relapse rates.
Because in my mind, I can see how somebody [00:37:00] can be, you know, my words, lightly recovered in the sense that they can superficially normalize their eating patterns or, you know, fit the definition of normal or desirable according to whatever program or treatment that they went through. But that deeper recovery where they don't have as much of a chance of relapse involves shifting some very personal beliefs and traits. So, you know, working on self compassion, which is the antidote for self blame, is a very, very worthwhile use of time in what we do. So, sometimes I have wondered if, you know, I'm wandering into all of this, like, self compassion stuff. Am I getting away from What I should be and like this research says no, like working on self compassion is one of the best ways that we can help people not only get better, but not slip back.
So take home points from the second paper. One, emotional eating is pretty common. Higher levels of emotional eating are linked to higher body weight. [00:38:00] Disordered eating and depression and anxiety. So it makes sense if people want to do less emotional eating, even if they are a weight they are happy with. It's not just about weight loss. There's also some other real life improvements that can come. Number two, the way we cope with emotional stress can be helpful or harmful to our wellbeing. Three, Specifically for emotional eating and binge eating, catastrophizing and self blame are particularly problematic.
Four, to help shift these habits of thinking, we can actually learn to decatastrophize, or a phrase I find easier to say, take things lightly. Just take things lightly instead of catastrophizing.. And lastly, number five, self compassion practice and compassion focused therapy are helpful in reducing that automatic self blame, and they may be some of the most helpful treatment tactics in healing people from emotional eating and binge eating for the long term.
We have made it to the end of the two paper research review. Thank you for bearing with me, [00:39:00] guys. Was there some helpful stuff in there?
Christina: Yeah, definitely. I'm kind of in the self compassion rabbit hole myself. We've talked about that book.
Georgie: Yeah.
Christina: The Compassionate Mind. Paul Gilbert, who is the author of that, is like, I don't know if he's a founder, but he definitely is a practitioner of compassion focused therapy. That's kind of like the model he works from. So I'm definitely like, ooh, interested in that. And yeah, I think the self blame thing is big because people think that if they don't treat themselves that way, they're like letting themselves go. But as we have seen, it's like the opposite is true. It's actually this way of caring for yourself.
Even like what Mary Claire's client was saying, like I was caring, but actually the more caring thing is self compassion. So that's interesting.
I think translating these, we've laughed about how many research terms are in here. And so our jobs. As I see it, in one sense, it's to help people recognize [00:40:00] that that's what they're doing.
Georgie: Because to them, they're not going, I am engaging in self blame. They're going, why did I do that? Like, it's so automatic. It's in their normal language. It's like, Oh, I really messed this up. I got to fix this. You know, we can help sort of translate. We're translators.
Maryclaire: Right. And it might be a confusion with taking responsibility, right? Like you want to be responsible, but self blame is a whole other thing. level when you're using shame, right?
Georgie: Yeah.
Maryclaire: As a motivation or there's a distinction there. It's like, you want to be aware of what you're doing and, and, you know, observe it perhaps kind of treat it like data. Not put a lot of emotion on it.
Georgie: Yeah, yeah. I did actually, if you look in my recent Google searches you'll see, what's the opposite word for catastrophizing? Like, what's the antonym for catastrophize? Because, yeah, it's taking things lightly is not catastrophizing, it's not blaming, it's not [00:41:00] my instinctive nature, which is probably why all of us can recognize when our clients are doing these sort of things because we know what it sounds like in our own head.
Maryclaire: Absolutely.
Christina: Yeah,
Georgie: The wild call of this self blamer.
Maryclaire: And even at the superficial level of self talk this what is a chatter like in your head, what does it sound like what kinds of things do you say to yourself on a daily basis.
Georgie: Absolutely. Yeah.
Maryclaire: Very telling. Yeah.
Georgie: So thank you guys for bearing with me.
Thanks everybody for listening at home to this episode. I hope you learned something new at very least you get to see how coaches continue our education behind the scenes. So if you want to know more about recovery from binge eating and emotional eating, we would love to help you drop a line through confident eaters. com. [00:42:00]