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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 Holland, 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.
"But I'm not losing weight yet"
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Georgie: [00:00:00] 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 team at confident eaters. /
My client takes a deep breath, then there's a pause, and then with a slight sigh of exasperation says, but I'm not losing weight yet. Ahh! Here we are. I know this place. It's been several weeks, possibly longer, and the client is showing up for our sessions. They're working on changing their behaviors, and they've had several non-scale victories. Perhaps they made it through a long weekend with their parents without binging once everyone else was in bed, or maybe last Tuesday was the first time they did a pushup from their feet. But today, when this phrase tumbles from their lips, none of that seems to matter. They haven't lost any weight and they feel like they absolutely must do something about that. I'm Georgie and my co-coach Christina and I understand that losing weight is the main reason most people want to end their binge eating. It's the physical symbol of success and is most apparent to the world. What bothers people about their current situation may also include achy knees, blood pressure, or distress about not being a healthy role model. But the big thing that hurts them on a daily basis is the size, shape, or weight of their body.
Christina: And at the same time, who wants to admit that? We fear we might seem superficial if we just say the main thing we want to change is how we look. I think many people are thinking, if I need to stop binge eating to get slimmer, okay. If I need to do some seaweed wrap or laser treatment or supplement or cold plunge, okay.[00:02:00]
If you wanna stop binge eating mostly because you want to lose weight, that's a perfectly fine reason. The goal for today's episode is to help alleviate the frustration that can grow when you're doing the right things to stop binge eating, but your weight hasn't budged. Because if we don't address that frustration, it leads people to do things like starting to count calories or try skipping carbs at meals, or just eating a can of soup for dinner instead of a full meal.
Basically it leads people to lose focus on binge eating recovery and start focusing more on getting that darned scale to move.
Georgie: As you can hear, this plays out in a somewhat predictable order. It goes like this: Jane wants to lose weight but fails over and over for decades. Jane learns new information and realizes that she has a binge eating problem. Jane starts treatment for binge eating, hoping she can get it out of the way quickly and then lose weight more successfully. Jane has some degree of success with reducing binge eating frequency or extremity. Jane says, but I haven't lost weight yet. Jane tries to cut back on her eating to get the scale to move. Jane starts binge eating again. Jane either gains more weight or stays the same. I really hate this storyline, but not everything is lost when this happens.
So if that's happened to you know that it's not the end of the road for Jane and it's not the end of the road for you. Lots of times we learn from this lesson and it helps us get back to focusing on completing recovery from binge eating. And hypothetical, Jane does go on to lose both the binge eating and then the extra weight.
Christina: But the more times Jane tries to cut back on her food intake and binging resurfaces again, the longer it takes for Jane to reach both of her goals: binge freedom and a lower weight. There is some variability in the order of [00:04:00] operations or which skills we focus on first, but some things do remain universal. Weight loss before binge eating is gone is not going to work. It's like if you wanna take your pants off, but you have shoes on, you can't just go straight to peeling off your jeans or they'll get stuck on your sneakers. The shoes have to come off first, or you'll get hung up. Same with when you wanna lose weight.
The binging has to be out of the way before you can lose weight. So let's take some time to describe the different stages you can expect to go through from when you start working on binge eating all the way through to maintaining your lower weight. We've put together some descriptions and quotes to characterize each phase.
Georgie: First up, let's talk about the initial phase. Establishing regular meal patterns, eating frequently and learning to handle urges with the goal of them not resulting in a binge are all part of what's going on in this chapter. The things we do in this phase are not necessarily ones that will be continued forever, but they are important at this point to help give a person the best chance of reducing their binge eating. In this stage, the conversation often includes statements like I had an urge to binge, but I was able to distract myself and set a timer for 20 minutes. Or, I'm not used to this eating six times a day, but I admit it's nice to not be chronically hungry at work when dealing with seven year olds. The goal in this phase is weight maintenance. If you try to eat at a deficit right from the outset, you may never get past stage one because when you try to lose weight and eat less, you'll get very hungry. You'll feel psychologically deprived or both. And those are two strong binge triggers. And if you keep binge eating, you can't lose weight. We have to get you binge free first.
Christina: During the second stage, we are building self-awareness. This and the next phase, which is [00:06:00] re-patterning, make up the heavy lifting of binge eating or emotional eating recovery. This is where clients make the changes that result in urges becoming less frequent. Self-awareness grows in several ways. First, awareness of body signals.
This sort of develops like a photograph. Out of the murky fog, you begin to differentiate when you don't need to eat, when you're physically getting hungry. When you're satisfied. People also become more attuned when their body feels tired, cold, hot, stiff, or needs to use the bathroom.
Awareness also develops around emotional states and distress. This is the whole, how am I feeling? What do I really need? Chapter, and it takes time to be able to ask and answer those questions. Here we stop kidding ourselves and we also stop lying to others about our state. We learn not to say we're fine when we aren't fine.
Instead, we start accepting that we might feel bothered, hesitant, scared, angry, or jealous.
Georgie: And we also grow in awareness of our needs and desires. Many people with disordered eating have spent all their lives trying to not need or want anything, but all humans have needs and desires, and recognizing them is part of healing.
Christina: During the growing awareness stage, you might hear people say, wow, I'm really bothered by what she said. Or I'm having a hard time getting through the kids' bedtime without losing my patience. Progress is also reflected in saying, I'm feeling sad today, or I need some quiet time. I'm gonna lay down for a few minutes. Or, I could really use a hug.
Georgie: While you're gaining all of this awareness, you still might not lose weight, but it's 100% necessary for getting rid of the binge eating. I'll repeat what I said earlier. We have to get you binge free first. Okay. Next [00:08:00] comes re-patterning stage three. With all that new awareness of what your body and mind are doing, we can start learning to manage and re-pattern our responses to those states. We break old habits and rehearse new ones, lots of new ones. With body signals. Your eating starts to follow your hunger and fullness cues more rhythmically. You're able to not panic when you feel hunger, but address it rationally and calmly. Instead of overriding your stomach's message that, hey, it's uncomfortably full, you begin to respond to it by stopping eating. It's also important to learn healthy responses for when we feel tired, thirsty, or are in pain.
Christina: When it comes to re-patterning our responses to emotional states and distress, we learn that there are many skills that we can use and some work better than others in different contexts. But no matter what feelings you encounter in this stage, you learn the many possible ways to handle them without panicking or resorting to self-destructive habits like binge eating. Stage two involved recognizing our needs and desires. In stage three, we grow more comfortable with speaking up and making moves to get our needs and desires met. Boundaries often come up in this stage as people realize that taking care of themselves often means telling others no or placing limits on work hours or the level of their personal business they want to discuss.
Georgie: As you can tell, stage two and three are biggies. You have a lot of body signals, emotions, and needs to get acquainted with, and it takes time to master responding to each of them in new ways. This process can't really be rushed if you want to do it thoroughly. How can you tell if someone's making progress? It sounds like this. I'm so angry right now. I need to vent. Do you have the bandwidth to just hear me out for a few minutes?
Christina: I need to grab a pair of gloves. My hands are cold, be right back.
Georgie: I need to [00:10:00] slow down to catch my breath.
Christina: I wanna grab a coffee before the flight.
Georgie: Why am I eating again? Oh, because I'm hungry.
Christina: I need to grab something else. That meal was a bit small and I'm not satisfied yet.
Georgie: Oh, I don't need the rest. Thanks. I'm full. It was delicious though. When someone has done a lot of that work and gotten through stages two and three, they're responding to their body, emotions and needs throughout the day. We are finally binge free. Weight loss may have happened on its own by this point or started. That's right. By doing nothing else. If you imagine yourself, not binge eating, but eating when you're hungry most of the time, and stopping when you're satisfied. Most of the time, that could be all you need to do to actually drop a pants size. And many times people feel like they have reached their goals by getting here. Because their life is so much better.
Christina: Some people want to pursue further weight loss, and that's okay. Now that you're more resilient and skilled at managing emotions and feeding yourself well, you're in a better place to succeed at weight loss than you were at stage one. If you're curious what deliberate weight loss behaviors might look like, here are some of the additional steps toward weight loss we may take after someone is binge free for a couple of months. Number one, decreasing low nutrition foods and liquid calories. We can look at the amount of low nutrition foods a person is having and talk about a slight reduction. By low nutrition foods, I mean fried food, sweets, desserts, and liquid calories such as alcoholic beverages or sugary coffee drinks.
Instead of labeling them as bad, we just look at the frequencies and portion sizes and see where it feels doable to reduce a bit like ordering a small blizzard instead of the medium, or having one glass of wine instead of two. If you did this at the beginning, [00:12:00] it would more likely have backfired.
It would feel like just another diet, another restriction, a denial of the chocolate You need to get through the day and deal with the stresses of living. But now you have other ways to handle your stress. You have built up trust in yourself and you know what it feels like to eat regularly and take care of yourself so you aren't coming home with low blood sugar and a chip on your shoulder heading to the pantry.
You can actually eat a reasonable portion of dessert, put the rest away, and know you'll have more for tomorrow. There's no talk of blowing it because you did the work to overcome black and white thinking.
Georgie: Number two, hunger tolerance. We might look at how long a person is feeling physically hungry for. commit to feeling hunger for a period of minutes, say 15 or 30 minutes before eating instead of just eating right away. Again, if you did this back at the beginning before stages two and three, it would likely have blown up in your face. But now you've got months of regular, drama free eating, and you have chilled out about feeling hunger. It's a normal sensation. It doesn't make you panic and you know you'll get something to eat soon, not perish from starvation. Back in the days you were binge eating, you were eating diet meals and probably not even getting satisfied. So the idea of even more hunger sounded cruel and terrible because you spent so much time underfed. But now those days are gone by this phase. It feels like no big deal to feel hungry for 15 minutes before lunch or dinner. Because you know, you'll eat enough to be satisfied and you'll really enjoy it.
Christina: Number three, nutrition shifts. We might adjust the amount of fruit, vegetables, protein, fats, or carbohydrates a person is eating to improve the balance and the amount of satisfaction a person gets from their meals.
But that doesn't mean counting calories. It is generally a [00:14:00] more broad recommendation, like getting two handfuls of fruit or vegetables with each meal, or a palm size source of quality protein with each meal. If someone is eating a lot of dietary fat, we might talk about swaps to help bring it into a more moderate range.
Maybe you put avocado or cheese on an egg sandwich instead of both statements. You might hear from people in this chapter of their journey might sound like it turns out whether I use cooking spray or oil, my food tastes the same, and then I'm not overshooting my fat needs.
Georgie: Or I got hungry around noon, which was perfect because I had a break at 1230 to eat lunch.
Christina: This pasta recipe is one of my mother's, but when I make it, I double the veggies, so it's a bit more balanced. You can take steps to trim your intake without launching into a diet or triggering binges if you've done the groundwork first, and you make those steps gently. If you think of these weight loss focused efforts as an optional stage four, that only leaves one more chapter, maintaining it all.
Georgie: So phase five is maintenance. All of the steps leading up to here have built up more than a way of eating. It's nothing short of a new way of being. Before starting this whole process, people describe going through life in a fog, operating on autopilot, and being constantly frustrated by their inability to just eat less or do a better job denying themselves. They seem to me often to be pushing themselves like machines and annoyingly, the machine is sometimes breaking down or not performing to their desired standard. But by the end of this process, they know themselves better, they communicate better, and they enjoy food more and stress about it less. They're more mentally flexible and understanding with themselves and others. Life certainly isn't perfect or effortless, but at least the dieting and binging theme is out of the picture.
Christina: [00:16:00] Maintaining this progress necessitates staying aware of your emotional wellness and your eating habits and remaining honest with yourself. If you stop practicing something on vacation, start practicing it again when you're home. If your life has an increase in difficulty and you need more support, you reach out to a friend, a coach, or a loved one instead of reaching for food.
Georgie: And to keep all of this long term, it's essential to frame these behaviors positively as things which are good for you and keep you on the path you want. If you start to think of them as chores rules or things you dislike, but quote, have to do to keep your weight down, they will feel tempting to toss aside. Our recommendation is to regularly notice how good self-care makes you feel. Then you'll naturally want to keep up those habits to keep enjoying those good feelings.
Christina: We hope this helps clarify the process of losing binge eating and losing weight and why some parts of it have to come before others if you think you might get a bit lost on your own, that's why professional coaches like Georgie and I are here. To help show you where you are on the map and guide you through the next step.
Georgie: To learn more about coaching, head to confident eaters.com or fire me an email at georgiefear@gmail.com.